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2019 Annual Meeting
Meeting Begins: 11/23/2019
Meeting Ends: 11/26/2019
Call for Papers Opens: 12/19/2018
Call for Papers Closes: 3/6/2019
Requirements for Participation
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Meeting Abstracts
New Testament Jerusalem: New Findings from Early and Late Roman Jerusalem
Program Unit: Biblical Archaeology Society
Joe Uziel, Israel Antiquities Authority
Throughout Jerusalem's rich history, its character, culture, and population have been affected by broader political and religious trends, which affect its archaeological remains. During the hegemony of the Roman Empire, Jerusalem is witness to an unprecedented urban expansion, tensioned by the interaction of its Jewish and Roman cultural aspects. Subsequent to approximately 100 years of this interaction, Jewish Jerusalem is destroyed, after which the city is reborn, first as a military camp and then as a Roman colony. The following lecture will present finds from recent excavations in Jerusalem—excavations on the Early Roman city's main street, along the foundations of the Temple Mount, and beneath Wilson's Arch. Through the application of cutting-edge archaeological methodology, these projects that have led to new understandings on the site's position, development and cultural milieu. Particular emphasis will be placed on the monumental structures exposed—stone-paved streets, arched bridges, a theater-like structure, and the temenos walls of the city's cultic center throughout its history.
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Bible and Children: Educators Loyalty towards the Cultural Bible
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Ingunn Aadland, IKO–Church Educational Centre
One of the main motivations to use the bible in Norwegian kindergardens with a christian foundation, is its ’christian values.’ There is a general understanding that the bible’s inherent values are christian, and ideal for a child’s life. Thus, children need to get to know the bible. But what bible is presented for the children?
Yvonne Sherwood’s term ’liberal bible,’ the idea that the bible and modern society is on the same page, corresponds well with the understanding of the bible in kindergardens with a christian foundation. In a survey on the use of the Bible (fall 2018), educators in kindergardens were asked why and how the bible was part of their pedagogical program.
The lists of biblical stories that were used, show two main guideline-principals: 1) pedagogical concerns and 2) the concern for the bible.
The pedagogical concerns correspond with the guidelines for kindergardens set by Norwegian authorities: First, the pedagogical concern to meet the child, plays part in the selection of stories. Thus a large amount of the stories include animals. Moreover, the kindergardens are expected to reflect Norwegian traditional holidays, which generally means to include the biblical stories related to christmas, easter, and pentecost.
The other prinicipal, which is also the overarching concern, is grounded in an understanding of the bible itself: that the bible is a subject that authorizes good values. The lists of stories however, are heavily influenced by the selections found in children’s bibles: there are lots of male heroes. The lack of female characters is not necessarily an expression of contempt of women, but a loyalty towards bible as culture values and remembers it. A significant question to be asked is this: what does our cultural bible say about ”our” christian values?
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Isaiah 55 and a Practical Theology of Persuasion
Program Unit: Bible and Practical Theology
Charles Aaron, Southern Methodist University
Isaiah 55 and a Practical Theology of Persuasion
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The Apocalyptic Imaginary in Geez Oral Poetry: Preliminary Observations
Program Unit: Ethiopic Bible and Literature
Sofanit T. Abebe, University of Edinburgh
It has long been recognised that a number of Ethiopic literary traditions, hagiographies and magical texts bear marks of the influence of the early Jewish literature of 1 Enoch and Jubilees. The significance of these works in Ethiopia has largely been focussed on the ecclesiastical context of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church or its theological discussions and biblical interpretation that employ language and imagery from 1 Enoch and Jubilees primarily for Christological formulations. However, to what extent such texts inform the lived religiosity of Orthodox Ethiopians or shape the deeper normative notions and images that underlie people’s world-views has been entirely absent. Adequate attention has also not been devoted to investigating if and how 1 Enoch and its prototypical early Jewish apocalypticism has informed Ethiopian oral tradition or Ge’ez oral poetry. This is particularly true in terms of the relationship between the apocalyptic outlook in Jewish texts in the Ethiopic canon and apocalyptic elements in the way Ethiopian Orthodox imagine their social existence. To address this scholarly lacuna, I will employ the notion of social imaginary as defined by Charles Taylor to present my preliminary observations regarding the relevance of the Enochic apocalyptic outlook in shaping an Ethiopian imagination that has constructed a symbolic world to make sense of a social existence marked by suffering and evil. Towards this end, I will analyse the content and social function of apocalyptic discourse in published and unpublished Ge’ez oral poetry/Qene whose symbolic world engages the issue of social injustice and persecution in comparison to apocalyptic thought in selected 1 Enoch traditions. In exploring the symbolic world of the apocalyptic imaginaries evident in these Qene in comparison to 1 Enoch’s apocalyptic imagination, I hope to explore the possibility of identifying early Jewish apocalyptic thought as the ideal relative to which Ge’ez oral poetry codify and comment on the state of the world. Going forth, this study hopes to incorporate a larger corpus of Ge’ez, Tigrigna and Amharic oral poetry, proverbs, and adages to explore to what extent the paradigm of Enochic apocalyptic tradition and its notion of mediated revelation about time and wisdom can be thought to provide the foundation on which the social imaginary on evil, social injustice and persecution is constructed by Orthodox speakers of Ge’ez and related languages.
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Seams and Kings: Similarities between the Shape and Shaping of Isaiah and the Psalter
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Andrew Abernethy, Wheaton College (Illinois)
When one compares the shape of the Psalter with the shape of Isaiah, several similarities emerge that cast light upon conceptual strategies involved in the formation of these books. First, the placement of Psalms at the “seams” of its five books (e.g., 1–2; 41; 42; 72; 73; 89; 90; 106; 107; 145–150) correspond with interests in Isaiah studies upon passages at its seams, regardless of how scholars divide the book (e.g., 1:1-2:5; 33; 35; 36–39; 40; 55; 56; 65–66). Second, in the formation of Psalms and Isaiah, there is greater emphasis upon Davidic Kingship within the first parts of each book (e.g., Isa 1–39; Pss 1–89) which gives way to an increasing focus on Divine Kingship in the second halves of these books (e.g., Isa 40; 52; 60; Ps 93–99; 146). This raises questions and debate over whether a decline in attention to David in the latter parts of these books indicates a replacement of Davidic Messianism with hope in YHWH as King. The paper will assess how “seams” and the topic of kingship played a role in the organization of these books.
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Imperial Rome as an Urban Borderland
Program Unit: Jesus Traditions, Gospels, and Negotiating the Roman Imperial World
Ryan R. Abrecht, University of San Diego
This paper will analyze the city of Rome through the lens of borderlands theory, a body of scholarship concerned with topics such as the nature of boundaries and their practical and symbolic functions; the relationship between physical barriers and ethnic, economic, religious, or other social differences; the permeability of borders and how this shapes discourses about migration and its effects; and the complex and situational nature of individual and group identities in borderland regions. While much scholarship on ancient and modern borderlands has historically been focused on “peripheral” areas at the limits of empires or between nation states (the Roman Empire’s Rhine/Danube frontier, the United States’ border with Mexico), this paper will argue that immigration also transforms great cities into borderland spaces, using imperial Rome as a case study.
At its height in the first centuries of the Common Era, Rome’s large population was comprised largely of migrants or their descendants. The capital was a place with many internal boundaries, from the physical (hills and valleys, walls and gates, the line of the Tiber dividing Trastevere and the Vatican from the rest of the city) to the administrative (14 regions and 265 neighborhoods from the time of Augustus forward). At the same time, Rome was a place where boundary-crossing was a constant backdrop to everyday life. As Romans worked, worshipped, attended the games, took baths, and got into trouble, they continuously navigated the city’s porous internal borders. While doing so, they also moved between different social worlds. Natives encountered newcomers, Latins encountered Greeks, and (as the history of Christianity tells us) rich encountered poor. In short, boundary-crossing in the imperial city was both a spatial and a social process, as it is in all borderland regions. Understanding community formation in the urban borderland requires close attention to this fact.
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“The Tree Was to Be Desired to Give Insight” (Gen 3:6): Perspectives on Ideas of Knowledge in the Paradise Narrative and the Influence of Wisdom Thought on Them
Program Unit: Genesis
Moritz F. Adam, University of Oxford
By means of the consumption of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the primeval human and his wife gain hadda‘at tōv wārā‘, ‘the knowledge of good and evill’ (Gen 2:9). Moreover the woman is presented to perceive the fruit by consumption of which the primeval humans gain this knowledge, lehaskil, ‘to make one wise’ (Gen 3:6). However, what this newly gained knowledge entails is left implicit in the biblical account, scholars have taken it to mean ethical knowledge, omniscience, or sexual knowledge.
Engaging with and in response to such readings, I shall propose an alternative perspective, namely that acquiring ‘knowledge of good and evil’ constitutes a gain of self-awareness and the ability to know rather than any one specific knowledge. For this, I shall draw for instance on the indications of the self-aware reflections which the man explicates when he explains himself to God after having eaten from the tree (Gen 3:10), as well as the importance of the primeval humans taking hold of their knowledge autonomously. In this demonstration, I shall support the argument by a consideration of the text’s genre, namely by showing Genesis 2-3 to be a wisdom text. This shall be accomplished by demonstrating that, beside notions of shared language, the key theme of wisdom as personal growth through knowledge, in the sense of self-aware experiential knowledge, is a central genre-defining feature here as it is in the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible.
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Apologetics or Innovation: Ben Sira’s Ambiguous Exploration of Theodicy
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Samuel L. Adams, Union Presbyterian Seminary
Ben Sira’s engagement with theodicy questions has perplexed commentators for centuries. This instruction defends the transcendent majesty of the Deity, while at the same time seeking to inoculate God from any responsibility for human sin. Borrowing heavily from Genesis, Deuteronomy, and other antecedent texts, the author utilizes the “Do not say” formula characteristic of Egyptian instructions to answer his interlocutors and arrive at some measure of consistency. This paper will explore the ambiguous presentation in Sir 15:11-20, especially when considered alongside such passages as 33:14-15, where God makes everything in pairs, and 39:12-35, a hymn of praise. Ben Sira’s affirmation of a good and bad “inclination” or “temperament” (yetser) foreshadows what will appear more fully in the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus and rabbinic texts. The argument here is that the author’s efforts are more didactic than doctrinal, as he seeks to merge Torah-piety with sapiential discourse and maintain his traditional understanding against those with apocalyptic ideas and/or skepticism about longstanding retributive models. Stoic influence is apparent in some of Ben Sira’s presentation, but the baseline goal is to defend the righteousness of God, at times absolving the Deity from sin and at other points speaking of duality in creation. In all of these efforts, Ben Sira is offering an apologetic, meandering response to the origin of evil. His presumed opponents represent a broader discourse on these existential questions in late Second Temple Judea than had occurred in earlier periods.
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What is a Composite Allusion? An Introduction to This Session and Its Aims
Program Unit: Intertextuality in the New Testament
Sean Adams, University of Glasgow
This short paper will provide an introduction to composite allusions, offering a preliminary definition and an overview of the wider project.
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Composite Allusions in Classical Authors
Program Unit: Intertextuality in the New Testament
Sean Adams, University of Glasgow
In this paper we explore the discussion of allusion in Graeco-Roman literary scholarship, seeking to understand how ancient authors alluded to multiple texts/ideas within a passage. We are interested in discerning reading and composition strategies, especially how they might have been taught as well as the interpretive process undertaken by the author.
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Responses to Thomas Paine after the Book of Mormon
Program Unit: Latter-day Saints and the Bible
Grant Adamson, University of Arizona
Arguably Joseph Smith’s gold bible, published in 1830, was in part a defense of Christian scripture against Thomas Paine’s infamous attacks on both the Old and New Testaments in his Age of Reason, such as his challenge to the Matthean account of the earthquake, rent rocks, and opened graves at the crucifixion of Jesus (Matt 27:51b-53 KJV; cf. Helaman 14:21-25; 3 Nephi 8:6-19, 10:9-10, 23:6-14). I follow up that argument in this paper. It might seem the Book of Mormon came too late to be a response to Paine, since the installments of the Age of Reason were published between 1794 and 1807, some twenty years before Smith ‘translated’ the golden plates he said he found buried in a hillside near his family’s farm. It also might seem the Book of Mormon is the wrong genre to be a response to Paine, since it was not composed in the learned discourse of trained clergy and academics. But I show that the gold bible was by no means the last rejoinder to Paine, nor was Smith the only one to base his biblical apologetic text in the religious experience of scrying or channeling. Two more responses from Smith’s home state of New York, one composed in learned discourse, another not, highlight Smith’s position within the ranks of defenders of the Bible. I compare and contrast the Book of Mormon with The Evidences of Christianity: In Their External Division, Exhibited in a Course of Lectures … (N.Y.C., 1832) by Charles Pettit McIlvaine, and Light from the Spirit World: The Pilgrimage of Thomas Paine, and Others, to the Seventh Circle in the Spirit World (Rochester, 1852) by Charles Hammond. McIlvaine was an Episcopal chaplain of the U.S. Senate, a chaplain at West Point, and “Professor of the Evidences of Revealed Religion and of Sacred Antiquities” at NYU, whereas Hammond was a Universalist minister turned spiritualist medium in upstate New York. I conclude that the money-digger Smith and the automatic-writer Hammond each in their own way actually took Paine more seriously than Professor McIlvaine did in his formal university lectures. Furthermore there are so many similarities between Hammond’s channeled material and Smith’s para-biblical and extra-creedal developments (e.g. celestial masonry) that I suspect Hammond may have been inspired by the Mormon prophet.
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Comprehensive Analysis of the Tefillin (Phylacteries) from the Judean Desert: A New Work-in-Progress
Program Unit: Qumran
Yonatan Adler, Ariel University
The Jewish practice of binding tefillin (generally translated as: “phylacteries”) to the arm and the head is an ancient one. While a small number of enigmatic references to the practice occur already in late Second Temple period literature, the first significant details relating to the ritual of tefillin are found only in early rabbinic literature. The ritual remains an important component of Jewish religious praxis until today.
The discovery of ancient tefillin remains together with the Dead Sea scrolls in the middle of the 20th century provided the first opportunity to investigate evidence predating the rabbis for the origins and early development of tefillin practice. Unfortunately, however, this vital corpus of tefillin finds never merited comprehensive scientific analysis and publication. Many of the finds remain unpublished, including numerous tefillin slips which have never been unfolded and deciphered. Official publications of the tefillin texts which have been opened and deciphered rely on old readings of the minuscule texts carried out before the introduction of high-resolution multispectral imaging. The paleographic character of the scripts found on most of the published tefillin slips has never been studied comprehensively, and as a result the chronology of the finds remains uncertain. And finally, no full scientific report has ever been published on the vast majority of the tefillin casings. The corpus of Judean Desert tefillin is a treasure-trove of vital information on the origins and early development of halakhah which remains largely untapped.
The present paper describes a new work-in-progress: the first comprehensive scientific analysis and publication of all of the ancient tefillin remains found in the Judean Desert. The project makes use of state-of-the-art technologies to analyze both the inscribed tefillin slips as well as the casings made to house them and the straps meant to attach these to the body of the tefillin practitioner. The overall objective of this project is to provide a better understanding of the specific details of tefillin ritual during the Late Second Temple and Interwar periods as an important example of how early halakhah in general was observed and developed over time and across ancient Jewish society. The five specific objectives are:
1. to obtain new texts from undeciphered and still-unpublished tefillin slips;
2. to ascertain new readings of previously-published tefillin slips using new imaging technologies;
3. to discern the dating of all tefillin manuscripts through paleographic analysis;
4. to characterize the questionable tefillin slips;
5. to characterize the tefillin casings and straps in terms of morphology, animal origin of the leathers, and manufacturing processes (tanning, dying, forming and stitching).
The significance of the current research project reaches far beyond the limited question of early tefillin practice alone in that it promises to serve as an important test-case for the development of early systems of Jewish ritual law in general.
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Stepped Pools and Associated Water Fixtures Adjacent to Synagogues in Early Roman Judea: A Reconsideration
Program Unit: Hellenistic Judaism
Yonatan Adler, Ariel University
Previous studies have noted the archaeological phenomenon of stepped pools and associated water fixtures (such as water channels and basins) often found adjacent to synagogue structures dating to the Early Roman period in Judea. In the past I had proffered the proposal that the phenomenon should be interpreted in connection with an enactment cited in early rabbinic literature requiring ritual ablutions prior to engagement in Torah study, recital of the Shema and prayer for men who had experienced a seminal emission. The present paper will reconsider this earlier suggestion in light of what we have come to learn in recent years about ritual purity practices prevalent in Early Roman Judean society.
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Reexamining חטאת in Leviticus 4 and Numbers 15
Program Unit: Pentateuch
Toochukwu Agha, University of Notre Dame
Leviticus 4:1–35 contains a series of laws governing the חטאת sacrifice; the “purification” or “sin” offering. Unlike the voluntary gift offerings of Lev 1-3 which are tokens of reverence and gratitude to God, the sacrifices in 4:1–35 serve an expiatory function. Their purpose is to secure atonement and forgiveness from God for specific violations or sins. That is, the efficacy of these sacrifices apply exclusively to inadvertent or unintentional offenses on the part of a specified group of individuals. This means that these offerings are not applicable to certain sins – precisely, defiant or “highhanded” sins, for which forgiveness by חטאת is not possible, a situation one finds in Numbers 15.
Num 15:22–31 contains a similar tradition which, like Lev 4, seems to be dealing with the same issue, namely; unintentional or inadvertent sins, for which expiatory sacrifice is required by way of חטאת. However, a closer look at Numbers reveals that the two sets of laws are not altogether identical. While the relevant passage in Num 15 restates the sacrifices required for inadvertent violations just like Lev 4, the sacrifices in the two sections differ in a number of significant ways as we shall see below. Moreover, Num 15:30–31 makes it clear that there are sins beyond sacrificial atonement.
These differences in legal prescriptions have been the subject of vigorous scholarly debates from late antiquity to the present. Many solutions have been proposed in view of a possible resolution of the apparent discrepancies between the two texts. In view of the ongoing discussion, the aim of this paper is to reconsider the relationship (if any) between the two חטאת sacrifices in Lev 4 and Num 15:22–31. In order to achieve this, we shall begin our discussion by a brief examination of the term חטאת, with regard to its etymology and meaning. The next is a review of the two kinds of חטאת sacrifices in the P source of Leviticus 4. In considering the treatment of חטאת in Num 15:22–31, we shall investigate the possibility of an internal cohesion of the various laws in the passage. This would be followed by a critical comparison of Lev 4 and Num 15:22–31 in order to address the question of whether we have two different laws or a later abbreviation of an earlier one.
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Hosea’s Problem: I Bought Her for 15 Shekels; To Enslave or Set Free?
Program Unit: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible
John Ahn, Howard University
The eighth century BCE was plagued by social and religious injustices, which clearly resurfaced in the fifth century BCE – or they never were resolved in the first place. Hosea and his texts chiefly represent issues of religious apostasy through painful and difficult imageries, including Gomer, the three children, and the unnamed woman in chapter 3. Hosea 3:1 begins with Yahweh’s words: And Yahweh said to me again, “Go love a woman who has a lover, and is an adulteress…” Hosea responded: So, I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and additional commodities (which may or may not equate to an additional fifteen shekels). That action, his response generates a complete pause – even for non-critical readers. First, can love be force? Second, in order to love, he goes out and buys, purchases a woman in economic hardship or a set market price for a female slave (thirty shekels) between the ages of twenty and sixty (Lev 27:1-8; Exo 21:32). Third, did Hosea buy her to enslave her or free her? Fourth, is the woman in chapter 3, the same person in chapter 1, Gomer, or is she a completely different woman? This presentation addresses these and other issues that deal with the selling and buying of women and children. Intertexually, we additionally critically examine archival ads like the Aug 22, 1863 New York Times’ “Market Price of Slave,” which denotes that slaves in Kentucky command a higher price than another other Southern States. “In Missouri they are sold at from forty dollars to four hundred, according to age, quality, and especially according to place.” https://www.nytimes.com/1863/08/22/archives/market-price-of-slaves.html
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The Mechanics of Healing
Program Unit: Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity
Mika Ahuvia, University of Washington, Seattle
Michael D. Swartz’s articles over the years have invited students and scholars alike to the study of late antique and medieval Jews through his analysis of magical-ritual sources of the Genizah, the liturgical poetry of the synagogue (piyyutim), and the mystical prayer of Hekhalot literature. In this presentation I review one of Swartz’s most intriguing and provocative contributions to the field: his endeavor to locate the authors of mystical and magical texts not in the periphery of Jewish society but at its heart, in the synagogue, even in leadership positions. Swartz argues for the fundamental coherency of ritual texts, the comprehensibility of piyyut, and the agency that prayer provided to ancient Jews, whether they were mystics or synagogue attendees. Swartz’s contributions have paved the way for my own research questions on ritual, liturgical, and mystical texts and the people who composed them. Building on his research, I examine how Jews sought healing in late antique Jewish society, turning to other mediators around them, both human and angelic, within and outside familiar institutional settings. Thinking about Jewish mediation in antiquity leads me to a larger rumination on the role of relationship networks among Jews in antiquity, including those among Jewish synagogue functionaries, ritual practitioners, rabbis, and mystics, but also with actors in the invisible realm, namely the angels. I close by reflecting on Robert Orsi’s critique of the category of religion and exploring how Judaism may be studied as a relational religion, far more focused on relationship with invisible networks than has been previously acknowledged.
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David Adamo and Communal Reading as an Interpretive Method in African Biblical Hermeneutics
Program Unit: African Biblical Hermeneutics
Miracle Ajah, National Open University of Nigeria
The African biblical hermeneutics privileges on liberation ethos and contextual readings of biblical texts and complements traditional approaches to biblical interpretation. According to David Adamo, “African biblical hermeneutic(s) has the following methodological distinctiveness: communal reading and interpretation, Bible as power, Africa and Africans in the Bible, African comparative, African evaluative, using Africa to interpret the Bible and using the Bible to interpret Africa, the promotion of distinctive life interest, and African identity.” This paper reviews especially, the ethos of communal reading as an interpretive method in African biblical hermeneutics as championed by David Adamo. Communal reading has been described with various synonyms by different authors, namely: “reading with the Ordinary readers,” “reading with the community,” “reading with African eyes,” reading with “residual illiterate people,” “real contextual readers,” “spontaneous and sub-conscious readers,” “collaborative and interactive” readers, etc. Adamo stresses the point that ordinary Africans and non-scholarly interpreters are constitutive of an African scholarship in ways that deviate from current Euro-American practice. How does communal reading method as presented by David Adamo complement with other interpretive methods of African biblical hermeneutics? Is it exclusive of African elites or scholarly interpreters who are also Africans? This paper argues that the appropriateness of communal reading as an interpretive method synchronises a multidimensional approach to biblical interpretation that can curb abysmal dangers of exclusivism in exegetical enterprise in African context.
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“Scripture Authentic! Uncorrupt by Man!” The Sublime Bible in the 18th Century
Program Unit: Rhetoric of Religious Antiquity
Alan P. R. Gregory, St. Augustine's College
In 18th century British culture, the sublime was almost always weighted with theological significance. From Addison to Burke, we are in the region of sublimity when our imaginations engage vastness and extreme power, the irresistibly fearful and threatening, the grand, imposing, vertiginous, and appalling. For those who expounded and applauded the sublime in nature and art, sublimity was not merely a feature encountered in plunging ravines, starlit nights, or poetry that tried to dizzy the reader with nature's scary exuberance. Most vitally, our experience of the sublime revealed human destiny as made in God's image with a capacity of mind and imagination apt for the apprehension of deity. Sublimity was the measure of humanity, indeed, in Edmund Burke's account, it was distinctively the measure of man, having a decidedly gendered preference, as discovered by the swooning ladies in a Gothic novel. As a measure of humanity and humanity’s moral and religious vocation, the sublime also provided a determining characterisation of divinity. God, Adam Smith insisted, is “of all the objects of human contemplation by far the most sublime.” If our capacity for sublime response and its attendant emotions engages the highest and best in human religious and cultural aspirations, and is the responsive chord for the mystery of God, then what of the Bible, the authoritative vehicle of divine speech? A due recognition of the sublimity of Scripture was not less important given the parallel insistence that the sublime mode in literary was the acme of art. The Bible could hardly lack the uplift that qualifies the highest in human literature. Configuring Scripture by way of sublime enthusiasm, however, involved some profound reordering of the theological shape of the Biblical canon, away, for instance, from the New Testament toward the Old and, within the latter, away from the prophetic orientation toward Jesus toward celebrations of divine power in creation and judgement. In the context of the New Testament itself, feeling for the sublime as the measure of God and humanity privileged the language of apocalyptic, just as it obscured the Pauline paradoxes around power. Outside the apocalyptic language of the Gospels, Jesus was a somewhat awkward theological feature, refusing the sublime assistance of angelic battalions and teaching with a decided lack of sublime oomph. This occasioned some awkward, not to say, dodgy, Christological manoeuvres in order to retain both a sublime reading and Christian orthodoxy. None of this is without some long-term theological and cultural significance since enthusiasm for the sublime involved a recasting of notions of power within the cultural imagination, one developed further in the 19th and 20th centuries, even when literary and philosophical interest in the sublime declined.
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The Interliterary Paradigm in Greek Isaiah
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Matthew Albanese, Oxford University
While the interlinear paradigm in Septuagint studies suggests that the Greek text was at least partially created to instruct readers in the Hebrew language, I explore an alternative approach for understanding Greek Isaiah. Greek Isaiah’s translator approached his work neither as an aid in learning the Hebrew language nor as simple representation of the Hebrew Vorlage. These points are well recognized among Septuagint specialists since Greek Isaiah is often characterized as ‘free’ on the translation spectrum. So, rather than employing something like an interlinear approach to translation, the translator of Greek Isaiah sought to create a work that instructed and introduced Greek readers into the thematic and literary patterns of the Hebrew text. That is, he employed an interliterary paradigm of translation.
In this paper, I investigate the oracle against Babylon and her king in Old Greek Isaiah 13:1-14:23 and explore the translator’s interliterary approach to translation. I explore three sections of this oracle in detail: the animals in 13:20-22, the creation, exile, and exodus motifs in 14:1-3, and the royal descriptions of 14:9-21. In each of these sections, I show how the translator imported unique lexical and thematic elements borrowed from elsewhere in the book in order to heighten the literary effect of the translation. The translator first accomplished this task with intentional deviations from the Hebrew text; such deviations are recognized because of their aberration from Greek Isaiah’s previously established translation patterns. Then, the translator’s specific choices created lexical and intertextual parallels within the immediate and larger contexts of the book. After detecting these translation patterns, it becomes apparent that the translator of Greek Isaiah approached the interpretation of these passages interliterarily, rendering one passage with the terminology of other passages.
The translator of Greek Isaiah worked forwards and backwards, treating the book of Isaiah as a coherent literary whole. Thus, the translator created a work which teaches readers how to understand the literary features of the Hebrew text since it employs Isaiah to interpret Isaiah in a nuanced and detailed manner. As is well known, the Septuagint is not merely the first translation of the Hebrew Bible, but is also its first commentary. And Greek Isaiah in particular embodies this commentary habitus, functioning for its readers as a hermeneutical guide which is closely attuned to the Hebrew text. It serves a pedagogical function, but not regarding the linguistic details of the source text. Rather, it instructs readers regarding the literary tapestry of the Hebrew. And so, the translator of Greek Isaiah approached his task through what I have labeled the interliterary paradigm.
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Reconciling James and Paul in the Ancient Greek and Latin Commentary Traditions
Program Unit: Letters of James, Peter, and Jude
Martin C. Albl, Presentation College
The Christian interpretive tradition has long recognized the tension between James' position in 2:14–26 (e.g., 2:24: “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone”) and Pauline views (esp. Rom 3:21–31; 4:1–12; Gal 2:15–21; Gal 3:1–6; Eph 2:8–9) (e.g., Rom 3:28: “a person is justified by faith apart from the works prescribed by the law”) on the relationship between faith, “works,” and justification.
This paper surveys the variety of ways in which this tension between James and Paul was addressed in the ancient Greek and Latin commentary on James traditions. I trace the Greek tradition as witnessed primarily in the Catena to James attributed to Andreas (late 7th c.) and the full commentaries attributed to Oecumenius (10th c.) and Theophylact (early 12th c.); the Latin tradition as witnessed primarily in the various writings of Augustine and Bede’s Commentary on James (early 8th c.).
The central aim throughout both traditions is to show that the apparently contradictory views of James and Paul can be reconciled. They seek to demonstrate the harmony between James and Paul in a variety of ways:
1. James and Paul address different audiences, and thus emphasize different aspects of faith and actions
2. James writes to correct a mistaken interpretation of Paul
3. James and Paul define “works” differently: James refers to ethical action, or to a striving for holiness after baptism; Paul to the commandments of the Mosaic law
4. James and Paul define “faith” differently: James refers to simple assent to God’s existence; Paul to an intentional, firm consent
5. Paul refers to a faith held at baptism, James to the faith that a mature Christian should have
6. Both share the same understanding of true faith: Paul’s conception of “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6) is the same as James’ formulation of faith “brought to completion by the works” (Jas 2:22).
This survey of the ancient Greek and Latin interpretive readings of James and Paul reveals not a forced harmonization of contradictory views based on a preconceived notion of the harmony of Scripture, but rather a careful exegesis of individual texts, with close attention paid to each author’s historical setting, his rhetorical purposes, and the precise, contextual meaning of his key terms.
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The Psalms of Solomon: Attributed to King Solomon and Located in Palestinian Judaism
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Felix Albrecht, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen
This paper deals with the Psalms of Solomon and discusses two general aspects which seem to be worth exploring further: First the attribution to Solomon and its historical context, second the theological and historical significance of the Psalms of Solomon as a document of Palestinian Judaism. The present study is based on the critical Göttingen Edition of the Psalms of Solomon (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), which entails a detailed introduction and yields a solid textual basis.
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Stone Deaf: Ableist Biblical Metaphors and a Deaf/Hard of Hearing Reflection on David Hammons’ Rock Head Sculptures
Program Unit: Bible and Visual Art
Isaac M. Alderman, Catholic University of America
Stone has often been used as a metaphor for a lack of understanding or diminished senses. Dense. Dumb as a rock. Stone deaf. We find this in common cultural references, but also in the Bible. There, people are often considered to have a lack of understanding or of not hearing, even though they are not deaf.
As it often does, however, the Bible speaks with more than one voice. We find a compelling passage in the book of Joshua (24:25-27), where after reading out the law, the leader of the Israelites sets up a stone which has “has heard all the words of the Lord...” Because it has heard both the law and the vocal reply of the people, the stone can act as a testifying witness. Here we find not a metaphorical comparison of humans to a stone, but the personification of a stone which can hear.
Many of David Hammons’ sculptures are roughly head-shaped stones, topped with hair taken from the floor of African American barbershops. These works are a statement on African American identity, with the rock as a silent and lifeless pedestal for what is culturally assumed to be the primary distinguishing characteristic of the black body. However, these rock heads are not only statements on African American identity; as heads without ears, they are also representations of unhearing individuals.
We suggest that insights from the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community (D/HoH) can help us better reflect on both Hammons’ work and on the scriptural metaphors involving deafness. Doing so can open up a discussion on ableism in communities that are deeply informed by religious texts that metaphorically utilize deafness for a lack of understanding. Just as Hammons’ sculpture focuses hearing viewers’ attention to the hair, those in the D/HoH community must daily interact with others who are generally unable to recognize their difference (“Funny, you don’t look/sound deaf.”).
By reflecting on the ability of the D/HoH community to hear without access to audible sounds, we hope to find biblical and artistic means to subvert the harmful and exclusionary tradition of the metaphorical equivalence of deafness with a lack of comprehension.
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Additions and Editions: The Textual History of Mordecai and Esther's Prayers
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Joshua Alfaro, Universität Salzburg
This paper examines the prayers of Esther and Mordecai (Addition C) in relation to each other, the surrounding narrative, and in the textual witnesses of the LXX, AT, Vetus Latina, Armenian, and Josephus. I argue that the presumed Semitic Vorlagen of these prayers originate from two different authors given their differences in perspective and textual history.
Mordecai and Esther’s prayers offer different causes behind Haman’s threat of annihilation. Mordecai maintains his innocence and says that he did not bow to Haman in order to give glory to God alone, while in her prayer, Esther says that God is punishing Israel precisely because they did glorify other gods.
Intriguingly, the tenth-century Jewish work Sefer Josippon contains Hebrew versions of the prayers of Mordecai and Esther. Some late medieval manuscripts also preserve lengthy Aramaic versions of the dream and prayers, most likely based on Sefer Josippon. Mordecai’s prayer in the LXX and the Aramaic version bear significant similarities while Esther’s prayer in the medieval Aramaic version contains no such similarities to the LXX. These medieval versions appear to support a Semitic original for the prayers as well as distinct authors.
The textual history of the Add. C can also be traced with the aid of the Septuagint daughter versions and Josephus. The Vetus Latina and Armenian contain a lengthy addition in Esther’s prayer that lists heroic figures from history. The figures mentioned differ in the Vetus Latina and Armenian, and since there was no direct contact between the two translations, this expansion to Add. C must have existed in their Greek Vorlagen. In addition, Josephus witnesses to a version of the prayers excluding C17-23, a minus he shares with the Vetus Latina. The complex textual history of these prayers offers insight into the relationship between the book of Esther’s many editions.
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Jesus Loves the Little Children
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Amy Lindeman Allen, Christian Theological Seminary
This paper examines the impact of the popular children’s songs about Jesus’ love for children, artwork depicting Jesus’ blessing of children, and infant baptism and dedication liturgies centered around this same theme on the reception of the synoptic accounts of Jesus’ encounter with children in Matt. 19:13-15; Mark 10:13-16; and Lk. 18:15-17. Such popular uses of this biblical account capitalize upon this gospel encounter as an opportunity to market Jesus to children as a gentle and welcoming teacher. Images of the compassionate Savior with arms outstretched toward a handful of smiling children hang in many Sunday School classrooms, mirroring children’s bibles with similar images across the ages, while baptismal fonts are engraved with the words of Jesus that the gospel texts recount. This paper seeks to provide a survey of the history of the use of the synoptic accounts of Jesus welcoming the little children in children’s literature and accompanying practice and to interrogate its influence on preconceived images of Jesus brought to the study not only this text, but also the broader gospel corpus, in contrast to A. James Murphy’s more cautionary picture of the Jesus Movement’s early interactions with children.
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Salvation in Whose Eyes? Three Generations Experience God’s Redemption in Luke 2:22–40
Program Unit: Ideological Criticism
Amy Lindeman Allen, Christian Theological Seminary
Due in no small part to its parallels in Childhood Studies and the sociology of childhood(s), child centered, or childist, criticism continues to gain momentum in literary and social science readings of the Bible, exemplified by the Children and the Biblical World unit of the Society of Biblical Literature. Those scholars engaged directly in child-centered work tend to name explicitly their child-centered orientation. Nevertheless, in the broader ideological critical world, childist interpretation rarely (if ever) makes the list of ideological criticisms. Moreover, in naming their own contexts and ideological assumptions, most interpreters outside of the child-centered sphere of theology and interpretation continue to ignore the role that their default adult-(and typically, adult in their prime) centered orientation has on their interpretations. This paper seeks to make explicit the hidden contexts of generational identity and orientation by exploring impact of age-centered orientations in ideological readings of a text. This is accomplished by reading the same text, Luke 2:22-40, the story of Jesus’ encounter with Anna and Simeon at the Temple, utilizing the same literary, historical, and social scientific methodologies within my same white middle class cis-gendered liberal heterosexual protestant context of ritual and family, but read through three different age centered lenses: child-centered, adult-in-their-prime-centered, and elder-centered. These three different readings will highlight the role that age-centered orientations play in the interpretation of a biblical text.
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Books of Hours, Biblical Reception, and Institutional Digital Tools
Program Unit: Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies
Garrick Allen, Dublin City University
Books of hours, the medieval ‘best seller’, are collections of prayers intended for private use. This genre of small book functions also a window into the reception of particular biblical scenes, with material from the psalms woven throughout. These books are better known today through their decoration and art-historical value; the quantity and quality of which was determined by the wishes (and purse) of the patron. Indeed luxury copies were intended as both objects of devotion and works of art. They offer direct insight into the interpretation of specific biblical passages.
One particularly fine example in the Chester Beatty collection is the Coëtivy Hours. A masterpiece of fifteenth-century illumination, it was produced in Paris (1443-45) for Prigent de Coëtivy, noted bibliophile and Admiral of France, to mark the occasion of his marriage to Marie de Rais. There can be no doubt as to the high cost and monumental effort that went into its production as almost every additional prayer available was included, each introduced with a three-quarter page miniature (148 in total). In addition, all 364 folios are ornamented with foliate borders inhabited by a variety of entertaining marginalia.
Fully digitised for the 2018 exhibition Miniature Masterpiece, this partially disbound volume, measuring only 142 x 113 x 42mm, was one of 2000 objects included in the launch of Chester Beatty’s new searchable database of high-resolution digital images in December 2018. The Coëtivy Hours offers a perfect example of the advantages of digitisation and online access. This diminutive volume can now be seen in more detail than by the original illuminators, accessible to almost anyone, anywhere. The digitised collection and scholarly catalogues will bring considerable benefits for students, scholars, researchers and educators. Images can be downloaded for non-commercial use, free of charge.
This paper explores new avenues for research into the reception history of the bible offered by new institutional digitisation tools and open-access, focusing on the Coëtivy Book of Hours as test case.
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Revelation's Manuscripts and the Influence of the Andrew of Caesarea Tradition
Program Unit: John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern
Garrick Allen, Dublin City University
Despite its importance for understanding the textual history, reception, and transmission of the book of Revelation, the Andrew of Caesarea commentary has received little critical attention until very recently. In addition to passing comments on Andrew's interpretation of particular texts scattered in a number of works, two major approaches on the Andrew tradition have emerged. Eugenia Constantinou has used the commentary tradition to reconstruct the "historical Andrew" and his method of composition, focusing on Andrew as an ideal ecclesiarch in the Greek Orthodox tradition. And, in a number of studies, Juan Hernández has engaged the Andrew commentary's importance for understanding Revelation's textual history and the context of modern textual scholarship. But no sustained studies have been made of the manuscripts of the Andrew commentary since Josef Schmid in the 1950s. This paper begins to explore the broader "Andrew tradition" by examining the many paratextual and design features that comprise the Greek manuscripts. The paratext of the Andrew tradition impinge on the shape of nearly half of all of Revelation's Greek manuscripts, even those that do not preserve any traces of the commentary.
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בנים גדלתי ורוממתי How We Have Changed Our Minds on Veqatal
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Sharon Alley, Institute for Biblical Languages and Translation
The veqatal is widely acknowledged as forming a contrasting pair with vayyiqtol. Their functions within time, mood, and aspect are generally recognized, although a question about veqatal as a volitional perfective aspect has been raised. Such a perfective proposal conflicts with the data, and should be rejected. On the one hand, in past contexts both veqatal and yiqtol default to habitual and imperfectivity. Ironically, when in future contexts, even yiqtol has a propensity to be perfective, and then veqatal is similar. ¶
We would like to look at the singular and problematic usages of ve-qatal. These have often been interpreted as if they were simply a ve, and a qatal appearing together, not as a fused form, veqatal. We must ask how communication happened in antiquity, and decide whether or not veqatal was internalized as a piece of the verb system. If so, how were stories heard by ancient speakers with an internalized veqatal? How was the veqatal received by speakers of mishnaic Hebrew during the Second Temple, or by speakers of modern Hebrew today? ¶
Formerly, we would read בנים גדלתי ורוממתי (Is. 1:2) as two simple qatal forms in something like a hen-dia-dys. However, as we have internalized the biblical use of veqatal through classroom teaching, the thematic veqatal seems the more natural and immediate reading in Isaiah’s poetry. Even Qohelet may contain more veqatal than is normally understood (or vocalized by the MT). The natural reading of שיאכל ושתה is a yiqtol and a thematic veqatal, which shows the writer's familiarity with the thematic veqatal.
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Are You Shaved? A Hermeneutic of Hair Removal
Program Unit: Biblical Literature and the Hermeneutics of Trauma
Carolyn Alsen, University of Divinity
Feminist biblical criticism that is not concerned with intersection can become elitist and ethnocentric. In response to this, the turn to postcolonial feminist biblical criticism can use such areas as embodiment as a site for biblical religious identit(ies) and the critique of their bases in homosocial male power or imperialism. In this way, the trauma embedded in the displacement and hybridity of postcolonial conditions intersects with the gender domination in the dominated culture.
Just as the Priestly orderly ideal seeks to tame the wild and install ritual, so the tribal story of Jacob and Esau seeks to tame messy body hair and yet hair is important to Israelite masculinity. Previous work on hair in the Bible examines the use of hair removal as a religious and liminal identity with implications for Israelite ritual. But in Genesis, how do Jacob and Joseph deal with maintaining hair removal so important to the Egyptians and Assyrians but traumatic to Israelite masculinities? Jacob deceives by putting on hair to perform an aesthetic and is identified as an ongoing “smooth man.” Indeed, the hairless state is equated with the primogeniture and sojourner role of Jacob as superior to non-covenantal tribes. In the postcolonial study of trauma, Joseph can be characterised as an assimilated hairless indigene in an aggressive pursuit of ascendency to nationalism and power. It is also a trace of the uncharacterised, invisible trauma for the feminine in the characterisation of imperial domination. Thus, the collaborating nature of hair removal is a site for negotiation of identities around intersectional power. Here is a role for an evolving intersectional postcolonial feminist criticism addressing the trauma involved in ethnic struggle, phallic power, capital, and queering through the body and the religious body politic.
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A Deeper Look at Deut 14:4–20 in the Context of Deuteronomy
Program Unit: Book of Deuteronomy
Peter Altmann, Universität Zürich
Ambivalence has long circled the place of the dietary prohibitions in the compositional history of the book of Deuteronomy. Their terminology of clean-unclean, while not quite completely singular within the book, does not accord with the terms or turns of phrase generally viewed as central to the Deuteronomic-Deuteronomistic tradition. On the other hand, animal consumption plays an important—if not central—role in the book’s purpose and theology. Given these well-known factors, how can one understand the significance and historical location of the dietary prohibitions within the book of Deuteronomy?
This study investigates the role of the overall passage on the dietary prohibitions in Deut 14:4–20 as part of its immediate context of 14:1–2, 3, 21 and within Deuteronomy as a whole. In spite of the content largely determining the terminology for vv. 4-20, a number of terminological and thematic issues help locate this section within the wider book of Deuteronomy, such as abomination (תועבה) in v. 3, notions of clean and unclean elsewhere in the book, the profound roles of eating and drinking within the law collection, and the overlap of the concluding prohibition of 14:21 with other biblical law collections.
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What’s Wrong? The Dynamics of Fasting as the Embodied Entanglement of Sorrow and Longing in the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Meals in the HB/OT and Its World
Peter Altmann, Universität Zürich
The theme of fasting in the Hebrew Bible often indicates both abnormality and hope. The literary portrayals of the bodily human practice formulate a bodily expression of discontentment with the present state of experience (e.g., Zech 7). On the other hand, divine rejection of a fast as supplication ritual entails God’s proclamation of other problems in the people’s practice along with desire for their change (e.g., Isa 58). This paper will explore the dynamics of sorrow and longing in the biblical texts as they connect with the embodied practices of eating and fasting.
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Urban Upper Classes through the Centuries: A Tale of Two Cities
Program Unit: Polis and Ekklesia: Investigations of Urban Christianity
Walter Ameling, Universität zu Köln
Caesarea Maritima and Jerusalem were the two most important cities in Palestine during the first six centuries of our time. Prima facie, no two cities could be more different: the one existed almost as long as people could remember and was thought to be the capital of Judaea (and more), the other was founded only by Herod the Great; Jerusalem was the home to the second temple of the Jewish people, and whoever came by sea to Caesarea could not fail to notice the temple of the emperor. But with time the one city lost its temple completely, and with time the cult of the emperor diminished seriously in importance: what is more, both cities reached the status of Roman colonies, and for roughly 200 years this status determined the way the cities operated. Cities in the Graeco-Roman world were depended mostly on their upper classes, and these upper classes traded involvement, favours, money for social positions in the cities (one of the keywords is euergetism). Now, it seems clear that Jerusalem as a city did not always work in this way, but it seems equally clear that differences and similarities between the two cities can be brought into focus by a study of their upper classes, the way they worked in the city, the places they came from, the way their memory was held up by the city (and their families). At the same time, important breaks in the history of the cities (and of the state they belonged to) will stand out in this investigation, especially if we look beyond the year 324 - and it is an important question, whether religion played a role in this, and how far a city and its upper class was defined by religion.
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The Fallacy of Tradition: The Place of Deuteronomy in Second Temple Literature
Program Unit: Transmission of Traditions in the Second Temple Period
Aryeh Amihay, University of California-Santa Barbara
The radical nature of Deuteronomy derives from its attempt to be a sufficient and enduring document, to which no additions will ever be required (Deut 4:2, 13:1). Its rhetoric is an impassioned appeal to its audience to treat it as a living document: “Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today” (Deut 5:3). Its claims to being accessible and relatable (Deut 30:11-14) played a crucial role in it being a popular text, as evidenced by the fact that it is the most quoted book of the Pentateuch in the New Testament, and the one of which most copies found in the caves of Qumran.
Its popularity notwithstanding, Deuteronomy's claims for endurance did not stand the test of time. Some of the earliest documents of the Second Temple period betray an uneasiness with the imperfections of Deuteronomic law. The Tale of Susanna celebrates its heroine’s steadfast loyalty to the law, but its conclusion subtly amends the Deuteronomic rationale of the law of testimony, and suggests a lacuna which requires emendation. The Book of Tobit similarly portrays an admirable adherence to Deuteronomic law (and biblical law in general), but the delayed rewards raise not only similar questions of theodicy as those raised by Job, but also an ambivalence towards Torah observance as a whole. The Deuteronomic Paraphrase is a further example of the same problem: the attention it pays to Deuteronomy confirms its authoritative status, as Schiffman elucidates, but at the same time it underscores the problems embedded in Deuteronomy, first and foremost the fact that it is presented as human law rather than divine. The Temple Scroll boldly resolves this by paraphrasing the laws and putting them in God’s mouth.
This paper seeks to explore these three Second Temple treatments of Deuteronomic texts as a case study for the status of Torah in Second Temple Judaism in general, and specifically for the legal implications that arise from it concerning the stance of tradition. Paula Fredriksen once suggested that “The past is too important to be allowed to exist.” Similarly, I will argue that Deuteronomy could only maintain its lively vigor and its caution never to adding nor to subtract from it by the careful and unadmitted supplements and omissions that its faithful readers introduced.
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Another Sad Calamity: The Tale of Paulina by Josephus as Pastiche
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
Aryeh Amihay, University of California-Santa Barbara
The testimonium flavianum is so heavily redacted with the inclusion of at least one gloss, it is hard to discern which parts of it are originally by Josephus. It is followed by an even more bizarre narrative, the Tale of Paulina. The Tale of Paulina departs from Josephus’s typical interests of political and military history. Even when he digresses to intrigues or gossip, it is usually part of his interest in leaders and royals. Paulina’s tale is further singled out by its introduction as a sory of a sad calamity that caused confusion among the Jews (ἕτερόν τι δεινὸν ἐθορύβει τοὺς Ἰουδαίους). Notwithstanding, the story does not conclude with any account that would explain how this curious narrative affected the Jews as a whole.
The contents of the story showcases a plethora of Hellenistic tropes, including sexual extortion (presented as unrequited love), mistaken identity and deceit, a hybrid sexual interaction between humans and (presumed gods). These are reminiscent of various Greco-Roman myths, as in the stories of Zeus and Leda, Cephalus and Procris, and Hephaestus and Aphrodite. The Egyptian setting of the story with the mention of the Temple of Isis and the god Anubis are uncharacteristic of Josephus, to say the least, and suggest a different provenance. Some have suggested that the tale reflects Roman aversion to the Egyptian cult of Isis, as reported also in Tacitus’s Annales.
The particularly Jewish tropes include the denigration of pagan temples as locations of deceit and debauchery. Elements from the Additions to Daniel are manifestly present here, both the deceit surrounding the pagan cult, familiar from Bel and the Dragon, as well as the sexual extortion reminiscent of the Tale of Susanna.
The suspected extramarital birth that includes a false claim for a conception by a deity is intriguing in light of the proximity of this tale to the brief mention of Josephus. It is reminiscent of other slanders of Jesus’s origins, some of which survive in rabbinic literature. This has been noticed before, but requires a new appraisal in light of new research on Jewish tales surrounding Jesus, as well as the markedly Hellenistic (and hence non-rabbinic) nature of the tale as a whole.
This paper will consider the conflicting elements of this tale as Jewish, Christian, and Hellenistic, in order to reassess the possibilities of the identity and allegiances of its author.
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Making the Divine Service Meaningful: Paul on the Church Service in I Corinthians 14
Program Unit: The Historical Paul
Aaron Amit, Bar-Ilan University
In this paper I will address I Corinthians 14:1-33 and examine Paul's critique of the church service in Corinth. In his description of the ideal service for the congregation in Corinth, Paul emphasis edification and understanding. This is especially clear in 1 Corinthians 14:3-4 where he addresses prophecy, saying: "But one who prophesies speaks to men for edification (οἰκοδομὴν) and exhortation (παράκλησιν) and consolation (παραμυθίαν). One who speaks in a tongue edifies himself; but one who prophesies edifies the church". As many scholars have pointed out, it is clear that in Corinth speaking in tongues ranked above prophecy in the eyes of the congregation. Paul objects to this view, and argues: "I desire to speak five words with my mind, that I may instruct others also, rather than ten thousand words in a tongue" (I Corinthians 14:18).
What is the force of Paul's argument that it is legitimate to speak in tongues, but that speaking in tongues must be followed by interpretation? I will argue that Paul's opinion on the ideal service stems from his Jewish background. In the ancient Jewish service, as described in tannaitic literature, learning and understanding were the priority. Scripture was read and translated into the vernacular, and not only do we hear nothing of speaking in tongues, but there seems to have been little prayer, other than brief blessings before and after the Torah service, at least in the Palestinian synagogue in the first century (as demonstrated by Ezra Fleischer and others). In I Corinthians 14:26 Paul states clearly the agenda of worship in his eyes: "When you assemble, each one has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification/building." I will demonstrate that much of this order of service is found in tannaitic sources, some of which may well demonstrate first century practice. Furthermore, Paul's use of the metaphor of edification or building, οἰκοδομὴν γινέσθω (I Corinthians 14:26), to describe the proper purpose of the instructional service would seem to echo an interpretation of Isaiah 54:13 found later in rabbinic exegesis. Paul is thus influenced in this chapter by his familiarity with the Palestinian Jewish service of the first century. It would seem that the polemic in this chapter derives from the fact that this order of the service came into conflict with the customs of members of the Jesus movement with pagan backgrounds.
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2 Kings 24–25 and Jer 52 as Converging Memories of the Babylonian Conquest
Program Unit: Deuteronomistic History
Sonja Ammann, Universität Basel
The last chapters of the books of Kings have received much scholarly attention in research on the Deuteronomistic History (DH) in Josh-Kgs. Not only do they constitute the end of this hypothesized work, but they raise several interpretive issues that have long fascinated scholars. Already F.M. Cross pointed out that the narration of the Babylonian conquest does not seem to align with the theological reflections in the former part of Kings. He therefore ascribed these chapters to an Exilic editor. Other scholars observed that the multiple and inconsistent accounts of deportations in 2 Kgs 24 and 2 Kgs 25 contain interpolations, which raises the question of how the writers envisioned the respective significance of the events of 597 and 587. As for the very end of the books of Kings, most commentators treat 2 Kgs 25:22-26, 27-30 as annexes, and consider 2 Kgs 25:22-26 an excerpt from Jer 40-41. Within the model of a DH, all of these questions surrounding the meaning and literary history of these chapters are focused on the DH as the relevant interpretive context. This paper takes a different approach. It discusses 2 Kgs 24-25 in the context of parallel accounts of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in the book of Jeremiah. While the parallels between 2 Kgs 25, Jer 39 and Jer 52 are well known, these texts are often lumped together in exegetical analyses. The result is a combined text-critical discussion of these texts that blurs the differences between them. Yet, the Jeremiah texts themselves have a complex history, as is attested in the manuscript tradition. Taking into account the differences between the Greek and the Masoretic texts of Jeremiah, the paper will particularly focus on the relationship between 2 Kgs 24-25 and Jer 52. The disintegration of traditional DH models requires a renewed discussion of redaction-critical models, such as those proposed by C. Seitz, J. Wöhrle, or K. Schmid. The paper discusses these various suggestions for the redactional history of these passages, paying particular attention to points of contact with the Jeremianic tradition that go beyond the obvious parallels. Rather than proposing a (too) easy one-directional solution for the textual developments, the paper aims to shed light on how the end of the book of Kings developed in dialogue with Jeremianic traditions. In particular, it argues that the literary developments between the two works reflects an ongoing discussion on the memory of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem.
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Leisure and Entertainment: The Babylonian Talmud's Lighthearted Life
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Monika Amsler, University of Maryland
The trouble with late antique manuscripts is that most of them only came down to us as medieval copies. Unlike medievalists, scholars of late antiquity can rarely claim that the author or supervisor of a certain work must himself have dictated the content and layout of a work, nor are they able to find traces of the original manuscripts usage in their - often digitalized and transcribed anyway- files. It may therefore be speculated to what extent we may be able to say something about the real life of a text. For even if the text still possesses a prolegomenon written by their author in which they describe the purpose of their work we cannot know without another testimony whether this imagined purpose by the author had turned into the way it was actually used.
The Babylonian Talmud is a work whose real biography is left to our imagination alone. No original manuscript survived neither did a prolegomenon or a late antique source witnessing to its spread and usage. The fact that the book is widespread today and used to constitute the backbones of contemporary Jewish orthodoxy may further cloud the original use of the work - the Talmud's purpose as authoritative legal commentary on the Mishna may seem obvious.
What I will present here is a view on the Talmud from its late antique literary surroundings, the prevailing trends and tastes for certain texts. From this perspective I will argue that the Talmud was written to engage a particular being (a son, a protégé or an otherwise important person) in knowledgeable matters -rabbinic and else- in a leisurely, entertaining and conversant (sympotic) way.
While this biography of the Talmud may not be more or less truthful than the idea that it had been studied and memorized by devoted students, it certainly widens our perspective on the ways in which a late antique work may have spent its unburdened days.
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From Transcendent Kitab to Piecemeal Qur’ans: A Qur’anic Model of Revelation
Program Unit: Qur’anic Studies: Methodology and Hermeneutics (IQSA)
Khalil Andani, Harvard University
The predominant view of Qur’ānic Revelation in Sunni Muslim Qur’ānic exegesis (tafsīr) and theology (kalām) has the Angel Gabriel verbally dictate the contents of a pre-existent heavenly Qur’ān to the Prophet Muhammad in a piecemeal fashion over twenty years, which the Prophet recites verbatim to his audience. Most Islamic studies scholarship takes this “scriptural-verbal dictation” theory of revelation” as axiomatic and common to all Muslims. This paper argues that the Qur’ānic concept of revelation is one where the Messenger receives non-verbal inspiration (waḥy) from a “Transcendent Kitāb” and expresses it as piecemeal Arabic qur’āns tailored to his audience.
Drawing on Qur’ānic studies scholarship by Fiegenbaum (1973), Crollius (1974), Graham (1984), and Madigan (2001), the paper first argues that the Qur’anic concept of kitāb does not refer to physical scriptures, but rather, has the meaning of divine prescription, decree, and guidance, symbolized by “divine writing”. Qur’ānic kitāb is a genus category that includes prophetic revelatory guidance and divine decrees. Second, building on Madigan (2006), Sinai (2006), and Neuwirth (2010), the paper argues that the revelatory process described in the Qur’ān distinguishes between a “Transcendent Kitāb” – a celestial domain of God’s knowledge and decrees called kitāb mubīn – and the piecemeal Arabic qur’āns, which are situated “adaptations” (tafsīl) of the Transcendent Kitāb tailored to audiences.
Thirdly, the paper critically engages the arguments of Bell (1934), Jeffery (1950), Izutsu (1964), Fiegenbaum (1973), and Neuwirth (2015) concerning the Qur’ānic notions of sending down, (tanzīl), speech of God (kalām Allāh), and inspiration (waḥy). In doing so, the paper shows that tanzīl/inzāl does not actually describe the revelatory process and that kalām Allāh does not mean verbal linguistic speech. It is then argued that Qur’ānic waḥy denotes a non-verbal form of divine communication conveyed to the Prophet’s heart through the mediation of the Holy Spirit. This entails that waḥy is a process by which the Prophet “reads” the Transcendent Kitāb and verbalizes it into Arabic qur’āns.
To corroborate this reading, the paper shows that early Muslim understandings of Qur’ānic revelation, as reflected in the Qur’ān and early ḥadīth, blur the hard distinction between “divine word and prophetic word” (Graham 1977) and elevate the Messenger’s extra-Qur’ānic speech to a level nearly on par with the qur’āns. This idea of waḥy as non-verbal inspiration, entailing revelatory agency for Muhammad, is mentioned in classical works including certain ḥadīth, the tafsīr of al-Māturīdī, Ismaili writings, and later ‘ulūm al-Qur’ān works.
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Demonic Deception of the Senses During Prayer in Late Ancient Christianity
Program Unit: Prayer in Antiquity
Elizabeth Anderson, Claremont School of Theology
The role of the senses during prayer had an ambiguous legacy during Christian late antiquity, because although the senses could play a positive role in helping a believer experience the divine, they were also liable to deception by demons. Around the year 519 CE, Jacob of Sarug received a letter from a monk who claimed to be afflicted by hallucinations caused by deceitful demons whenever he attempted to pray. He insisted that these were not merely visions presented to his imagination, but that he physically saw them with his own eyes. If the detrimental spiritual effects of these visions ultimately made their demonic origin clear, he was unable to perceive those effects until after the fact, and thus he had no clear means of self-defense at the time of the attack. Jacob’s letter is a response to the monk’s plea for advice about what to do when his own senses constantly seemed to betray and deceive him. Similar accounts appear in other texts as well, most notably in the sayings and lives of the desert fathers and mothers. Of all of the senses, vision seems to have been regarded as the most likely to be led astray, but other senses such as hearing or smell could also be ensnared and misdirected, and caused to apprehend things that were not truly present at all, but were only demonic illusions. This paper seeks to contextualize Jacob’s letter 38 within the wider context of late ancient Christian accounts of sensory deception during both liturgical and private prayer. It explores the particular kinds of sensory delusions that individuals described, how they were ultimately recognized as being hallucinations rather than reality, and what advice authors gave for guarding and using one’s senses correctly, given that the senses were usually regarded as phenomena that could never simply be transcended by an embodied creature, but which were nevertheless perilously prone to error.
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"Little Children, Stay Away from Idols!" The Last Word as the First Word in the Johannine Situation; 1 John 5:21 and the Roman Imperial Cult
Program Unit: Jesus Traditions, Gospels, and Negotiating the Roman Imperial World
Paul N. Anderson, George Fox University
Far from being sectarian, the pressures felt by Johannine Christianity resulted from their cosmopolitan setting in the Greco-Roman world. In particular, presenting Pilate as miscomprehending the truth, and featuring Thomas making an anti-Domitian confession in John 20:29 reflects an anti-imperial thrust of John’s story of Jesus. Additionally, numerous inferences of the historical backdrop of the Johannine Epistles abound, but a striking lacuna involves the relative dearth of historical-critical treatments of the Roman Imperial Cult under Domitian (81-96 CE) upon the ethical concerns of the diaspora-setting Johannine situation overall. Indeed, tensions with the Jewish leadership of local synagogues were real (1 John 2:18-25), as were debates with hierarchical Christian leaders, such as the primacy-loving Diotrephes (3 John 9-10). However, the socio-religious backdrop of the assimilative teachings of the docetizing “Antichrists” (1 John 4:1-3; 2 John 7) was directly impacted by the requirement of emperor laud instituted by Domitian, which was carried forward by further administrations. As echoed by the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan some two decades later, the long-established practice of requiring Christians to demonstrate emperor laud, confess Caesar as Lord, and to deny Christ carried penalties up to and including capital punishment if transgressed. These pressures would have been real in the rest of Asia Minor, even if Christians were not to be sought out programmatically.
That being the case, some of the primary ethical concerns behind the thrust of the Johannine writings come into clear view. (a) The miscomprehension of Pilate (John 18:28-19:22) and the confession of Thomas, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:29) were clearly crafted with an anti-Domitian thrust, as such is the way the third Flavian Emperor expected others to reference him. (b) Obviously, the Johannine Apocalypse challenges the numismatic image of baby Domitian holding seven stars in his hand, as such is performed by Christ himself (Rev 1:20). (c) Likewise in the Johannine Epistles, claiming to be “without sin” was less a matter of Gnostic perfectionism and more a factor of disagreement between Gentile and Jewish believers over what things were sinful and which were not—illuminated by socio-religious tensions with the Imperial Cult (1 John 1:5-10). (d) The appeal to love not the world was especially targeted at young adults, tempted to be involved in assimilative practices associated with imperial festivities and pagan celebrations, embellished by Rome (1 John 2:12-17). (e) The threat of docetizing traveling ministers is that they were teaching assimilation with Greco-Roman culture, legitimated by the cheap-grace implications of a non-suffering Jesus (1 John 4:1-3; 2 John 7). (f) While venial sins might be overlooked, death-producing sins could not be, and submitting to the requirements of the Imperial Cult would have been first among them (1 John 5:16-17). (g) Finally, all of these issues are addressed culminatively and directly in 1 John 5:21: “Little children, stay away from idols!” That being the case, the last word in the first Johannine Epistle serves as its first word, challenging believers’ participation in the Roman Imperial Cult and its associated practices.
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Egocentric, Superficial, and a “Paucity of Ongoing Mental Coordination”: Interpreting Cain through the Lens of Kohlberg’s Stage Theory of Moral Development
Program Unit: Psychology and Biblical Studies
Royce Anderson, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York
Many Biblical commentators have speculated upon the apparently “missing” information in the story of Cain and Abel. The story seems so sparse and superficial. Why did Yahweh prefer Abel’s offering? What did Cain say to Abel before they went into the field?
Some have tried to fill these gaps. If, however, we look at Cain through the lens of psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s Stage Theory of Moral Development, it may not be necessary to do so. I propose that, if we see Cain as depicting Kohlberg’s early-stage moral growth, the very meaning of the narrative may lie in its sparsity.
Kohlberg proposes that, as we mature into adulthood, we pass through predictable and relatively stable stages of moral development. He posited three “Levels” of moral development:
• Level I, “Preconventional”: preschool through early adolescence.
• Level II, “Conventional”: adult moral perspective based on social norms.
• Level III, “Postconventional”: following higher-order ethical principles.
This paper focuses on Level I and the transition to Level II: children’s maturation into adolescence and early adulthood.
Kohlberg posits that each of these Levels has two “Stages”. The two stages in Level I differ in that Stage 1 children understand only their own perspective. Children under about 3 years old simply don’t imagine that anyone else sees the world any differently than they do.
Children move into Stage 2 when they realize that others have different, even conflicting, perspectives. This is the first breakthrough in moral development. Although still driven by egocentric needs, Stage 2 children learn how to respond to other perspectives - thereby developing the cognitive tools they need to rise to the next Level.
Normally, children pass from Level I to Level II during early adolescence as relationships, especially with friends, become more important. Rising above their egocentric bias, young people begin to develop a “third person perspective” and a deeper concern for others. This initiates them into a more mature and adult moral perspective.
This paper describes how Cain exhibits a Stage 1 level of moral development – using the three key characteristics that Kohlberg identifies with early-stage morality:
1. Egocentricity: unawareness of another’s actual thoughts and feelings; projecting one’s own thoughts and feelings into others.
2. Superficiality: perceiving only overt actions and physical appearances; not grasping underlying thoughts and feelings.
3. Non-Reflectivity: inability to connect multiple cognitive ideas simultaneously – what Kohlberg calls the “paucity of ongoing mental coordination”.
The paper concludes with a discussion of Yahweh’s role – showing parental concern and tolerance for Cain's underdeveloped morality – while appealing for empathy toward Abel and, perhaps, attempting to move Cain from Stage 1 to Stage 2.
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Reconstructed Mark: A Test Case for Q?
Program Unit: Q
Olegs Andrejevs, Carthage College
The task of reconstructing Q has always been fraught with challenges, some arising from the inherently nuanced nature of the endeavor, others stemming from skepticism with which such attempts have not infrequently been met. In recent decades the impossibility of a precise reconstruction of Q has been asserted by a number of scholars at least partly on the grounds of what Dieter T. Roth calls in his 2018 monograph “a thought experiment” involving the reconstructed text of Mark’s gospel. As the argument goes, Mark’s gospel, when reconstructed solely from the Matthew-Luke overlap containing Markan material, amounts to a document that does not closely resemble the canonical gospel of Mark as we know it. Consequently, the proponents of this argument conclude, any reconstruction of Q as a document should similarly be viewed with suspicion.
In this paper we shall suggest that the “reconstructed Mark” argument cannot be deployed to invalidate the reconstruction of Q as a document, because Mark’s gospel presents an inadequate test case for Q. The multiple ways in which the two documents differ from one another will be highlighted. We shall also revisit the once well-known but perhaps more recently forgotten or underappreciated observations clearly showing that the evangelists consistently treat the double synoptic tradition material, viz., Q, more favorably than their Markan source. The purpose of our discussion will not be to discourage continued critical assessment of Q’s word-level reconstructions in the future. We do hope, however, to shift scholars’ attention away from what is at best a simplistic argument.
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How Would the Biblical Law Punish the Lovers in the Song of Songs?
Program Unit: Biblical Law
Jennifer Andruska, University of Cambridge
The unmarried status of the lovers in the Song of Songs immediately draws our attention. It is a violation of cultural norms concerning female chastity, and more importantly, biblical law. The Song of Songs, Exodus and Deuteronomy are very different books, written by different authors with very different concerns. Yet, this paper will draw these texts together in dialogue in order to understand how an ancient audience would have navigated these divergent texts within the same society and culture. Comparisons with other ANE laws concerning pre-marital sexual encounters and female chastity shed light on the motivations that lie behind the biblical laws in Exodus and Deuteronomy. Yet, these biblical books also dictate slightly different resolutions for pre-marital sexual encounters. Whilst both demand that the bride-price be paid, Exodus 22:15-16 leaves the decision of whether the couple will marry to the discretion of her father, whereas Deuteronomy 22:28-29 says that the man must marry her and cannot divorce her in future. Regarding the lovers in the Song, this is further complicated by the fact that the father is never mentioned in the Song. It mentions only the mothers of the woman and the man, which is fairly typical in ANE love poetry, though brief mention is made of the woman’s brothers in 1:6. Some have argued that these texts show that women played a more prominent role in matters of love than we might think from the legal texts alone. Regardless, the violation of female chastity had implications for the honour of the entire family, so that one must ask what the tidiest resolution to this dilemma would have been for all of those involved. Books like Exodus and Deuteronomy are interested in the “domestication” of such relationships, that is, the placement of such relationships into the context of marriage and back into a respectable status within society. The Song elevates a different value, over and above other values and norms within society. An ancient audience would have needed to navigate these simultaneous tensions and competing values. This paper will look at the sexual relationship of the lovers in the Song in light of both biblical and ancient Near Eastern laws concerning female chastity before marriage, from a literary, feminist and historical-critical perspective, to determine what penalties the lovers in the Song of Songs would have likely incurred for partaking in a sexual relationship before marriage, and more importantly, if they would have cared.
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The Architecture of Election: The Outer Limits of the Second Temple in Qumran and Related Traditions
Program Unit: Qumran
Joseph Angel, Yeshiva University
This study centers on the relationship between temple architecture (both real and figured) and Jewish religious and cultural values in Greco-Roman Palestine. The Second Temple not only determined the worldview of the varieties of Judaism in its time but also reflected, in its spatial layout, the values and tensions at the heart of Jewish society. Without reducing the purpose of the temple to the establishment and enforcement of social divisions and hierarchy (as some current scholarship tends to), this paper examines how architectural changes at the outer edges of the Temple precincts, the liminal area that distinguished the chosen community from outsiders, relate to complex and diverse Jewish attitudes toward the Greco-Roman world. Such attitudes continued to develop and were at least partially informed by the tumultuous experiences of Jews with non-Jews throughout the period.
Analysis will proceed on two planes. First, I consider the very patchy historical record, seeking clues for development from the evidence of Josephus, 1 Maccabees, and the Greek and Latin warning inscriptions from Herod’s Temple. Then, within this historical framework, I turn to roughly contemporary texts portraying ideal temples and focusing especially on their presentation of the boundary between inside and outside as a reflection of core conceptions of covenant and election. Here I intend to focus on the Temple Scroll and related Qumran traditions, as well as some relevant early Christian traditions. The comparison will illustrate not only the centrality of the image of the temple across different Jewish groups, but also, more importantly, how different notions regarding the boundaries of the temple played into distinctive understandings of the covenant, different expectations with regard to God’s plans for humanity, and ultimately, different platforms for the construction of communal identity.
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Righteousness and Riches: Dead Sea Scrolls Sectarianism and Its Economic Discontents
Program Unit: Qumran
Giancarlo P. Angulo, Florida State University
This essay frames the sectarian formation of the Dead Sea Scrolls communities in light of the economic conditions and conversations of second- and first-centuries BCE Palestine. Scholars have generally studied the sectarian underpinnings of the Qumran movement in one of two ways. Albert Baumgarten’s 1997 monograph, The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era, argues that the proliferation of Jewish sects in the second-century is a result of widespread disillusionment with the Hasmonean dynasty. In other words, Jewish sectarianism is considered to emerge in response to political volatility and disagreements with respect to the political establishment. On the other hand, John Collins locates the formation of the Qumran movement in the midst of the invention of Judaism and halakhic authority. In that case, the consolidation of sectarian identity is motivated by disputes over halakhah and interpretive agency. Each of these approaches is well corroborated by the extant evidence and has produced compelling avenues for research. I do not mean to oppose either of these conclusions. Instead, this essay suggests that there is also a strong and overlooked socio-economic undertone to the movement’s separation from Jerusalem. The Ptolemies and Seleucids instituted an exploitative economic system that included high rates of taxation, plunder, and debt. The successful rebellion by the Maccabees seems to have done little to change this, as Josephus records that Hasmonean kings hired foreign mercenaries, held lavish banquets, took money from public funds, and minted coins analogous to Hellenistic productions. Economic concerns related to these points garnered considerable attention in second-century Jewish writings. Non-sectarian texts such as the Wisdom of Ben Sira, Jubilees, and 4QInstruction each discuss the economic landscape of second-century Palestine and how best to manage debt. I posit that the sectarian groups behind the Dead Sea Scrolls emerge from within this context of significant economic anxiety and organize themselves in ways to counteract the deleterious fiscal conditions of the period. In other words, Qumran sectarianism is motivated by economic discontents in addition to the political and religious perspectives previously suggested. The Dead Sea Scrolls often denigrate the temple and scorn their opponents for financial malpractice. The Damascus Document lists money as one of the principle corrupting elements of the temple and the pesharim condemn the Wicked Priest for economic oppression on at least four separate occasions. Furthermore, communities represented by the S and D traditions require members to contribute personal funds to the community for distribution among the wounded, poor, elderly, and ill (CD 14.12-17). Positions of leadership, such as the mebaqer and maskil in those texts, are appointed to oversee responsible transactions with outsiders and store the assets of the covenanters. I argue that these economic institutions were a common feature to Jewish sectarianism and contribute significantly to the formation of the Dead Sea Scrolls communities. An analysis of the Qumran texts in relation to the economic climate of Hellenistic Palestine offers avenues to understand more fully the sectarian landscape of the Maccabean era and the wider Jewish discourse on economic dissatisfaction.
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Was the Hijrah a Historical Event? A Survey of the Evidence
Program Unit: The Qur’an and Late Antiquity (IQSA)
Sean Anthony, The Ohio State University
The hijrah of Muhammad and his earliest followers from Mecca to Yathrib in 622 CE stands as an epoch-making event in the historical memory of the early Muslims preserved in the literary works of the Arabo-Islamic tradition. Yet, does there exist any historical evidence for this pivotal event beyond the immense cache of communal memory preserved in this literary evidence? This paper argues that there indeed exists a bevy of evidence for the historicity of the hijrah outside the literary source material—even if one limits the survey of the available data to artifacts dating to the 1st century AH/7th century CE. Moreover, establishing the historicity of this event has potentially monumental consequences for the current debate over the feasibility of applying diachronic approaches to reading the Qur’an and for defending this approach from its critics, who dismiss it as overly reliant on assumptions internalized from the sirah-maghazi literature of the 2nd–3rd/8th–9th century.
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Divination as an Analytical Tool: A View from the Late Second Temple Period
Program Unit: Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature
Katri Antin, Helsingin Yliopisto - Helsingfors Universitet
In contemporary scholarship, it has become less common to characterize Second Temple period as a time decay and decline of Jewish prophecy. Instead, there has been an increasing interest in studying the continuation and transformation of prophecy throughout the Second Temple period. This quest has been fueled by the discovery of new textual sources such as the Dead Sea Scrolls which include previously unknown compositions that attest a belief in an ongoing divine-human communication in the late Second Temple period. At the same time, the way in which transmission of divine knowledge is depicted in these compositions defy modern categorization as prophetic, mantic, or apocalyptic. To develop a fuller picture of how divine knowledge was believed to be transmitted in the Second Temple period, studies on wide variety of compositions are needed. I suggest using the definition of divination as an analytical tool as it can be applied to various cultures and time periods and would allow better comparative studies. The definition of divination invites a scholar to examine, for example, how the different components in transmitting divine knowledge (God, message, human mediator, and recipients) are depicted, as well as pay attention to both inductive and intuitive elements in transmitting divine knowledge in the Second Temple period.
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Gender Fluidity of Qur'anic Grammar
Program Unit: Linguistic, Literary, and Thematic Perspectives on the Qur’anic Corpus (IQSA)
Ghazala Anwar, Independent Scholar
Whereas Michael Sells has explored the multidimensionality of meaning across what he identifies as the semantic, acoustic, emotive and gendered modes and has aptly pointed out the use of the feminine grammar in creating impressive feminine ‘sound-scapes’ or barely hidden personifications (or ‘sound figures’, as he calls them), in hymnic surahs of the Qur’an (e.g. Surat al-Qadr [Q97] and Surat al-Qariah [Q101]), I am not aware of any studies of the alternate use of the feminine and masculine grammar in the same verse or couplet and how it may relate to a deeper gender discourse in the immediate passages and in the overall literary intent of the relevant surah (e.g. Q al-Najm 53:38–39, alla taziru waziratun wizra ukhra / wa an laysa li-l-insani illa ma sa‘a). In this paper I propose to study the two terms–nafs and insan–most commonly used in the Qur’an to refer to the human subject. Both terms are semantically gender inclusive whereas the former is grammatically feminine and the latter grammatically masculine. Beginning with some general observations on the interchangeable use of the two terms in the Qur’an leading to grammatical gender fluidity, the paper shall proceed to a more focused study of Surat al-Najm, where there is an explicit and implicit discussion of gender across its semantic, acoustic and emotive modes. The surah’s breathtaking rhythm with its short verses and feminine endings (except for verses 26–32, which seem to be a later insertion), its concern with denial of female goddesses, its use of the feminine and masculine grammar to refer to the human subject and the primacy of the ethical across human differences makes it an excellent candidate for such a study. The paper will also endeavor to determine the degree to which there might be a tension or agreement between the various modes through which the discourse on gender is developed in this surah. Finally, the paper will reflect on how the gender fluidity of qur’anic grammar might open a way for queer Muslims to transcend hetero-normative and patriarchal readings of the Qur’an.
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ḥnp̱ and bᵉriṯ: The Social Background of Isa 24:5
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Avigail Aravna, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Nearly all exegeses of Isaiah chapters 24-27 have noted the centrality of the reference to the broken "eternal covenant" in Isa 24:5. Most studies have identified this bᵉriṯ in Isa. 24 as the 'bᵉriṯ ʿôlām' in Gen 9:16 which YHWH made with Noah in the aftermath of the flood (Gen 9:8-17), and focused on the Pentateuchal background of these concepts. The universal dimension of this covenant has suggested to many that Isaiah 24 is re-appropriating this earlier tradition and arguing that its provisions have come undone.
Following Polaski's and Hibbard's broader, intertextual approach to the term 'bᵉriṯ ʿôlām' in Isa 24:5, and based upon recent studies that explore how the notion of the covenant functioned during the Persian, and early Hellenistic period, I would like to suggest that Dan 11:32 and CD 1:20 be taken into consideration when discussing the late reception of the broken covenant discourse.
These additional texts that reflect upon Isa 24:5, show how the breaking of the covenant tradition and the defilement of the land, 'hāʾāreṣ ḥonp̱â', as a result of this transgression, are part of the social dualistic polemic about the right interpretation of the law by the true descendants of Biblical Israel: the Righteous, the People who know their God vs. those who forsake the holy covenant, the Wicked or The ones who ganged up on those of Righteous souls.
Finally, introducing Daniel and CD into the discussion of Isa 24:5 opens up new interpretive possibilities for Isa 24:5 and for the broader group of chapters 24-27 in which it is placed.
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From Erotic Human Love to Erotic Divine Love…and Back Again? How Medieval Interpretations of the Song of Songs Might Say to Theology Today
Program Unit: History of Interpretation
John Arblaster, University of Antwerp
Estimates suggest that of all the books in the Hebrew Bible, the Song of Songs was commented upon more than any other book in the Middle Ages, with the possible exceptions of Genesis and the Psalms. The Song’s interpretative history is a vast and complex field and medieval commentaries and interpretations are very diverse. One central point of agreement, however, is that the literal content of the Song is not something to which a great deal of attention should be paid. From Origen in the 3rd century until John of the Cross in the 16th, the consensus of the vast majority of commentators was that in itself, the song does not refer simply to a human relationship, and if we were to read it in that way, it would, in the words of Denys the Carthusian, “be of no worth, sensual and prurient, and not spiritual, mystical, most excellent and heavenly. It would then not be a prophetic text, but a sort of love song.”
Until the 12th century, readings of the Song in the Latin West had centred on allegorical interpretations in which the bride represents the Church. Inspired by Origen, the 12th-century Cistercian monks William of Saint-Thierry and Bernard of Clairvaux and the Augustinian canon regular Richard of Saint-Victor popularized the ‘personal’ or ‘moral’ reading of the Song, in which the bride represents the individual soul, and they thus radically reshaped the Song’s reception and profoundly impacted the Christian mystical tradition.
This paper will explore whether and to what extent the pervasive moral mystical reading of the Song – in all its diversity – functions as a norm for understanding the Song theologically, despite the fact that contemporary exegetical scholarship has decisively moved away from this reading. The contemporary exegete Jean-Pierre Sonnet (2005) has suggested that allegorical readings of the Song were not only traditional (i.e. dating back to a tradition of Jewish interpretation predating the Song’s definitive inclusion in the canon), but that this book was so popular among medieval commentators because the language of human love and the language of divine love have so much in common. The historical theologian Denys Turner (1995), on the other hand, has suggested that in the Middle Ages, the Song represented the perfect combination of monastic interests – namely Neo-Platonic, Dionysian erotic ontology on the one hand and almost constant scripture reading on the other. Taking its lead from these and other studies, this paper will explore (i) a number of specific medieval mystical readings of the Song, (ii) the extent to which this mystical theology rejects or presupposes the literal, erotic content of the poem, and (iii) whether retrieving medieval approaches to the Song might influence its role in theology today. What might we learn from the way in which the most ‘profane’ of biblical books might impact contemporary understandings of erotic relationships with O/others, both human and divine.
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Biblical Amulets: A New Enhanced and Limited Definition
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
Peter Arzt-Grabner, Universität Salzburg
The Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB) lists 301 papyri, parchments or related materials as amulets. Among those, 239 are classified as Christian whereas only 21 are regarded as testimonies of the classical Greco-Roman religion. Not a single one of the 301 amulets contains a quotation from Greco-Roman literature (except three amulets with quotations from the Anthologia Palatina). On the other hand, 70 out 1917 artifacts, that contain a quotation from Homer who has been called the “Bible of the Greek”, have been identified as papyrus or parchment sheets (and not scrolls) but none of them has been regarded so far as amulet although many of the 70 artifacts are similar to pieces of papyrus or parchment quoting from the Bible that are usually regarded as “probable” or “possible amulets”. On the basis of this evidence I tackle the current definition of “Christian amulets” and suggest to treat comparable artifacts alike, no matter if they quote classical or biblical texts.
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The Paradox of Sacred and Profane Shared Space
Program Unit: Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures
Shelley Ashdown, Dallas International University
Sacred space and profane space are not mutually exclusive. Cognitive science has proven clear, distinct boundaries are not realized between existential categories. The reality of life space is the sacred and profane may exist in the same space with one taking precedence over the other. A space may become sacred to accommodate a sacred action limited to a particular temporal moment even with the profane present. In this way, sacred space becomes utility based for life focused outcomes. This paper explores the reality of the sacred and the profane occupying the same space. Primary examples are taken from 2 Kings 4:32-35 and 1 Kings 17:19-23 in which death (profane) is at the spatial forefront confronting prophetic power (sacred); and 2 Kings 5:9-14 in the story of Naaman confronted with the dirty Jordan river (profane) and divine healing (sacred). In the one case, the profane space is permanently transformed by sacredness. In the other space, the sacred act is momentary and the profanity of the space remains constant.
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Affirming Madness as an Unexpected Context in Mark 5:1–20 Reflections on Jesus, the Academy, and the Structural Sin of “Sanism”
Program Unit: Contextual Biblical Interpretation
Emily Askew, Lexington Theological Seminary
In this paper, I will argue that Jesus’ identity as the Christ is much more tenuously claimed when Mark 5:1-20 is read through the unexpected contextual lens of mad hermeneutics. Further, I will claim that destabilizing the text and it’s Christological center through the affirmational lens of madness serves as a point of reflection on the larger academy’s discomfort with and even rejection of those who claim a subject position of “mad.” Indeed, the hegemony of strict interpretations of reason and the structural sin of “sanism” in the academy, leave those of us who live with non-normative thought processes silenced and invisible, as becomes the case for the man from Gerasa. It is my hope that a mad reading of the man from Gerasa will open up larger questions of how we can and should make visible space in our biblical interpretations, theological imaginations and institutions for the mad as a valuable form of being human rather than as a stigmatized, pathologized and medicated anomaly.
To make my claims, I will first define and situate the emerging field of mad studies and hermeneutics in the larger landscape of disability theory/theology/biblical interpretation and forms of liberation theologies. I will argue that the reclamation of the word “mad” is in keeping with other liberations projects such as Crip theory/theology and Queer biblical studies/theology, (off shoots of disabilities studies and LGBTQIA theology, respectively) in which a pejorative label returns to help create a space of interpretive and activist resistance to rhetorical and practical strategies of “normality.” I then apply a mad reading to Mark 5:1-20 and challenge both traditional notions of the Gerasene man’s “cure” and more liberative readings of his “healing” (as being restored to community) concluding that he is left without voice or community in the end. Following this reading, I will argue that his silencing and isolation for the larger good of Jesus’ identity as the Christ replicates the results of an unproblematized acceptance of reason and sanity in the authority of the academy. Ironically, in my own context of theological education, where we invoke the movement of Spirit in our committee meetings, and teach the unexpected mystical experiences between women religious and God, how does “sanism” prevail and join in silencing epistemologies of difference?
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The Case for Substantial Revision of Lexicon Entries for Μνεία: Overlooked Factors Worth Mentioning
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Gillian Asquith, Australian Catholic University and Melbourne School of Theology
The New Testament attests seven instances of μνεία, typically glossed as “remembrance, memory, mention,” all within the Pauline corpus, six of which occur in the epistolary thanksgiving periods. Four of these attestations occur in the periphrastic phrase μνείαν ποιεῖσθαι, which lexica such as BDAG, LSJ9, and GE gloss as “mention, make mention.” Despite such concordance across weighty lexica, English NT translations tend to oscillate, seemingly arbitrarily, between glossing μνείαν ποιεῖσθαι as “mention” and “remember,” and commentators argue over how best to determine the precise sense of μνεία in this collocation. There is tension, moreover, between “mention” as commonly used in contemporary English and the cotext of the Pauline thanksgivings, a disjuncture that appears to have gone unnoticed in lexica and scholarly literature. “Mention” connotes “a reference, comment or remark that is generally brief in nature and incidental to the main point” (OED3, s.v. “mention,” n.), whereas the Pauline prayer reports suggest a depth of intentional prayer incongruent with a mere cursory reference. This disjuncture appears to stem from the lexicological trajectory of “mention” in English. “Mention” has been used as a gloss for μνεία since the sixteenth century, but the sense of a brief and incidental remark associated with “mention” today did not originally exist; rather, “mention” denoted “the action of calling to mind or commemorating something in speech or writing” (OED3, s.v.). It appears that such semantic shift has escaped the attention of translators, commentators and lexicographers alike, most likely due to the neatness of the calque “make mention,” the semantic overlap between “mention in prayer” and “remember in prayer,” and the limited contextual evidence within the NT. Moulton and Milligan’s Vocabulary of the Greek New Testament provides a number of attestations intended to illustrate μνείαν ποιεῖσθαι in the sense of “make mention,” but a fresh examination of papyrological and epigraphical material confirms that the semantic range of μνεία does not include “mention” in the contemporary English sense and that such a gloss is based on archaic usage of the English word that is no longer legitimate. In the papyri, μνεία occurs both formulaically in epistolary proemia, as in the NT, and also in independent usage. These attestations connote three separate nuances of remembering: remembering as a purely internal recollection, remembering as a communicative event intended to draw ongoing attention to the object of the memory, and remembering accompanied by a responsive action, the nature of which is determined from context. These nuances are not adequately captured by the glosses “remembrance, memory” and dictate the need for substantial revision of existing entries in BDAG, LSJ9, and GE. Data from the documentary papyri also facilitates the drawing of an additional conclusion that deserves mention in lexica, namely that μνεία was a high register lexeme whether used formulaically or independently, a conclusion significant for informing assessment of lexical choice within the Pauline epistolary proemia.
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How to Read the אות of Genesis 9:11–17?
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Luiz Gustavo Assis, Boston College
In this paper, I will investigate the אות (sign) of the first covenant between Yahweh and humanity described in Genesis 9, namely, the word קשׁת (bow). This paper has two parts. In the first, I will discuss the way in which Biblical scholars have interpreted the reference to קשׁת in Genesis 9. I will follow the interpretation of some Jewish authors from the Middle Ages who argued that the Judahite deity has turned his bow toward himself, indicating peace. The second part of the paper is an analysis of the iconography from ancient Iraq of deities and kings holding this military weapon in the same manner as Yahweh in Genesis 9. These representations indicate that when the bow’s owner turns it toward him or herself, it signifies the cessation of hostilities after the complete subjugation of the enemy, and I will argue that this is exactly the context of Genesis 9.
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How Isaiah 44:21–28 Both Support Cyrus and Undermine His Neo-Babylonian Royal Ideology
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Shawn Zelig Aster, Bar-Ilan University
Isaiah 44:28 argues that Cyrus is God’s shepherd. At His command, Cyrus has ordered the re-building of Jerusalem and the re-establishment of the Temple.
This verse is located at the culmination of a series of literary units (beginning in 43:16) which praise Cyrus’ actions while implicitly undermining the Neo-Babylonian royal ideology Cyrus himself promulgated. The culminating verses of these units (44:26-28) exhibit a very positive view of Cyrus' plan to allow return to Yehud and rebuilding of the Temple. But 43:16-44:27 subvert elements of the Neo-Babylonian royal ideology Cyrus adopted, by appropriating its motifs. Instead of using them, as Cyrus did, to argue that Marduk chose Cyrus, these verses use these motifs to argue that God chose Israel. 44:1-2, which argue that God formed Israel “in the womb,” have long been recognized as an example of such subversion (Paul 1968), but there are many other examples of this technique in 43:16-44:28. These include the claim in 43:19-20 that God creates a path and water in the desert, which recall claims in Nabonidus’ inscriptions (Beaulieu 1989: 173), the claim in 44:3-4 that God revives Israel (reflecting Cyrus’ claim in his cylinder that he revived Babylon), and the argument in 44:5 (repeated in 44:21) that Israel is God’s dedicated servant.
Embedded within these adaptations of Neo-Babylonian royal ideology is a clear polemic against Marduk theology and Babylonian iconography in 44:6-20. This polemic begins in 44:6-8, which use the Babylonian belief that Marduk was not present at creation to undermine Babylonian claims that Marduk is the chief god. Only YHWH, the Creator who acknowledges no rivals, can persuasively claim to be the author of future events. In 44:9-11, idolators are called upon to bear witness in favour of Marduk’s claims of chiefness, but they are unable to do so because they cannot affirm a role for Marduk at creation. The polemic continues with an attack on the idol-making and -animating ritual in 44:12-20.
In 44:21-28, the two strands of argument articulated since 43:16 reach their joint culmination. 44:21 refers to the polemic against idols in 44:6-20 and also refers to the image found in 44:5 of Israel as God’s servant, an image appropriating elements of Cyrus’ royal ideology. 44:24 goes beyond this; it affirms God’s creation of Israel from the womb, thus recalling the subversion of Cyrus’ ideology advanced in 44:1-2, while also affirming God’s role as sole Creator, thus recalling the polemic in 44:6-8. Finally, 44:27 refers to the cosmic combat motif, thus closing the circle begun in 43:26. The Babylonian cosmic combat story tells how Marduk became supreme, but 44:27 uses this motif to affirm the supremacy of YHWH.
Taken as a whole, 43:26-44:28 carefully balance an appropriation of Neo-Babylonian royal ideology with an attack on Babylonian mythology. Both of these arguments reach their joint culmination in 44:28, arguing that Cyrus, who appropriated Neo-Babylonian royal ideology to support his own royal claims, is actually the servant of YHWH.
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One God and One Nation: The Unity of Israel in the Face of Imperial Politics and Internal Division
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
George Athas, Moore Theological College
Accepted paper for the 2019 IBR annual meeting, Book of the Twelve research group
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What Can Biblical Greek Studies Learn from Hebrew Language and Linguistics?
Program Unit: Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics
George Athas, Moore Theological College
This paper will speak from the experience of grammar in the world of the Hebrew Bible to grammarians and interpreters of the Greek New Testament. It draws primarily on the experience of the struggle to understand the Hebrew verb and formulate helpful categories of grammar that advance our understanding of the Hebrew Bible. These will be used as the basis for both caveats and encouragements for grammarians of Greek, especially with regard to the nature and explanatory power of grammar.
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Scribal Sensitivity in Greek Deuteronomy: Forms of Interpretation in 7:12–15
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Christopher Atkins, Yale Divinity School
The present paper is a study of the translation and vocabulary of Old Greek Deuteronomy. Translation analysis—specifically regarding semantics and vocabulary—represents a lacuna in scholarship on Greek Deuteronomy. The landscape is thus lightly treaded. Considering translation analysis a crucial dimension of the study of the formation and early reception of the Hebrew-Aramaic Jewish scriptures, I argue that the translator's decisions to differentiate—to use multiple target-language lexemes for a single source-language lexeme—and to level—to use a single target-language lexeme for multiple source-language lexemes—were not simply due to stylistic variation. Rather, they were meaningful and sophisticated, disclosing contextual, stylistic, and ideological sensitivities and nuances. The paper proceeds with Deut. 7:12-15 as a test case. Each verse exhibits either semantic differentiation or semantic leveling, yet I argue that each instance of differentiation and leveling stems from different translational motivations. These include theologically interpretive concerns, a matter of varying semantic ranges between Greek and Hebrew nominals, a perceived linguistic constraint in the source language, and a rhetorical concern. While the arguments herein can inform many areas of research (e.g. diachronic language studies, textual criticism, and Greek Deuteronomy's theological and ideological orientation), my primary interest is the way in which it informs research on the study of Second Temple Jewish scribal habits and compositional activity. The Septuagint and its recensions receive relatively sparse attention in discussions of scribal habits and compositional activity in Hellenistic Judaism. With hopes of further integrating the Old Greek compositions into the study of Second Temple Jewish scribal activity and textual transmission, I present this as a hermeneutical engagement with the transmission of the Jewish scriptures in the Second Temple period from the perspective of Old Greek Deuteronomy through the lens of semantic differentiation and semantic leveling.
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Where Is It Written That the Christ Must Suffer? An Intertextual Clarification of Luke 24:44–46
Program Unit: Intertextuality in the New Testament
J. D. Atkins, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
Luke 24:44-46 raises a number of questions for modern interpreters. First, the curious phrase, “while I was still with you” (v. 44), gives the awkward impression that Jesus, who has just eaten fish in the presence of the disciples (v. 43), may not actually be present with them. Next, Jesus’s statement that “everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled” is intriguingly precise and vague at the same time. It names three distinct sections of the Hebrew Bible but offers no specific examples. Moreover, because Jesus introduces his next statement with the standard citation formula, “it is written,” the reader expects an explicit quotation. But the words that follow (“that the Christ should suffer and rise from the dead”) do not resemble any known OT text or combination of texts. This paper will argue that most, if not all, of these tensions can be resolved if we posit the influence of 4 Macc 18:9-19 on Luke 24:44-46.
The awkward phrasing in Luke 24:44 need not imply a docetic view of the risen Jesus. Rather it is probably the result of an intentional echo of the wording of 4 Macc 18:10. In the latter the mother of the famous Maccabean martyrs encourages her seven sons by reminding them of the teaching of their late father: “While he was still with you (ἔτι ὢν σὺν ὑμῖν), he taught you the Law and the Prophets (τὸν νόμον καὶ τοὺς προφήτας).” Similarly, the risen Jesus reassures the disciples by saying, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you (ἔτι ὢν σὺν ὑμῖν), that everything written about me in the Law and the Prophets (τῷ νόμῳ Μωϋσέως καὶ τοῖς προφήταις) and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44).
To illustrate the father’s teaching from the Law and the Prophets, the mother of the seven martyrs presents a carefully arranged chiastic sequence of OT quotations and allusions. The theme of the first half of the chiasm is the suffering of the righteous, and that of the second half is God’s ability to make the dead live. The two parts of the mother’s list correspond to the sequence of two themes in Luke 24:46, namely, that the Christ should first suffer and then rise from the dead. Notably, even though the mother introduces the father’s teaching as coming from the Law and the Prophets, the center of the chiasm includes a programmatic quotation from the Psalms. It may thus serve as a precedent for the otherwise unparalleled reference to the Psalms in Luke 24:44. Overall, the intertextual connections with 4 Macc 18 suggest that Luke 24:44-46 is not a claim about the fulfillment of texts that refer specifically to the Messiah, but a claim that Christ’s suffering and resurrection are the climactic fulfillment of two themes that can be found in each of the three major divisions of the OT.
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Exclusion and Embrace: Identity Dynamics in Johannine Christianity
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
Harold Attridge, Yale University
Arthur Darby Nock’s highlighted the way in which “conversion” works within monotheistic traditions of antiquity, offering a different model of religious identity from what had been previously common. This paper explores the ways in which the theme of unity, among believers and with their divine source, works as a vehicle of the “conversion” process primarily in Johannine Christianity.
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Paul's Speech in Athens and the Challenge of Conversion in Greek Sacred Landscapes
Program Unit: Religious Experience in Antiquity
Ranjani Atur, University of California, Santa Barbara
Acts 17:16-34, Paul's speech in front of the Areopagus in Athens, is often characterized as his attempt to engage with Hellenistic philosophy. Yet, rather than discussing philosophical dogma or virtues in the abstract, Paul focuses on his experience of the city of Athens and the role of materiality. At the opening of this passage, Paul makes it clear that his opinion of Athenians was informed not by dialogue with philosophers but by walking through the city and observing the ubiquity of pagan shrines and idols. In response to what he saw in Athens, Paul argued that the true God cannot be expressed by or worshipped through materiality. The end of the passage states that some in the audience were swayed and joined him, and modern scholars have pointed to conversions such as these to assert that pagan religious experience was easily cast aside by some. In this paper, I first contextualize Paul's speech by considering the types of religious performances he would have seen while walking through the public spaces in Athens. More importantly, I look at the Pauline epistles to show that early followers of Paul from pagan communities struggled to adopt his program both practically and conceptually while still inhabiting sacred landscapes similar to that of Athens.
Greek cities in the first century were filled with temples and shrines that acknowledged the presence of gods within the community and provided a venue for interaction with them. Anyone walking through the city, like Paul, passed and interacted with multiple shrines regularly, usually through the performance of religious rituals such as pouring libations, making offerings, and engaging in theoria with the idol. From the Areopagus, therefore, Paul's greatest challenge in changing the pagan worship practices was actually the physical space of Athens. For Paul's audience, the influence of sacred materiality was not something able to be dismissed quickly. The newly converted followers of Paul may have shifted their religious worldview but they still had to inhabit the geographical space of the Athenian sacred landscape, which encouraged and reinforced the pagan worldview. This paper relies on two theoretical premises. The first is that monuments, such as temples, act as external symbolic storage by conveying and reinforcing cultural narratives to the viewer (Renfrew, 1998). The second is Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social behavior which states that ingrained actions not only reflect but reinforce cultural values and norms. Thus, interacting with pagan shrines through the performance of religious activities strengthened the very pagan mindset that Paul sought to eliminate.
Acknowledging the importance of space in shaping religious experience is crucial for our understanding of early Christian communities. In cities like Athens, Paul needed to combat the pagan mindset not only intellectually but also spatially. Evidence from his writings shows that this effort continued well after an individual's initial decision to become a follower of Paul.
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Biblical Laws in Josephus' Retelling: Was Josephus Influenced by Roman Law?
Program Unit: Josephus
Michael Avioz, Bar-Ilan University
In recent years scholars emphasize that Josephus was a Roman citizen, well-integrated in the Roman society. More than seventy years ago, Boaz Cohen wrote that "Josephus is interpreting Jewish law in order to bring it in harmony with the Roman rule." According to Cohen, when there is no biblical or rabbinic source for Josephus' retelling, it must be assigned to Roman influence. Birgit van der Lans wrote similarly on Josephus' retelling of Hagar that "Josephus was… thoroughly familiar with Roman customs and cultural practices." The question addressed in my paper is whether Josephus was indeed influenced by the Roman law. I will revisit the methodology of finding analogies between Josephus and Roman law and will offer my input on several biblical laws rewritten in Josephus' work and try to uncover their origins.
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The Beloved Who Became a Widow and the Widow Who Desires to Be Loved Again: The Song of Songs and Lamentations
Program Unit: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible
Orit Avnery, Shalem College and Shalom Hartman Institute
The Book of Lamentations is a response to the destruction of the Temple, the punishment of exile, and the painful sense of loneliness and failure. It reflects the feeling that the relationship with God may have come to an end. The nation is depicted in the megilla as a woman, and by portraying her as a widow / nidda / lonely / betrayed / sexually humiliated / abandoned, represents the state of the nation. The image of Jerusalem as a sinful, abandoned woman is precise and powerful. The image is not one of death, which would have provided the painful solace of suffering that is finite, but rather of a woman who was raped and defiled and left to live, forlorn and companionless. A woman like this is a living witness to ongoing pain and anguish without relief.
The Song of Songs masterfully paints a picture of the relationship between man and woman, between lover and beloved, between two lovers experiencing the complexities of the love bond, and at its center is the experience of passion and the challenge of consummating it. The megilla gives voice to a woman who loves and is loved and offers a glimpse into the woman's attitude to love, passion, yearning, and desire. It sketches a world that moves from alienation and estrangement to intimacy and harmony. Already in antiquity this megilla was understood allegorically and interpreted as a metaphor for the relationship between God and His people; it reflects the vicissitudes that this relationship has undergone, is still undergoing, and will yet undergo.
Concerning both megillot, opinions differ as to whether the megillah in question is an integral work with structural order and conceptual development, or whether these are independent works arranged as an anthology one after the other. In my lecture I will follow the scholars who for different reasons suggested that the work should be seen as an integral unit with an inner logic (even if they were not written entirely by one author). I propose that the megillot be read side by side. I will show various motifs that link them, and most important - I will propose ideological-theological significance to the reading of Lamentations and the Song of Songs, two works that contend with the challenge of existence in the face of the presence and actions of God. Special emphasis will be placed on the fact that in both megillot, the collective is represented by the image of a woman. I will analyze the implications of this representation and of the relationship to God as an intimate partner.
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The Closing Hymn of the Baal Cycle: A Mesopotamian Background?
Program Unit: Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy
Noga Ayali-Darshan, Bar-Ilan University
The closing hymn of the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, which praises the Sun goddess—a minor character in the cycle—has raised literary questions since its publication, due to its exceptional content. While some have suggested resolving these questions by interpreting the hymn as devoted to Baal despite Baal’s absence therein, others have correctly focused on its independent origin, while leaving the question of its relation to the preceding myth unanswered. Following a close examination of the hymn, its addressee, and its origin, this paper suggests looking at the hymn from a wider perspective by studying the literary structure of the common Mesopotamian Belle-lettres compositions, with a special focus on the Sumerian and Akkadian disputation poems. The conclusions illustrate the formal role of the closing hymns in the ancient West Asian texts in general and in the Baal Cycle in particular.
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Parallelism: A Not-So-New Perspective
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Matt Ayars, Emmaus Biblical Seminary of Haiti
Roman Jakobson, patriarch of literary linguistics, stylistics, and structural poetics, conceptualized parallelism in ways more technical and arguably more sophisticated than how biblical scholars have applied the term to Biblical Hebrew poetry (BHP) since Robert Lowth. Parallelism according to Jakobson is more than the patterned stacking of words and grammatical-syntactic constructions from verseline to verseline. It is also more than the gradual or intensification of semantic domains from verseline to verseline. As such, this paper sets out to demonstrate that Jakobson, in understanding that parallelism operates hierarchically at all linguistic levels (e.g., phonemes, lexemes, and syntagemes), and that parallelism is an integral part of the of the poetic text’s overall artistic architecture, posited that linguistic parallelism ultimately functions to create structural cohesion through subtly variegated linguistic repetitions (e.g., reiteration and collocation), that in turn create a discourse grounding against which foregrounding occur. In short, and for Jakobson, linguistic parallelism has a dual rhetorical discourse function of structural cohesion and foregrounding.
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Women at Persepolis: The Aramaic Evidence
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Annalisa Azzoni, Vanderbilt University
This paper will offer a review of the data regarding women from the Aramaic texts in the Persepolis Fortification Archive. While much more evidence is attested, and has been studied, in the larger sub-corpus of the archive, i.e. the Elamite tablets, the Aramaic texts have been thus far mostly unpublished. The paper will present the relevant texts, discuss their lexical features, and assess their contribution in our understanding of women at Persepolis vis-à-vis the Elamite evidence and the Persian Empire as a whole.
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Maternal Cannibalism and Categorical Failure in Lamentations: A Reexamination of the City Lament Genre
Program Unit: Philology in Hebrew Studies
Nazeer Bacchus, Yale Divinity School
This paper examines the pragmatics of the “city lament” genre by considering the various epistemological and sociological claims embedded in its literary expression (Dobbs-Allsopp 1993). Building upon the notion that the qinah is a discourse which expresses the failure of categories (Vayntrub 2015; 2019), this paper explores how such failure is mapped onto the female body in Lamentations. I will examine how Jerusalem, personified as Daughter Zion, serves as both the site and embodiment of categorical failure. In this analysis, I consider how the motifs of maternal cannibalism and barrenness relate to one another, and together rhetorically and conceptually undo the category of motherhood and maternal exemplarity. These motifs do so through an inversion of procreative imagery. Through these rhetorical examples, the paper more broadly seeks to reframe an understanding of the city lament to encompass the conceptualization and contestation of wholeness as it interrelates gender and embodiment in the ancient world.
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Transformative Learning Theory as a Hermeneutic for “Creative Tensions” in the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation
Elizabeth H. P. Backfish, William Jessup University
As an interdisciplinary field that takes seriously the embodiment and experience of the subject, cognitive linguistics is an apt arena in which to explore how learning happens within biblical studies. Specifically, this paper suggests that transformative learning theory can serve as an effective hermeneutic in understanding the tensions within the Hebrew Bible.
For four decades now, scholars have been building upon the foundations of Jack Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning (TL). One of the key distinctions of TL is that deep learning involves a crucial change in the learner, often in their perspective or beliefs. This change is usually induced by a crisis or a “disorienting dilemma” wherein the subject’s experience conflicts with preconceived understandings, forcing the subject to reconsider his/her perspective and deepen his/her understanding.
This movement from disorienting dilemma to deeper learning and commitment is precisely what characterized Israel’s growth and theology. Perhaps the most impactful crises in Israel’s history were the exiles of the northern and southern kingdoms and the destruction of the temple in 586 BCE, and yet these “disorienting dilemmas” helped to shape and transform Israel’s understanding as the people of Yahweh.
Just as Israel achieved deeper understanding through what we now call TL, so also TL can be a helpful tool in interpreting tensions within the Hebrew Bible. For example, in portions of the Hebrew Bible, Israel’s God clearly commands them to perform certain rituals that are vital to their living in right relationship with their deity. The first five books of the Hebrew Bible are filled with such laws, and they are viewed as a very good thing, for Israel and for the nations around her (Deut 4:6-8). However, later writers seem to say that ritual and sacrifice are not God’s will (Ps 51:16) and even abominable to him (Isa 1:13). The ideal reader allows this disorienting dilemma to transform his/her perspectives in order to explore various means of synthesis between the disparate parts.
Transformative Learning offers an important reading strategy for learning communities to grapple with difficulties in sacred texts in a deep, analytical, and life-changing way. TL methodology precludes a simplistic reading of hard texts and encourages students to do what faithful recipients of this sacred literature have done from ancient times: wrestle with the materials given, with the faculties given, in the communities given.
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Yahweh in a Suit: Kǝḇôḏ YHWH as the Official (Uni)Form of Divine Appearance
Program Unit: Israelite Religion in Its Ancient Context
Sun Bok Bae, University of Chicago
My paper aims to offer a fresh understanding of kǝḇôḏ YHWH in the Pentateuch’s Priestly Document (P), considering P’s coherent presentations of the deity and his appearance (both in its narrative and law). Kǝḇôḏ YHWH has been predominantly translated as and thus understood through abstract nouns, like “the Glory of the LORD” or “the Presence of the LORD,” but these translations do not adequately capture the sense of this phrase. According to my hypothesis, the expression may have evoked a more concrete image to the reader. There are some better interpretations. Moshe Weinfeld, Julian Morgenstern, David H. Aaron, and Benjamin D. Sommer suggest that it refers to the divine body, while Moshe Greenberg, Tryggve N. D. Mettinger and Shawn Zelig Aster ascribe it to the person or the self of the deity. Yet I think both views still do not fully grasp P’s technical use of the phrase.
It is my thesis that kǝḇōḏ YHWH is a royal robe of the deity, agreeing with Michael B. Hundley who suggests a bright, radiant cloak. There are fifteen attestations of kǝḇōḏ YHWH in P: Exod 16:7, 10; 24:16-17; 28:2, 40; 29:43; 40:34-35; Lev 9:6, 23; Num 14:10; 16:19; 17:7; and 20:6. Admittedly, it is not simple to draw out a definitive concept of kǝḇōḏ YHWH from these instances. Nonetheless, some biblical and extra-biblical clues are available. First, the word kāḇōḏ is used for the priestly garments in Exod 28:2 and 40, even though the word is a modifier for the garments rather than their designation. Also, the Mesopotamian word melammu—often described as the fiery, awe-inspiring garment—is comparable to kǝḇōḏ YHWH in P. Comparing kǝḇōḏ YHWH with melammu has an additional benefit: it gives a royal flavor to the understanding of kāḇōḏ. Yet I part from Hundley who sees this divine garment as an enigmatic, camouflaging device of the divine essence that indicates divine presence; instead I see its purpose to be presenting the official public aspect of the divine quality, a purpose which makes perfect sense within the entire Priestly history that depicts the deity as king. Understanding it in this sense, I will demonstrate that kǝḇōḏ YHWH as the royal garment also accords well with both the remainder of the above instances and consistently with the Priestly deity throughout P.
I expect my paper to contribute to the novel understanding of the Priestly God. P’s depiction of the deity including kǝḇôḏ YHWH has often been considered anti-anthropomorphic and transcendent by concealing the essence of the deity. But if understood as a garment as such, it cannot but imply anthropomorphism. Kǝḇôḏ YHWH does not conceal divinity, but rather reveals divine/royal quality and stresses the hierarchic superiority of the deity, so fully anthropomorphic, in the public sphere.
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Ἱλαστήριον, Ἱλαστήριος in the Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint (HTLS): A New Polysemy to Displace the Deissmann–Bauer Monosemy of ἱλαστήριον
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Daniel P. Bailey, University of Illinois at Chicago
I am writing ἱλαστήριον and ἱλαστήριος in HTLS (vol. 2–2021?). This Abstract addresses only particular problems and solutions. There is one heading ΙΛΑΣΤΗΡΙΟΝ. Under ΙΛΑΣΤΗΡΙΟΣ (adj.) are two subheadings. ΙΛΑΣΤΗΡΙΟΣ—“(1.) Attributive use.” Cf. ἱλαστήριοι θυσίαι, “propitiatory sacrifices” (P.Fay.337).—“(2.) ἱλαστήριον (sc. ἀνάθημα, δῶρον),” “propitiatory offering, gift.” This definition (2.) for the substantive ἱλαστήριον accepts LSJ s.v. ἱλαστήριος II.2, “ἱλαστήριον (sc. ἀνάθημα) propitiatory gift or offering” (IKosPH 81, 347), then adds δῶρον from a scholion on Apollonius of Rhodes 4.1549, where τὰ ἱλαστήρια are τὰ ἐκμειλίξασθαι δυνάμενα δῶρα, “gifts able to appease.” However, disagreement arises between the specialist Septuagint lexicographers and the generalists. Under ΙΛΑΣΤΗΡΙΟΝ, a specialist could include two τήριον place-noun neologisms, θυσιαστήριον for an altar of God’s chosen people (contrast βωμός; Heb. mizbeach), then ἱλαστήριον for the “mercy seat” on the ark (Heb. kappōret) as a sister to θυσιαστήριον (cf. J.A.L LEE). Morphological and semantic symmetry is achieved in Greek, illustrated by the translations θυσιαστήριον, “place of sacrifice,” “Opferstätte,” and ἱλαστήριον, “place of atonement,” “Sühnestätte.” Clearly, the θυσιαστήριον is not an instrument to slay a sacrifice, nor is the Pentateuchal ἱλαστήριον an instrument or offering to propitiate God/expiate sin. Nevertheless, several general or etymological dictionaries define LXX ἱλαστήριον in precisely this way, with only Chantraine among the following alluding (vaguely) to the mercy seat. See FRISK, “ἱλαστήριος, ‘sühnend’, -ιον ‘Sühnmittel usw.’ (LXX, Pap. u.a.)”; CHANTRAINE, “ἱλαστήριος, ‘propitiatory’, -ιον ‘propitiatory offering’, also designates a part of the Holy of Holies (LXX, etc.)”; BEEKES, “ἱλαστήριος, ‘appeasing’, -ιον ‘propitiatory gift’ (LXX, pap.)”; MONTANARI, “subst. instrument of expiation NT Rom. 3.25.” At the height of this Hellenism, ROTHSCHILD invests the “mercy seat” with the power of the “pagan” ἱλαστήρια to appease “angry deities,” with the “Jewish cult” as a parallel: “By ‘mercy seat,’ Paul probably wishes to evoke pagan practices of appealing to angry deities, while drawing on ideas related to Jewish cult at the same time” (ed.Porter 2013, 260). But now history must be invoked. DEISSMANN tried to nullify Luther’s mercy-seat interpretation of Jesus as ἱλαστήριον (Rom 3:25) by calling ἱλαστήριον the “substantivized neuter” of ἱλαστήριος, glossed as “das Versöhnende, das Sühnende,” which translates back into Greek as τὸ ἱλασκόμενον—an active verbal idea that precludes a ἱλαστήριον as a place and is therefore MONOSEMIC, “gift” or “offering,” not polysemic, “gift” vs. “place.” Deissmann failed to investigate the subst.-neut. as such, when in fact there is still no known example in the NT or early Christian literature that has his force of a transitive verb. I currently have 44 counterexamples from BDAG, from τὰ ἀγαθά σου, “your good things” (Luke 16:25) through πρωτείων, “preeminence” (Shep. 73:4). The misleading “subst.-neut.” is cited in the lexicon (BAUER, all eds.), but it should be rejected especially by those accepting the mercy-seat interpretation of Rom 3:25, since it denies that ἱλαστήριον compares Jesus to a sacred object or space. Hence the following mercy-seat proponents achieve cogent presentations only by ignoring what their cited “subst.-neut.” actually means: BUCHSEL-TDNT; ROLOFF-EDNT; WILCKENS-EKKNT; WOLTER-EKKNT; BREYTENBACH-TBLNT; MOO-NICNT; KRAUS-Heiligtumsweihe; KNÖPPLER-Sühne.
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Typological Intersections and Divine Utterance: Divine Prosopopoeia in Luke’s Transfiguration
Program Unit: Gospel of Luke
Jeremiah Bailey, Baylor University
Scholars have long noted the pronounced use of Christological typology in the Gospel of Luke. The Gospel employs numerous typological images for Jesus without apparent concern for negotiating how these typologies overlap and interact. For example, Jesus is cast as the Davidic horn of salvation in the Song of Zechariah, as the heir of the mantle of Elijah and Elisha in Luke 4, and as Moses anew in the transfiguration narrative. How does the Gospel of Luke navigate these typological intersections so that Jesus can be the fulfillment of all these different traditions from the Hebrew Bible? The key is found in the voice from the cloud during the transfiguration. This short speech in Luke 9:35 has a number of curious features.
First, it appears to be a composite stitched together from passages in the Hebrew Bible. It most likely sandwiches together an allusion to Psalm 2, Isaiah 42, and Deuteronomy 18. This could be understood as an attempt to rescripturalize accepted texts into a new divine utterance that fuses together the Davidic, Prophetic, and Mosaic traditions. Second, the speech despite its shortness has features in common with prosopopoeia as understood in the rhetorical handbooks. The sequence of citations follows Theon’s recommendations for the chronological arrangement of prosopopoeia, and the choice of material reflects the demands for sensitivity in the creation of speeches. Understood in this way, the speech on the mount of transfiguration uses divine proclamation to cement together the numerous Christological typologies of the Gospel. Thus, it paves the way for the audience to understand how Jesus is the fulfillment of all that is written in “the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms” (Lk 24:44).
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"Gap" Activities in the Biblical Hebrew Classroom
Program Unit: National Association of Professors of Hebrew
Sarah Lynn Baker, University of Texas at Austin
A primary challenge of adopting the methodological principles of CLT (communicative language teaching) in the Biblical Hebrew classroom is that students do not typically find themselves facing a situation where they need to make themselves understood in Biblical Hebrew in order to accomplish a practical task. Put another way, even though an increasing number of biblical language teachers in recent years have been concerned with building students' language skills through "comprehensible input" (both written and spoken), the fact remains that the students' real-life need for producing comprehensible *output* is not quite what it would be in modern language study. However, research on language acquisition has suggested that the process of producing comprehensible output—of speaking comprehensibly to a fellow language-learner for the purpose of achieving a common goal rather than simply reproducing a linguistic form—plays a significant role in developing communicative competence.
One type of classroom activity that does require students to produce Hebrew in a comprehensible context is a "gap" exercise in which each student has some piece of information that the other students need to discover in order to accomplish a task. In my presentation, I will discuss several examples of such "information gap" activities that could be used in an introductory Biblical Hebrew class to provide students with an authentic context for producing comprehensible language. Each exercise is set up in such a way that the students need to incorporate a particular element of Hebrew grammar into what they ask (or answer) each other; but the goal of the task moves beyond the simple reproduction of correct linguistic forms and is focused rather on the gathering of certain information, such as the order in which separate events in a story took place. Alongside these examples, I will also address 1) some potential dangers of this method (e.g., does practical facility in the language necessarily require precise technical accuracy, or can students achieve a classroom task while still using inaccurate forms?) and 2) some strategies for mitigating these difficulties (e.g., supplementing the classroom exercise with at-home preparation and/or follow-up assignments that focus students' attention on the grammatical details). By incorporating such activities into our classroom practice, we can maximize our students' communal interaction in Hebrew that is genuinely spoken for the purpose of achieving a communicative goal, thereby developing their facility in the language and ultimately strengthening their reading fluency.
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Labour of the Soul
Program Unit: Wisdom and Apocalypticism
Arjen Bakker, Oxford University
In this paper I will look at a number of texts that develop an interpretive tradition growing out of early reading of the Book of Isaiah in which innocent suffering is transformed. I will try to demonstrate that this tradition grows out of a process of interpretation and translation that is embedded in practice: the practices of reading, explaining and translating texts, but also bringing the texts into practice, into lived practice that in itself constitutes an act of interpretation. I will argue that the notion of labour, or toil, brings the dimensions of interpretation and practice together and constitutes a driving force behind the growth of a rich tradition. At this level we are perhaps not speaking of an interpretive tradition but of the emergence of a concept that is embedded in practice: the concept of labour. We cannot relate this directly to the any single passage in Isaiah, but neither can we separate it from interpretive traditions that build on earlier texts, including Isaiah.
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Lost to the Bosom of the Church: Abortion as Differentiation and Slander in Ancient Christian Texts
Program Unit: Healthcare and Disability in the Ancient World
Tara Baldrick-Morrone, Florida State University
When considering early Christian texts that mention abortion, oftentimes scholarly projects stray from making an attempt to understand the sources in their contexts, focusing solely on how these ancient texts fit into the modern categories of “anti-abortion” and “pro-choice” positions. The goal here then becomes one of looking to the past to inform, and legitimize, current positions on abortion. Yet if we only focus on how the past informs the present, we miss the ways in which early Christians talked about abortion and for what reasons. In this paper I argue that viewing ancient texts as only informing these modern frameworks prevents us from seeing the other projects of early Christian identity formation at work. In other words, by considering the texts in their socio-historical contexts and how these ancient authors addressed abortion, we can develop a clearer and more comprehensive view of the different ways that Christians used abortion “to think with,” especially as it relates to the developing boundaries of mainline ancient Christian identity. More importantly, when we consider that these authors use abortion “to think with,” what becomes apparent is that early Christians used “abortion” as a device by which they constructed their identities over against so-called pagans, Jews, and other Christians. Upon closer readings of the Epistle of Barnabas and Hippolytus’ Elenchos, a couple of the texts that best exemplify this point, we can see two main ways in which this process of identity formation occurred through the use and discussion of abortion: 1) abortion as differentiation and 2) abortion as slander. Thinking about how early Christian authors used abortion to invent difference between and assert dominance over Christians and non-Christians alike will help us to move away from importing our modern debates and categories into antiquity.
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Toward a Poetics of Speech Performance: The Iconography of the Sword and the Visual Semantics of Lāšôn
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible, History, and Archaeology
Ji Min Bang, Brandeis University
The lexeme lāšôn has a wide range of semantics that developed throughout the history of ancient Hebrew. The word underwent semantic expansion based on its physical and spatial properties and on its function as an articulator. The basic meaning of lāšôn is “tongue.” It may also refer to “language,” “nation,” or “speech.” While the semantic history of lāšôn has received a certain degree of treatment, particularly with respect to metaphorical usage, visual semantics embedded in this lexeme are as yet unexplored by any cognitive investigation. That is, how the ancient Hebrews might have visually conceptualized and cognitively processed the term lāšôn when uttering and hearing it. This paper will pay particular attention to the “speech” dimension as a productive site for understanding the visual-semantic property of lāšôn in poetic contexts where the term is used as a synecdoche, typically collocated with abstract nouns (e.g., šeqer, tahpukôt, mirmāh, ḥokmâ), to indicate speech imbued with qualities. By way of appealing to insights from the iconographic representations of the Akkadian cognate lišānu “tongue” or “blade,” I will explore the way in which the ancients conceptualized lāšôn as speech particularly in association with the sword imagery and its inherent characteristics. In this paper, I will argue that lāšôn was imagined as a sharp-edged weapon that leads both the speaker and the hearer to “deadly” and thus decisive consequences. I will also maintain that the speech language is semantically tied to the concept of performance, verbal action that actually enacts or produces what is uttered with intention, and that the ancients perceived speech as a kind of speech act. I will then examine how lāšôn “speech” conveys the concept of performance in passages from Proverbs. This paper hopefully offers some insights on theorizing visual cognition in semantic processing through the use of iconography.
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The Qur’anic Theology of the Land: An Inter-textual Analysis of the Land Verses in the Qur’an
Program Unit: The Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition (IQSA)
Daniel Bannoura, Bethlehem Bible College
This paper examines the qur’anic land verses and the passages that deal with the narratives and motifs surrounding the Israelite entry into the Promised Land. Special attention is given to certain recurring phrases that are connected to the land such as “inheriting the land” (wirathata ’l-ard), “the oppressed in the land” (al-mustad‘afuna fi ’l-ard), and “the corrupt in the land” (mufsiduna fi ’l-ard). The qur’anic topos of the land is directly connected to biblical themes and narratives pertaining to the oppression the Israelites faced in Egypt, their entry into the land, and the ethical codes and conditions prescribed during their presence in the land. The paper further analyzes the qur’anic dependency on biblical literature for its formulation and understanding of the land, particularly from the Torah and Mishnah. More significantly, how it further develops and appropriates biblical themes of possessing, inheriting, and ruling the land within a now islamicized context of a community of believers that are now the new vanguards of the land.
The analysis of the paper leads to a formulation of a qur’anic “Theology of the Land” based on the topos of the land and its function for the early Muslim community of the Qur’an –namely by addressing how the Meccan and Medinan surahs of the Qur’an delineated the function of the land in relation to the traditional Islamic understanding of the life and ministry of the Prophet Muhammad. This is done by answering questions pertaining to the qur’anic understanding of the significance of the land, its geographical location, and its theological role within the framework of Islamic rule over the land and the implementation of God’s Shari‘a therein.
The paper concludes by attempting to relate this qur’anic “Theology of the Land” to the biblical theology of the land, especially in consideration of current political definitions and applications that are found in Zionism and Palestinian Christian theology.
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Nazarenes (נוצרים) in Rabbinic Sources
Program Unit: Jewish Christianity / Christian Judaism
Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
In this paper I will examine the use of the term Nazarene/s (נוצרים/נוצרי) in rabbinic sources. I will outline the sources which use this term, the context in which it is used, and survey the scholarly discussions concerning this term and the group it is meant to represent. These rabbinic sources provide an angle through which to ponder the question of Jewish Christian relations in the first centuries CE, as seen from the eyes of the composers of the rabbinic sources.
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The Ransom Saying (Matt 20:28) and Overlooked Cultic Imagery in Daniel 7: A Fresh Solution to an Old Problem
Program Unit: Matthew
Michael Patrick Barber, Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology
Scholars have long puzzled over Jesus' statement that "the Son of Man has come… to give his life as a ransom [lytron] for many". While an allusion to atonement traditions is often detected here (e.g., A. Collins, 2007; W. Davies and D. Allison, 1991), an explanation of the saying's precise relationship to its wider setting has been elusive (e.g., Gurtner, 2007). Complicating the matter has been uncertainty about the precise quarry for the "ransom" language (cf., e.g., Huizenga, 2012), with Isaiah 53 seen as the traditional favourite among the contenders (J. Edwards, 2012). This paper offers a fresh approach to explicating the logion in its wider context, revising and strengthening C. Fletcher-Louis' suggestion (2007) that the saying, at least in part, can be read as drawing out cultic aspects of the vision in Daniel 7. First, the paper highlights scholarship that has detected multiple allusions to Daniel 7 in the logion's wider context, namely, Matthew 20:20-28 (Pitre, 2005; Bird, 2014). Drawing on others (e.g., T. Kazen, 2007; D. Allison, 1985; T. Manson, 1931), it will argue that Jesus' teaching that the disciples will share in his sufferings (e.g., Matt 20:23) coheres well with interpretations of the Danielic vision that view the "son of man" figure as an image of the righteous who suffer during the eschatological tribulation. Second, the paper turns towards recent work on Daniel that has examined the significance of temple motifs in the book in general and cultic themes in Daniel 7 in particular (R. Winkle, 2017; W. Vogel, 2010; J. Bergsma, 2009). Among other things, it shows that the scene of the presentation of the "Son of Man" in Dan 7:13 employs the term, qrb, a word that has cultic connotations (cf. Ezra 6:10, 17). That such a meaning was thought to be in play in Dan 7:13 is suggested by the fact that the ancient Greek versions of Daniel (OG, Theod.) render the Aramaic with terms that also have cultic resonances. Furthermore, it would not be surprising in the least if the suffering of the saints in Daniel 7 was portrayed with such imagery. As others have recognized, the book of Daniel itself applies Isaiah's Suffering Servant passage to the description of the saints (cf. Dan 11:32-33; 12:1; cf. J. Collins, 1993). Such a depiction also coheres well with other Jewish sources in which the suffering of the righteous is identified with sacrificial imagery (e.g., Wis 3:6; Pr Azar 15-17; 4 Mac 17:22). Finally, a cultic reading of Daniel's vision is also supported by parallels to Daniel 7 in 1 Enoch 14 and 1 Enoch 47 (J. Vanderkam, 1995) as well as in Revelation 4-5. In short, a compelling case can be made that the combination of the "Son of Man" title and ransom language in Matthew 20:28 flows from a careful reading of Daniel 7 that recognizes the presence of cultic imagery many modern scholars have failed to recognize.
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Holy Craps: Lot Casting and Priestly Traditions in Acts 1
Program Unit: Intertextuality in the New Testament
Michael Patrick Barber, Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology
Holy Craps: Lot Casting as a Priestly Rite in Acts 1
In the opening chapters of both Luke and Acts the reader encounters an episode involving the casting of lots (cf. Luke 1:8–9; Acts 1:26). In the Gospel of Luke it is clear that this is a custom associated with the priesthood (cf. Luke 1:9), a tradition attested by the Chronicler (e.g., 1 Chr 24:5, 7, 31; 25:8, etc.). Though it may appear that the imagery in Acts 1 is unrelated to priestly traditions, this paper will argue that priestly lot-casting traditions provide the most plausible backdrop for the imagery in Acts 1. First, we will show that the disciples in Luke-Acts elsewhere appear to be associated with priestly imagery (Strelan [2008], Fletcher-Louis [2007]). Among other things, they are identified as the future “judges” of Israel (cf. Luke 22:30), a role most prominently associated with the priests (cf., e.g., Deut 17:9; 2 Chr 19:8-11), particularly in the eschatological age (cf., e.g., Ezek 44:23; 4Q161 VIII–X, 24–25). In addition, like the Levites, the apostles’ commitment to Christ is linked to the renunciation of kin (cf. Exod 32:29; LXX Deut 33:9; Luke 18:29), a commitment in context also linked to a unique “inheritance” (cf. Luke 18:18), terminology also especially associated with the Levitical priesthood (cf. Num 18:20, 23; Deut 10:9; 18:1–2; Neh 13:10). All of this would seem to reinforce the idea that the “office” Judas has turned aside from in Acts 1 is best understood in priestly terms (cf. also Acts 1:20 and Num 4:16). Second, we shall argue that such imagery makes sense since Jewish hopes for the restoration of Israel—something Luke links to Christ—frequently involved not only the expectation of an eschatological temple, but also an eschatological priesthood (e.g., Isa 66:21; Mal 3:3; Ezek 40:45–46; 1Q28b 3:22–23; CD 4:1–6). Third, the broader structural pattern of the narrative of Luke-Acts as a whole reinforces the perception that the casting of lots in Acts 1 is related Zechariah’s lot-casting in Luke 1. As numerous studies have demonstrated (e.g., C. Talbert [1982], R. Tannehill [1991], C. Rothschild [2004]), the events in the Gospel of Luke are clearly paralleled in the life of the community in Acts; e.g., the Spirit descends upon Jesus in visible form at his baptism (Luke 3:22), just as the Spirit descends upon the apostles in visible form at Pentecost (Acts 2:1–4); etc. This paper therefore suggests that the apostles’ lot-casting in Acts 1 follows this pattern and intentionally mirrors Luke 1. This reinforces the imagery found elsewhere in the narrative that suggests that the disciples play a priestly role in the Christ-believing community.
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Special Factors in Determining the Date of Legal Texts
Program Unit: National Association of Professors of Hebrew
Pamela Barmash, Washington University
The volume “How Old is the Hebrew Bible” analyzes texts of a variety of genres. I propose to focus on the legal texts of the Hebrew Bible, and I will address to what extent the considerations taken into account in determining their dating mirror those of other biblical texts and to what extent they differ. I will assess their methodological rigor as well as their accuracy and precision. Like other biblical texts, the linguistic stratum of legal texts needs to be taken into account. Proposing links between legal institutions and customs and the socio-economic conditions and religious ideas of particular time periods and then hypothesizing a pattern of historical development is a key strategy employed in the analysis of biblical law. It is used as well to date other biblical texts, but this is especially fraught with peril for legal texts because they can reflect their time of composition or they can attempt to modify the socio-political circumstances of the time of composition. Moreover, it is often unclear whether they are addressing the chronological period of their composition or were preserved because of the concerns of a later time.
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The Divine Voice in Paul’s Greek Scriptures: The Creation of a Divine Speaker in 1 Cor 1–4
Program Unit: Greek Bible
Gregory M. Barnhill, Baylor University
The first major theological section of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians begins with a citation from the Greek translation of his scriptures (Isa 29:14) modified under the influence of a Greek Psalms text (32:10). While scholars have seen this connection, none have documented just how far Paul is influenced by the Greek translations of these two texts in what follows, the entire section of 1 Cor 1:10–4:21, as well as how this “divine speech” in the first person from God influences the course of the argument. This paper seeks to analyze the functions of such divine speech, termed theopoiēsis, akin to the Greek rhetorical technique of prosopopoeia, and to investigate the allusions and echoes to both Psalm 32 LXX and Isa 29:14–15 LXX that aid this characterization of God through scripture. The paper proposes that words in these key Greek texts are interspersed throughout the discourse, lending Paul’s argument some of its major themes.
Ultimately, the scriptural language (brought into the discourse from these Greek versions of Paul’s scriptures) comes to an important climax in 1 Cor 4:5, where Paul draws heavily from Isa 29:15 (an allusion not detected by interpreters thus far) to make a point about his apocalyptic theological epistemology: that the Lord will reveal secret plans “when the Lord comes” (readers are left wondering whether this “Lord” is God or Christ). With this allusion to Isa 29:15, Paul brings his argument to a climax, which began with theopoiēsis in 1 Cor 1:19 (citing Isa 29:14). Moreover, the puzzling statement, “Not beyond what is written” (1 Cor 4:6), makes much more sense when one recognizes that Paul has now brought to a close an argument based on God’s speech in Isaiah 29:14–15. Finally, these texts emphasize the universal context within which Paul reads his scriptures: a cosmic narrative in which humanity and God play the central roles, and in which God is the principal revealer of Godself to humanity, an epistemological point that overturns the faulty theological epistemology of the proud and boasting Corinthians. From the first instance of theopoiēsis in 1 Cor 1:19 to the last allusion to this divine speech in 1 Cor 4:6, God is characterized as powerful, wise, and other (all attributes which come via the Greek scriptures), as well as speaking and revealing Godself in Christ (aspects of God’s character which are brought to the interpretation of God by Paul).
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Queering the Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53, 1 Corinthians 6, and the Case for LGBTI Inclusion
Program Unit: LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics
Lori A. Baron, Saint Louis University
There are seven quotations from Isaiah 53 in the New Testament. Various authors cite this passage to explain enigmas about Jesus of Nazareth: Why did the majority of Jews not believe that Jesus was the Messiah? And if Jesus was the Messiah, why did he die on a Roman cross? Didn’t Jesus's ignoble death disprove Christian claims that he was the Son of God? New Testament authors turn to Isaiah 53 and other parts of the Jewish scriptures to find biblical texts which they deploy as evidence that Jesus’s death and Jewish unbelief were all part of a divine plan. But there is another connection between Isaiah 53 and the New Testament; the Greek word malakia and its adjectival cognate, malakos. Isaiah 53:3 LXX speaks of a servant who was dishonored, and who has known how to bear weakness or sickness (malikia). If this servant represents Jesus in the New Testament, it is ironic that Paul uses a related word, malakos, in 1 Corinthians 6:9 to condemn those who will not inherit the kingdom of God; they are the “effeminate” (KJV), “male prostitutes” (NRSV), or “passive homosexual partners” (NET). If, for New Testament authors, Jesus is the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 who bears human sicknesses, then there is a way in which Jesus is also queer. In his identification with the suffering of the weak, he is also numbered with those in 1 Corinthians 6, whose sexuality has been judged to be unholy, sinful, who are unworthy of membership in many religious communities. If Jesus is the Suffering Servant, he is also the Grieving Gay Man, the Languishing Lesbian, the Bedeviled Bisexual, the Tortured Transexual, the Ill Intersex, and the Queasy Queer.
This interpretation is not as farfetched as it seems on the surface; rabbinic biblical exegesis often involves linking two passages of scripture that are unrelated contextually, but have a key word in common, and uses both passages to interpret one another. Looking more deeply into these two biblical passages, I believe that we can find a Suffering Servant who represents Jesus, and who also represents those LGBTI/Queer individuals who have suffered and who continue to suffer marginalization, exclusion, and rejection in our society and in our religious communities, even those communities that claim to love and welcome all people. If Jesus is the Servant who is familiar with malikia, he is also malakos, queer, condemned. This reading has far-reaching implications for the treatment of LGBTI/Queer people in the world and in the church.
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The Rolling Stones: How Circumcision Removes the חרפה in Joshua 5:2–9
Program Unit: Joshua-Judges
Jordan Barr, Yale Divinity School
This paper, in part, re-examines this complicated textual tradition of Joshua 5.2-9. However, while there are many ways one might compare the various textual witnesses and begin reconstructing the complex history of Joshua 5, my goal here is not to engage in this kind of debate, and certainly not to delineate the original or even earliest text. Instead, my analysis examines the various witnesses on their own terms, helping the reader to more clearly see the varied importance ascribed to the act of circumcision in Joshua 5. By encountering each text on its own terms, the reader will begin to see multiple levels of cultic, social and theological meaning attached to this particular instance of Israelite circumcision. After some comments on Joshua 5.2-9’s literary positioning and its basic narrative development—shared by the Hebrew and Greek text traditions—I briefly sketch circumcision’s place in both the biblical tradition and wider ancient Near Eastern world. Upon synthesizing the major interpretive moves of Joshua 5.2-9 in the MT, OG, and Qumran versions, I move to explicate the ways that circumcision functions in this narrative—principally how this ritual removes the enigmatic חרפת מצרים (5.9).
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A Comparison of the Wisdom of Solomon and the Middle Platonism of Plutarch
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Jeremy Barrier, Heritage Christian University
The wisdom literature of Second-temple Judaism has been the center point of a recent influx in discussion developing significantly over the last 25 years. Within this interesting and exciting corpus of texts one finds the Greek text of the Wisdom of Solomon. This ancient rhetorical defense of the beliefs and practices of Judaism has interestingly come down to us today as one of the highly Hellenized examples of Jewish literature produced within this genre. I think it is a fair assumption to conclude that the Wisdom of Solomon can not only be considered a deeply Hellenized document, but one that is, philosophically speaking, firmly rooted in Middle Platonism. In recent years it has been examined for Middle Platonic thought in regards to comparing the text to the work of Philo of Alexandria. In particular, a comparison such as this dealt with Wisdom in the context of another Middle Platonist of Alexandria living previously to or possibly corresponding to the time of Wisdom’s composition, but fails to also take into consideration one of the prominent Middle Platonic writers immediately following the years of the writing of Wisdom.
The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate the similarities of Wisdom with another Middle Platonist, in this case one who lived after the composition of Wisdom, in order to see some of the similarities between the Wisdom of Solomon and the writings of Plutarch of Chaeroneia, and how they both demonstrate a great familiarity with Middle Platonism. I have no intentions of arguing that the naïve level of philosophical development within Wisdom is in any way approachable to the advanced level of philosophical development within Plutarch. This should go without saying. On the other hand, my hope is that such a study as this will help provide greater exposure to the study of Middle Platonism and the study of the Wisdom of Solomon, while at the same time demonstrating the richness of the writing of Wisdom, so that scholars will come to realize how much more can be gained from seeing this document in light of it’s rich philosophical background.
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A Bad Romance: Melania the Younger and the Male Fantasy
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Jennifer Barry, University of Mary Washington
Judith Perkins, in her now classic on the suffering self, helpfully reoriented our understanding of how Christians used the suffering body to articulate the parameters of a unified Christian narrative. Here I draw on Perkin’s work to begin to push our understanding of the suffering self to a suffering gendered self in the fantastical bios written and dreamed of by men. To narrow my focus, I will examine Gerontius’s labor of love, the Life of Melania the Younger. The author makes it clear that this is an intentional exercise in memory making as well as a performance of personal piety. He uses elements of the Greek novel to coax his readers into his vita. The author then insists that it is only when the reader properly interprets the young girl’s early experiences of marital torment that the moral of the story is revealed. I conclude that the young saint’s experience of marital rape is filtered through the imaginative fantasies of late ancient male writer intent on constructing a recognizable (bad) Christian romance.
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Queen Mab Visits the Fathers: Fantastic Dreams and Male Desire Revisited
Program Unit: Religious World of Late Antiquity
Jennifer Barry, University of Mary Washington
Dream theory has sat at the edge of early Christian studies for some time now. In 1994, Patricia Cox Miller convincingly showed how late ancient authors incorporated all the pleasures and the dangers of dreams into the late antique worldview. In this paper, I will return to two Christian texts previously explored by Cox Miller to push our understanding of dream theory further to include fantasy theory. Specifically, I will revisit the dream sequences in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina and Jerome’s Letter to Eustochium to begin to gesture toward a larger phenomenon on the use of dreams to discipline and shape the female life. Fantasy theory, which has made significant waves in biblical studies, allows us to re-evaluate the fantastic dreams of men to yield new readings concerning the control of female subjects as well as amplify Cox Miller’s critical engagement with male desire. I conclude that these early authors exploited the lingering threats of violence associated with the sleeping world to assert their tenuous hold over the waking world of women.
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Roman Stoicism, the Second-Order Self, and the Perversion of the Subject
Program Unit: Wisdom and Apocalypticism
Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, University of Chicago
The idea of a divided soul is familiar to us from Platonic philosophy, where only the triumph of the rational part of the soul over the appetitive and spirited parts will allow for the subject formation of the philosopher. In Stoicism, which depicted the soul as unitary rather than tripartite, a division emerges nonetheless in the form of first and second-order selves in dialogue, and here too, there must be a struggle before the two the philosophical subject can transit from a “person on the pathway to being Stoic” (proficiens) to the ideal Stoic wise man (sapiens). Whereas for Plato, the divided soul proved useful in the formulation of many of the main ideas of the Republic (such as the shape of justice and the hierarchy of the ideal city), Roman Stoicism is entirely about getting the human soul to its ideal state, a state in which the wise man will not be adversely affected by anything that is not under his control. This is the telos of Roman Stoicism (even as its practitioners humbly admit failure) and the most perfectly rational way to live.
How then to form such a subject? In Seneca’s writing, this subject is the outcome of the successful struggle of the second-order self to master the first-order self—indeed, to master and become one with it, so that the soul finally is unitary. Unlike Platonic dialectic, in which two people search for the truth together via the exercise of logical argument, the Stoic process is represented as taking place largely via internal dialogue. The dialogue takes place between the prescriptive self (second-order) and the faulty (first-order) self, and relies on the liberal use of military and judicial metaphors and analogies to motivate forward progress, as well as the use of exercises such as “Hermes’ wand” and the meditatio malorum, the former a practice of learning to see and evaluate differently, the latter a reflection on the myriad bad things that could happen to you, a sort of emotional prophylaxis should such an event actually occur. But the Stoic process for the formation of the correctly philosophical subject, through its isolation of that subject, its use of a second-order self, and its privileging of absolute self-control, opens itself up to a number of problems Plato never faced. Strikingly, these are represented, as if on the other side of the coin, in the dark protagonists of Senecan drama, who seem to have taken Stoic spiritual exercises and put them to unauthorized use, and who finally emerge triumphant and happy from their own acts of evil.
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Models of Personal Transformation in the Biblical Psalms of Thanksgiving
Program Unit: Prayer in Antiquity
Evan E. Bassett, Emory University
The genre of individual thanksgiving in the biblical Psalms needs fresh reconsideration. Since the pioneering form-critical analysis of the genre by Hermann Gunkel, scholars continue to describe the individual thanksgiving psalms as having originally functioned (1) to facilitate a worshipper’s ritual expression of gratitude for Yhwh’s responsive action in their life and (2) to proclaim the beneficent character of the deity to the faithful community, usually in fulfillment of a vow. While such accounts remain foundationally important for the study of these psalms, I want to press further beyond them and build upon them, inquiring about further dimensions of these psalms’ longer-term functionality for their earliest religious settings. I propose an appreciation of these psalms as complex rhetorical compositions whose continued use through time allowed them to function as mechanisms for the transmission and preservation of models of personal transformation, especially through their use of first-person narrative accounts of the experience of transformation (e.g., Ps 30:6–12; 32:3–5; 34:4, 6; 41:4–10; 66:16–19). Further, I will argue that, as these texts preserved models of transformation important to Israelite religious communities, they also contributed to the formation of corresponding subjectivities in the individuals and communities who used them. In this paper, then, I will begin by more fully explaining my basic argument, just described, before proceeding to an analysis of the personal narratives of transformation in three psalms, Psalms 30, 32, and 66. My analysis of these psalms will exemplify my approach while also highlighting one of its main payoffs, namely, that there are subtle but important differences in how these psalms seem to conceptualize the process of personal transformation, the right response to personal affliction, and the role of the divine in effecting transformation of one’s own person and circumstances.
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Human Seeing, the Genre of Praise, and the Restoration of Yahweh’s Order: A Theological Anthropology of Psalm 8 within the Tehillim
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Caroline Batchelder, Alphacrucis College, Parramatta, Australia
Psalm 8, the first praise psalm in the Psalter (tehillim, ‘praises’), is well known for its reflection on the place of humanity and its acknowledged echoes of Genesis 1. There has been much meditation upon and scholarly analysis of this much-loved Psalm, but while scholars have reflected on the function of praise, including its constitutive function, they have not often considered the details of Psalm 8’s anthropology upon its position and function in the Psalter, or indeed the light it sheds upon the genres of praise and lament. Indeed, as a uniquely ‘first person’ praise psalm, it may be that this psalm creates a context for the 3rd person praise psalms which follow.
By means of a close examination of the biblical text, with attention to genre, poetics and rhetoric, I will argue that Psalm 8 represents a post-fall re-envisioning of the place of humanity within Yahweh’s world. The psalm’s single human verb ‘I see’ is the key to its anthropology, and to the restoration of the humanity to the privilege and responsibility of their appointed place in relation to Yahweh and earth. The praise of the psalm enables those who voice it to embrace their place within Yahweh’s order and to take up the ‘rule’ with which they are entrusted, and thus to bring about the restoration of Yahweh’s good order. It enables them to ‘see’ the world as Yahweh has conceived it (along with its antithetical notions of power that relativise human rule), and to align their vision with Yahweh’s, and puts a declaration in their mouths that makes these their own. Psalm 8 shows that a life lived within this order is the ultimate declaration of praise, and indeed constitutes a turning aside from ‘the way of the wicked’, upon which turning Psalm 1 (and so the Psalter as a whole) has declared blessing. Within the book of tehillim, Psalm 8 reveals that the lament over the loss of Yahweh’s order in Psalms 3 to 7 is fundamentally an expression of covenant hope for restoration. The praise of Psalm 8 appears as the antonym to this series of laments. It is the voice of the one who lives with the dissonances of the fallen world, but whose eyes Yahweh has opened.
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Precedents for Prosopological Exegesis: Motivating Literal and Figurative Senses
Program Unit: Development of Early Christian Theology
Matthew Bates, Quincy University
Prosopopoiia, taking on a different character and then speaking from that person, was a well-known technique of rhetoric and composition in Greco-Roman antiquity. When making an oral speech, the adoption of a new persona was signaled by voice modulation. Yet since this was not possible for written texts, a virtuous reader had to look to the text itself for indicators of prosopopoiia. This quest to identify in-character speeches in written texts is best termed prosopological exegesis (following Marie-Josèphe Rondeau). Prosopological exegesis was an important reading strategy throughout early Christian history, with rich implications for the Trinity and christology. This paper will explore Greco-Roman precedents to prosopological exegesis, with particular attention to the specific textual signals that prompted it. Regarding ancient interpretative motivation, attention will be given to how its ‘literal sense’ compares and contrasts with figures such as allegory and so-called typology.
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Reading Together Apart: Collective Annotation as an Out-of-Class Reading Tool
Program Unit: Teaching Biblical Studies in an Undergraduate Liberal Arts Context
Kimberly Bauser McBrien, Trinity University
Whether explicit or implicit, many of the predominant desired learning outcomes in undergraduate biblical studies courses relate to the idea of reading. Whether reading closely, or critically, or through particular hermeneutical lenses, faculty expect students in these classes to acquire, practice, and then apply certain reading skills to biblical texts. While these tasks are, arguably, best engaged in-class, through collaborative peer-to-peer and group conversation with the faculty serving as model or guide, the majority of student reading is generally done independently outside of class. Among the many challenges to our reading goals for students, then, is the isolated and unsupervised nature of the bulk of their reading experience.
As one way to address those challenges, this paper offers an introduction to online learning tools, in particular Perusall.com, found to be effective in engaging students in guided and collaborative reading outside of class. Perusall is primarily a free, online e-reader platform in which faculty and students can collectively annotate texts. Annotation features allow faculty to define or explain unfamiliar vocabulary in the text, provide guiding questions linked to particular passages, or highlight connections or themes via tags in order to help students understand and critically consider their reading as they go. For students, these same features allow them to raise and respond to faculty and peer questions on particular passages, to create their own hashtags in order to make connections in and between texts, and to report on their own points of confusion (anonymously, if they prefer). This in turn improves in-class discussion by preparing students to engage with particular passages and one another’s ideas. While no tool is perfect, this type of collective annotation work has proven effective for enriching out-of-class reading experiences and reenforcing reading-based learning goals in undergraduate biblical studies courses.
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The Ethiopian Biblical Canon in its Earliest Literary Attestation: An Assessment of the Evidence
Program Unit: Ethiopic Bible and Literature
Alessandro Bausi, University of Hamburg
Aside from textual evidence of documentary character, like inventory lists attested as early as from the thirteenth century, that have recently attracted more attentively the attention of scholars, Ethiopian literary texts have transmitted a certain number of ‘biblical canons’. These ‘biblical canons’ are attested in prescriptive works and have received attention since August Dillmann’s time, in a series of contributions by Ignazio Guidi, Anton Baumstark, Marius Chaîne, just to quote a few, and more recently other scholars as well. This evidence however, was rarely considered from the essential point of view of the dynamics of (1) origin and context of production, (2) provenance in relation to the Ethiopian context, and (3) within the actual state of the Ethiopian manuscript and literary tradition. In my paper I intend to deal with the earliest retrievable evidence for a literary ‘biblical canon’ and provide some details on the context of its transmission and reception.
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The Covenant of Levi Revisited
Program Unit: Literature and History of the Persian Period
Richard Bautch, St. Edward's University
Even though the Covenant of Levi is infrequently attested in biblical texts that date to the Persian Period, its significance for the era in question is considerable, in terms of social identity and group politics. There is an allusion to the Covenant of Levi in Jeremiah (Jer 33:21-22), and it is clearly referenced in Malachi. Malachi, however, situates the glowing Covenant of Levi (Mal 2:4-7) within an oracle that is highly critical of the temple priests in Jerusalem (Mal 1:6-2:14). In this the second oracle of Malachi, the priests’ failure to worthily serve God and God’s people is elaborated in stinging detail. Famously, the prophet excoriates the priests for blemished sacrifices offered at the temple (Mal 1:7-8, 14).
This study focuses on Malachi’s juxtaposition of the pro-levitical covenant and the harsh denunciation of priests that serves as its context. First the study considers the commentary tradition, where the Covenant of Levi is typically contrasted not with the Malachi’s second oracle but with notions expressed elsewhere in the book of Malachi that the people’s covenantal relationship with God had ceased to exist in the manner it did before the exile. Employing a literary-critical approach, commentators sometimes argue for continuity between the Covenant of Levi and the oracle that frames it inasmuch as both derive from the Aaronide Blessing in Num 6:24-26. In this vein, Elie Assis has recently suggested coherence between the covenant and the oracle because the figure of Levi both reflects obedience to the teaching of Torah and serves as the sign of a covenant that God has made with priests. Taking a different approach informed by social-identity theory, this study asks whether the Covenant of Levi indicates a group of priests, either a cadre or a coalition, current in Jerusalem in the fifth or fourth centuries BCE. In this scenario, there is tension if not outright conflict between the priests celebrated in the Covenant of Levi and those subject to attack in Malachi’s second oracle. The juxtaposition of these two perspectives in Malachi 2 is a window on inter-group conflict within Yehud, and it further clarifies our understanding of the religiously based politics in this place and time. To develop this contrast, we introduce insights gained from reading 1 Chronicles, understood as a text imbued with characteristics of prophecy rather than a strictly historiographical work of the Persian period. 1 Chronicles 23-27 provides a designation of temple personnel, comprising both religious (chs. 23-26) and secular figures (ch. 27). In this account, distinctions in privilege between the priests and the Levites are subtle but clear. The differences between Levites and priests in this section of 1 Chronicles shed more light on the social fissures reflected in the Covenant of Levi as set in its literary context, the second oracle of Malachi. In concluding, this study considers the place of the Covenant of Levi in the larger sweep of covenant in the Persian Period.
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Presenting the King: The Function of Herod in the Synoptic Gospels
Program Unit: Synoptic Gospels
Wayne Baxter, Heritage College & Seminary
Historians have long recognized Herod the Great as one of the great builders in the ancient world. Indeed, his architectural and material legacy is celebrated in contemporary Israel. Nevertheless, earliest depictions of this monarch cast him in very critical light. While the Synoptic Gospels align in their negative portrait of Herod, the distinct way in which he functions in each text differs; and the way they vary sheds light on their respective socio-religious settings. The present study examines the portrayal of Herod in the Synoptic Gospels as well as in the writings of Josephus, by focusing especially on Herod’s role within each text. The late introduction of Herod into the stories of Mark and Luke coupled with the two Evangelist’s deployment of him as mainly a character foil, on the one hand, and the early introduction of Herod into the narratives of Matthew and Josephus coupled with a definite interest in the monarch’s rule, on the other, suggest that Mark and Luke view kingship along similar lines, but that Matthew views it more like Josephus. The manner in which Matthew agrees with Josephus, over and against the other Evangelists offers another strand of evidence for thinking that Matthew thinks more along the lines of non-Christ-believing Jews than other Christ-believers.
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Sourcing the Second Canon: Josephus, Hebrew Heroes, and the Rhetoric of National Decline in De excidio hierosolymitano
Program Unit: Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature
Carson Bay, University of Bern (Switzerland)
Scholars have long recognized that, for many early Christian authors, Josephus’ corpus functioned as a kind of second canon. Josephus’ presentation of historical and/or biblical narrative provided inspiration and fodder for a host of early Christian authors pursuing sundry literary-rhetorical ends. In particular, Josephus’ treatment of certain heroic figures from the Hebrew Bible – figures like Moses, Joshua, and David (catalogued systematically by Louis Feldman) – set a standard for the cultivation of a particular brand of mos maiores from the Hebrew Bible. In time, Christian historians would take their turn at reconstructing past figures for present purposes, re-remembering Hebrew heroes in Christian contexts, often with Josephus (along with the biblical text) in hand.
This paper presents what I argue is the most significant historiographical use of Hebrew heroes within early Christian literature. The passage under question comes in the last book of De Excidio Hierosolymitano, a Latin rewriting of Josephus’ Jewish War that was to become the standard Christian history of the Second Temple’s demise – indeed, a standard Christian version of Josephus’ text – for centuries subsequent. Drawing upon both biblical and Josephan tradition (and classical literary tropes), the author inserts a long epideictic speech at the beginning of Book 5 of De Excidio (5.2.1–2). This speech is addressed directly to Jerusalem and the Jews, and it goes on at length to describe, explain, and confirm Jerusalem’s destruction as divinely sanctioned following the Jewish rejection of Jesus. At the beginning of this speech comes one of the most interesting uses of biblical heroes anywhere in ancient literature.
At the beginning of this speech, the author of De Excidio speaks directly to the ciuitas of Jerusalem and asks, “How have you been deceived?” (Quomodo decepta es?). The author then goes on to introduce five biblical figures – Moses, Aaron, Joshua, David, and Elisha – each in terms of a famous biblical episode (or two). The author then uses these biblical references to juxtapose the nobility and competency of these ancient Hebrew heroes with the Jews of the first-century C.E. (the fictive audience). Conceptually, this rhetoric creates a stark juxtaposition between ancient Israel and the “modern” Jews who witnessed Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 C.E. This paper explores this narrative-oratorical presentation of national decline in conversation with recent scholarship on Rezeption, what Hindy Najman has called “traditionary processes” and “Mosaic discourses,” and with reference to text-critical questions. While influenced by Josephus’ presentation of these figures, the author of De Excidio also interacts with the biblical traditions that lie behind the episodes and characters he cites. This paper thus introduces some particularly intriguing text-critical problems involving Hebrew, Greek, and Latin scriptures while also speaking to contemporary discussions about reception, adaptation, translation, and authority. It treats Josephus as a “second canon” for Christian authors, thus also providing an interesting comparandum for other scholarship on rewritten Bible or rewritten Scripture.
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The Semantics of Jewish Christian Judaism: Jewishness as Negotiated by Josephus, Pseudo-Hegesippus, and Sefer Yosippon
Program Unit: Jewish Christianity / Christian Judaism
Carson Bay, University of Bern (Switzerland)
It is no secret that the first-century Jewish writer Flavius Josephus became a favorite author of Christians, but not of Jews, in late antiquity. Josephus is cited and lauded in innumerable early Christian works, but in rabbinic and other early Jewish literature, his presence is notably absent. One of the most interesting early Christian receptions of Josephus’ Greek text comes in the late fourth-century Latin work called Pseudo-Hegesippus, or De Excidio Hierosolymitano. This text rewrites Josephus’ Jewish history into a Christian history about Jews, and along the way redefines the Jewish people in terms of their collective place in divinely-orchestrated history. Half a millennium later, in the early tenth century, a Jewish author based his own historiographical work, written in Hebrew, on De Excidio and a number of other (classical, Christian, biblical) sources. This work, Sefer Yosippon, thus represents the Hebrew reception of the Latin reception of a Greek text, and the Jewish reception of the Christian reception of a Jewish text. Taken together, these three authors – Josephus, Pseudo-Hegesippus, and the author of Yosippon – comprise a particularly interesting and fruitful site for comparison and critical inquiry into questions of reception and Jewish identity as contested by Jews and Christians (and Jews, again).
This paper addresses one foundational aspect of the confluence of Jewish identity and Rezeption within Christian and Jewish historiography: the philological-translation aspect. Greek-to-Latin and Latin-to-Hebrew translation constitute in themselves significant cultural-linguistic moves by authors. These translational contexts in turn may inform how negotiation of identity may or must be read. This paper thus explores the ways in which Josephus, Pseudo-Hegesippus, and Sefer Yosippon talk about Jews at the level of language and vocabulary. By selecting salient locations in Josephus’ narrative, locations which also appear in Pseudo-Hegesippus and Sefer Yosippon, this study explores the grammar and syntax that represent the confluence of the art of translation, the exercise of ethnography, and the multifaceted dynamics of Rezeptionsgeschichte. The nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections that appear in Josephus’ Greek have telling afterlives in the ideologically-loaded historiographies of the Latin Pseudo-Hegesippus and the Hebrew Sefer Yosippon. This paper illustrates this culturally-moded and chronologically-dispersed dynamic across these three texts. In the end, it presents a Jewish version of a Christian version of Jewishness by tracing Yosippon’s reception of Pseudo-Hegesippus’ reception of Josephus’ articulation of Jewish identity as manifest at several points in his oeuvre.
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Jesus as Dionysus in Revelation 12:5 and 19:15
Program Unit: John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern
Leslie Baynes, Missouri State University
This paper argues that the newborn in Revelation 12:5 who “will shepherd (ποιμαίνω) all the nations with an iron rod” and who is “snatched (ἁρπάζω) to God” is meant to evoke the infant Dionysus. Adela Yarbro Collins has demonstrated that the Leto-Apollo-Python myth underlies Revelation 12, but the snatching up of the child breaks the otherwise convincing combat myth pattern, and thus it demands further explanation. Of the several raptured children we find in Greco-Roman mythology, the infant Dionysus shares numerous attributes with the baby of Revelation 12:5, in aspects both manifest and subtle. In Euripides’ Bacchae, which is the classic, but far from only, telling of the tale, Zeus saves his newborn son from death by snatching him up (ἁρπάζω) into his thigh and taking him to Olympus. As an adult, Dionysus returns to his mortal mother’s home as the god of wine to receive his divine due, and he wreaks havoc upon those who refuse to worship him there. Revelation also narrates an adult return, identifying the endangered infant of 12:5 with the warrior in 19:15 through their mutual quotation of “shepherd with an iron rod.” This warrior will “trample the wine press of the wrath of God Almighty” to annihilate those who fail to acknowledge him as Lord. Dionysus, like Jesus, was called shepherd (Merkelbach, Die Hirten des Dionysos, 1988). Multiple inscriptions dating to the late first century BCE and late first century CE in Ephesus, one of the most prominent of the seven cities of Revelation, register priests of Dionysos Phleus Poimantrios, “Dionysus the Shepherd.” The author of the Apocalypse would have ample opportunity to encounter the infant god, since iconography of the birth and childhood of Dionysus was ubiquitous in the ancient world, including Palestine and Asia Minor, and particularly in Ephesus, Pergamum, and Smyrna. In a study of the ancient iconographical evidence of divine children in the Greco-Roman world, Michaela Stark concludes that Dionysus can “rightly be labeled as the divine child par excellence.” There are more representations of him, over a longer time span, and throughout a wider geographic area, than of any other divine child. Even more, Dionysus is an anomaly among the Olympian gods in that his iconography alone portrays him both as a child and as an adult in the same work (Stark, Göttliche Kinder, 2012). In terms of broader themes in Revelation, Dionysus and Jesus also pair well. For example, Dionysus descended to the underworld and returned from it, linking the god of exuberant life inextricably to death. A bone inscription from the Dionysian mysteries expresses this simply as “life-death-life”; cf. Revelation 1:17-18, “I am … the living one, and I was dead, and see, I am living.” This is just a sampling of the literary, inscriptional, and iconographic evidence that the paper employs to demonstrate the likelihood that Revelation 12:5 and 19:15 draw on the myth of Dionysus.
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Tales of Two Cities
Program Unit: Polis and Ekklesia: Investigations of Urban Christianity
Giovanni Bazzana, Harvard University
Herod’s foundation of Caesarea Maritima was the most prominent move in a complex plan to redesign and reshape the political and social structure of his recently stabilized kingdom of Judea. It goes without saying that such a move entailed a significant shift in the balance of power and social relationships within the kingdom, particularly in regard to the position of Jerusalem, which had been up to that moment the center not only in religious terms but also from a political and administrative point of view.
Similar repositionings were far from unusual for Hellenistic sovereigns. Indeed Egypt offers a well-known parallel, since - roughly three hundred years earlier - the Ptolemies brought about an equally momentous change by building a new capital, Alexandria, which replaced other, more traditional centers of power.
We are well informed about the nature of the changes that took place in Egypt through the wealth of surviving papyri that illustrate not only the violent conflicts originated by the move, but also the more mundane consequences that it had in an administrative and economic perspective. Unfortunately, the evidence is less plentiful with regard to the foundation of Caesarea and its consequences, but it is hardly thinkable that they were less significant.
The present paper will address this problematic nexus by leveraging the Egyptian documentation in order to understand better what new issues were brought about by the foundation of Caesarea. The paper will focus not so much on the political conflicts that are well known through ancient historiography, but more specifically on the administrative and socio-economic dimensions of the new foundation and of the ensuing relationship between the competing centers of Caesarea and Jerusalem. Ultimately, one will try to evaluate if and how these changes impacted the history of the region in the decades leading up to the first Jewish war and the formation of religious movements such as the Jesus movement.
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Why Do You Ask for My Name? The Significance of Divine Identity in Biblical Theophany Episodes
Program Unit: Israelite Religion in Its Ancient Context
Adam L. Bean, Johns Hopkins University
A fascinating and widespread source of evidence for ancient awareness of the complexities and perils of identifying deities can be found in literary motifs reflecting a sudden meeting with a suspected manifestation of the divine. In such encounters found in sources ranging from classical literature to biblical texts, an element of uncertainty and anxiety regarding the identity of the divine being encountered is ubiquitous. H. S. Versnell has insightfully connected such motifs in Greco-Roman literature to pervasive habits of doubt and equivocation in attempting to correctly name and respond to the encountered divine. Yet in discussions of several comparable episodes in the Hebrew Bible (e.g. Gen 16:7-14; 18:1-33; 32:23-33; Exod 3:1-15; Judg 13:1-23), explanation of the motif of uncertain divine identity has been underappreciated, misdirected toward the (non-existent) identity of a divine messenger, or explained by appeal to a dubious notion of a quasi-magical power in the possession of a divine name. While the notion of “power in possession of the name” has been more widely critiqued in scholarship on Greek religion, it still persists in discussions of the Hebrew Bible. This paper critiques such explanations of the role of questions about the names of divine beings in theophany episodes in the Hebrew Bible. Instead, it is demonstrated that this motif reflects awareness of anxiety and uncertainty surrounding divine identity, and that the primary impetus for characters in these episodes desiring confirmation of the identify of an encountered divine being is to facilitate proper cultic response to the event, i.e. to know what god to present offerings to and/or pray to. Additionally, it is demonstrated that in the Pentateuch such episodes support a narrative arc in which key characters grapple with the question of how to identify the god(s) of the ancestors of Israel, culminating in the revelation of the divine name to Moses in Exodus 3-6.
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The “Nazarenes” in the Persian Martyr Acts
Program Unit: Jewish Christianity / Christian Judaism
Adam H. Becker, New York University
The Persian Martyr Acts (PMA) are a series of over sixty Syriac martyrological texts composed from the fourth century into the Islamic period. They depict the persecution of Christians within the Sasanian Empire (i.e. Pre-Islamic Iran), even when the texts were composed after the fall of the Sasanians. Most were written in Sasanian times in present day Iraq and Iran, whereas some seem to come from within the Roman Empire. The term, “Nazarene” (Nastraya), appears relatively often in the mouths of the texts’ protagonists as a term of abuse for Christians. This seems to reflect some real use of the term within Sasanian times by the Zoroastrian authorities, but it may also help us to understand the literary relationship among a number of different PMA.
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Developing Economic and Administrative Roles for the Jerusalem Temple in Achaemenid Judah
Program Unit: Economics in the Biblical World
Peter R. Bedford, Union College
This paper explores arguments in support of the developing roles of the Jerusalem temple and its personnel in the economic and administrative organization of Achaemenid Judah. Also explored are how these roles relate to the Achaemenid Persian administration of the southern Levant within the wider empire.
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"Jews, Nazareans, Christians, and Baptists": Jewish-Christianity and Manichaean Origins
Program Unit: Jewish Christianity / Christian Judaism
Jason BeDuhn, Northern Arizona University
The late antique religious culture of Mesopotamia had extraordinary complexity, but the sources for knowing it in any detail are frustratingly meager. Towards the end of the third century, the Zoroastrian leader Kerdir spoke of "Jews, Nazareans, Christians, and Baptists" alongside the Manichaeans, but what he understood to demarcate the boundaries between these communities is unclear, just as the precise referents of these terms continue to be debated. This paper scours Manichaean sources for clues to the kinds of "Jewish" religious communities and/or traditions with which Mani and the first Manichaeans had contact, and upon which they drew in the development of a distinct Manichaean identity.
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Conditional Structures in Northwest Semitic and Biblical Hebrew
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Peter Bekins, Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion
Conditional structures are well represented within the Northwest Semitic corpus, and they vary in some interesting ways. This paper will present a taxonomy of conditional structures with respect to sentence structure and discourse incorporating grammatical features such as the use of a conditional particle to mark the protasis, the presence of the so-called “waw of apodosis”, word order in the clause, and the use of suffixed or prefixed verbal forms. This will be followed by a discussion of the possible semantic and pragmatic features that may condition these features, as well as any phenomena found in typical main clauses that may be blocked within conditional structures.
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The Relation of RA 2110 to Hexaplaric Readings in Psalms 24–32; 77:30, 36–82:16
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Joel R. Bell, University of Oxford
This paper will compare hexaplaric readings from Vaticanus graecus 752, Canonicianus graecus 62, and Ottobonianus graecus 398 to the text of RA 2110 (P. Bodmer XXIV) in an attempt to further clarify the textual history of the Greek Psalter. In 1975, Adrian Schenker published his "Hexaplarische Psalmenbruchstücke: Die hexaplarischen Psalmenfragmente der Handschriften Vaticanus graecus 752 und Canonicianus graecus 62." This work focused on the hexaplaric fragments of Psalms 77:30, 36–82:16 from Vat. gr. 752 and Can. gr. 62. Then in 1982, Schenker published the hexaplaric fragments of Psalms 24–32 contained in Codex Ottobonianus graecus 398. Before him Frederick Field had known and included the fragments in his 1875 magisterial edition; however, he relied on a poor transcription by Elia Baldi for his source. According to A. Hilhorst “a trustworthy edition remained a desideratum” until Schenker’s 1982 volume. In his 2018 MA thesis, titled “The Relation of RA 2110, or P. Bodmer XXIV, to Origen’s Hexapla: A Study in the Textual History of the Greek Psalter,” Brian Baucom compared readings from RA 2110 with other witnesses. His analysis shows that text of the papyrus appears to reflect revisional activity, and he believes that the scribe worked with an Upper Egyptian text type and incorporated hexaplaric readings. In his thesis, Baucom does not include the readings from Schenker’s two published volumes mentioned above. This study will take Baucom’s work as it point of departure and will compare the readings from Schenker’s volumes to those of RA 2110 in Psalms 24–32; 77:30, 36–82:16.
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Decolonizing Κατάκριμα: Usage, Translations, and Lexica.
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Joel R. Bell, University of Oxford
Based on a precursory study, some of the methodological perils of past New Testament lexica may be true for κατάκριμα: lazy reliance on predecessors, unhelpful dependence on Bible translations (and on Latin in general), improper use of etymology, and the employment of glosses or synonyms rather than definitions to indicate meaning. With regards to κατάκριμα, most lexica give the gloss “condemnation” seemingly portraying it as an action noun. However, both usage outside the NT and the history of -μα ending neuter nouns (predominantly result-of-action nouns by the time of the NT) mitigate against this understanding. The gloss “condemnation” might then be the result of Latin influence from the action noun condemnatio (to condemn, to bring about condemnation of one). This gloss has caused many biblical exegetes and lexicographers to then gloss the parallel δικαίωμα with the action noun “justification” in Romans 5:16 (Latin influence seems a culprit here as well). Κατάκριμα is rare in Greek literature (2x) and inscriptions (4x), and relatively rare in papyri (30x). It may occur once in the Septuagint (most likely a conflation of κατὰ κρίμα), and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae lists 354 occurrences from the 1st century B.C.E. until the 5th century C.E. (almost all in Christian writings). This study will (1) cover occurrences in Greek literature, papyri, inscriptions, and Christian literature until the time of Hesychius’ lexicon in the 5th/6th century C.E., (2) survey lexical entries throughout history, and (3) interact with any specialized secondary literature addressing κατάκριμα. The goals of this study are (1) to achieve a better understanding of the history of usage, (2) to outline the influences of Latin and earlier lexica upon lexical entries (ancient to modern), and (3) to assemble a more accurate and nuanced lexicographical entry for κατάκριμα than exists in current lexica.
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Emending Gideon’s 300: A Defense of a Text-Critical Approach to Judges 7:5–6
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Historical Books
Jason Bembry, Milligan College
In the Gideon story ambiguity exists in the Masoretic Text regarding who accompanies the reluctant hero into battle against the Midianites. After the army has been pared down by divine decree, another reduction is required on the basis of the approach the men take to drinking water from a stream. Descriptions of the approach appear in the text as “lapping the water like a dog,” “bending down on one’s knees,” “with their tongues,” and “with their hands to their mouths.” The MT describes the 300 whom Gideon keeps as those who “lap (the water) with their hands to their mouths.” It appears that the two groups have been conflated whereby ones who lap the water like a dog also scoop the water to their mouths with their hands. This conflation, stemming from the MT of Judg 7:5-6, has persisted in the early translational/interpretive tradition and extends to the present day, even among many English Bibles, some scholarly essays, and the most recent commentaries. I survey essays by L. Klein, C. Begg, I. Himbaza, and most recently A. Hornkohl and commentaries from R. Boling, A. Soggin and most recently J. Sasson and the BHQ editor N. Marcos. Particular attention is given to Hornkohl’s 2009 essay since it has clouded the discussion unnecessarily in my estimation. After surveying the modern discussion of this textual problem, I examine the Greek translations of these stories in LXX A and B as well as the ancient traditions of Targum Jonathan and Josephus to help reconstruct an older version of the MT that clears away the ambiguity, providing a more likely version of the story while explaining how the MT came to be so confusing. Two text-critical issues are decisive for the solution. The first appears in v.5 where an apparent anacoluthon arrests the clarity of the original story in which the “kneelers” are dismissed. The second text-critical issue arises in v.6 from a confusion of the two qualifying phrases “with their tongue” and “with their hands to their mouth.” While LXX A provides the key to a clearer Vorlage, the data from the Targum and Josephus demonstrate the antiquity of the textual problem. Detailed examination of the process that led to the current MT and Greek text traditions is included, along with a few suggested corrections to the BHS text critical notes and to the most current LXX translations into English (NETS) and French (Harlé and Roqueplo).
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Did Antiochus' Measures against Judean Jews Have an Impact on Later Roman Policy?
Program Unit: Hellenistic Judaism
Miriam Ben Zeev, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Antiochus' policy in Judea has been aptly defined as carrying a meaningful significance "not only because of the religious and cultural influence of Judaism for which this persecution – and the following Maccabean revolt – proved to be a pivotal moment in history, but also because the episode presents our best-documented example of the tensions between Hellenism and the native traditions in the Near East." The view has even been suggested, that its effects were felt as late as the second century CE, inspiring that carried out by Emperor Hadrian.
Both in Antiochus' and in Hadrian times, a military colony, settled by a gentile population, was installed in Jerusalem, a ban on circumcision was issued – whether before, during or after the Bar Kokhba war – and ordinances were enacted against Jewish ancestral practices. The causes which prompted these measures, too, carry some resemblance if they may be identified as a reaction to a problematic political situation. According to Gruen, after having being compelled by Rome to abandon his Egyptian adventure, the introduction of a garrison in Jerusalem and the intimidation of the populace would have announced Antiochus' resumption of control to the diverse peoples nominally under the Seleucid regime. As for Hadrian, the first months of his reign witnessed some kind of rebelliousness in several parts of the Empire, while the Jewish Diaspora uprisings which had started in Trajan's time had not yet been completely quelled. Hadrian's policy in Judea, therefore, would have been meant to prevent the possibility of further armed resistance. Finally, a certain similarity has been observed between the personalities of Antiochus and Hadrian and their enterprises: both of them promoted their own self worship and emphasized the importance of Greek cities and cults, among which a special role was bestowed on that of Olympian Zeus – measures that may have reflected an interest in the unification of the Empire through Hellenism (an evaluation still under discussion).
However, that of Antiochus may not have been Hadrian's sole model. Aggressive policies against local cults are well attested in Roman history also. The practice of eradicating cults that functioned as a political or military center of resistance was conceivably longstanding. What happened on the island of Mona in Britain and the suppression of the Druids and the German prophetesses are only the most visible instances of a widespread phenomenon. As for the measures carried out by Hadrian in the wake of the Bar Kokhba war, namely, the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem and from the surrounding area, and the obliteration of the name of the province, Judaea, closely remind us of the policy implemented by leading Roman figures against rebellious peoples and cities. The cases of Carthage and Corinth are but two emblematic antecedents.
It therefore appears that several earlier political patterns, both in Hellenistic and in Roman times, may have had an impact on Hadrian's dealings in Judea in the first half of the second century CE.
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Approaching the World of the Literati of the Early Second Temple with Social Memory Approaches
Program Unit: Exile (Forced Migrations) in Biblical Literature
Ehud Ben Zvi, University of Alberta
This paper will explore how some Social Memory approaches, which will be summarily described, may serve to shed important light on the social mindscape of the literati of the period and the literati's world of knowledge, including the literati's socially shared and socially shaped memory-system or memoryscape and underlying generative systems for the development and acceptance of particular types of memories. It will argue for the necessary contribution of these approaches and this type of knowledge for reconstructing the intellectual and social world these literati.
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The History of Jerusalem through Its Hillsides
Program Unit: Biblical Archaeology Society
Nitsan Ben-Melech, Tel Aviv University
The hills surrounding the city of Jerusalem create a versatile landscape, scattered with archaeological features which attest to human involvement in the shaping of what we sometimes perceive as the “natural” surrounding. This paper will present the archaeological evidence for the human impact on the city’s rural areas and its importance to the city’s development and sustainability. Our research employs techniques from several fields of study which were integrated into the archeological research. These include different dating methods (14C radiocarbon dating and OSL) as well as micro-archaeology proxies for the identification of the cultivation of various crops (e.g., fossil pollen grains). The image emerging from the archaeological data shows versatile patterns of land-use throughout history. The use of different agricultural systems hints at different subsistence strategies, abilities, and/or outside influences. The implications of these changes through time will be discussed, as well as their potential for furthering our understanding of the city’s past.
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Uses of Leviticus-Numbers in Biblical Second Temple Jewish Literature
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Aure Ben-Zvi Goldblum, New York University
This paper investigates the uses of Leviticus and Numbers in Biblical Second Temple Jewish Literature. The paper analyzes both explicit and implicit quotations of Leviticus and Numbers, thus addressing the question of intertextual references in Biblical Second Temple Jewish Literature and their contribution to evaluating the textual history of the Hebrew Bible.
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The Book of Isaiah and the Psalms: Twin Books and Joint Authors?
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Ulrich Berges, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
One of the main results of the last thirty years in the research of the books of Isaiah and the Psalms is the fact that both are not just collections of individual texts but well organized entities, i.e. compositions. This is nothing unique to these two corpora but applies to each one of the books of the Old Testament. What is instead very special to these two books is the centrality of Zion, the inclusion of non-Israelites into the veneration of YHWH, the singing to God on the one hand and the reservation regarding the sacrificial cult on the other. In various publications of the last years I ventured the idea that temple singers deported to Babylon composed the core of Isaiah 40–55 as their »oratorio of hope«. After the return to Jerusalem this has been connected to the literary heritage of Isaiah ben Amoz and his disciples.
In the proposed lecture I would test this hypothesis by analyzing further points of contacts between the subsequent chapters Isaiah 56–66 and the Book of Psalms, especially book IV and V. There seem the be good reasons to suppose that the returned temple singers developed into a guild of scribal experts that made consistent use of texts from the growing book of Isaiah, the Psalms and other parts of the literary heritage of Ancient Israel.
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The Direction of Dependence between Jer 34 and the Manumission Instructions in Torah
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Kenneth Bergland, Independent scholar
Accepted paper for the 2019 IBR annual meeting, Pentateuch research group
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Discipleship Ideals in the Apocryphal Acts: A Radical Departure from the Gospels?
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Carl Johan Berglund, Uppsala University
It is well known that early Christian authors often expressed their theological convictions in narrative rather than argumentative form – in the way they selected, framed, and presented their stories about Jesus and the early Christian movement. What is less well studied is how these views were received and transformed when later generations formed their own narratives about Jesus, disciples, and martyrs. This paper identifies discipleship ideals – characteristics of an ideal Christian disciple – in key passages from the apocryphal acts of the apostles John, Peter, and Andrew, and discusses whether these ideals are continuous or discontinuous with similarly expressed discipleship ideals of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
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The Relation of Texts to Archaeology
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Andrea Berlin, Boston University
The Relation of Texts to Archaeology
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Frequency of vayyiqtol and yiqtol Verbs in Post-Exilic Literature: Data from the Tiberias Stylistic Classifier for the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Joshua Berman, Bar-Ilan University
Using data compiled from the Tiberias Stylistic Classifier for the Hebrew Bible (https://tiberias.dicta.org.il/#/), this paper assesses the frequency of wayyiqtol and yiqtol verbs respectively in the non-parallel portions of Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther and Daniel. Although it is accepted within the discipline to think in terms of a divide between classical biblical Hebrew and late biblical Hebrew, the syntax of a language evolves over time, and thus it is worthy to examine how the syntax of late biblical Hebrew itself evolves within the books of the post-exilic period. One of the difficulties of tracing the development of late biblical Hebrew from any one of these books to another is their relative brevity; the data pool is small. Many of the telltale markers that distinguish classical biblical Hebrew from late biblical Hebrew do not appear with enough frequency in each book to be able to chart their development from book to book with statistical confidence. Wayyiqtol and yiqtol verbal forms, however, are the most ubiquitous expressions of verbal syntax and thus provide an ample data pool for study. The Tiberias Classifier utilizes the syntactic tagging of the ETCBC IV database, and thus computes data for two forms of wayyiqtol clauses and six forms of yiqtol clauses. Tiberias not only supplies the number of appearances of each form for each book, but also provides a measure of their frequency within each book, and rates their relative significance as telltale markers of that book in a hierarchical scale. Discussion of the data will focus on two issues: 1) the implications for the chronological development of the trend away from wayyiqtol verbs in late biblical literature and greater proliferation of yiqqtol verbs; 2) the implications for the question of shared authorship between Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah, and the question of shared authorship between Ezra and Nehemiah.
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Hart’s New Translation of the New Testament: Assessing Its Translational Effectiveness and Affectiveness
Program Unit: Nida Institute
Steven Berneking, United Bible Societies
In The New Testament: A Translation, David Bentley Hart has described his purpose as one of rigorous literalism, aiming to give, as much as possible, the reader without Greek an access to the Greek text. As a philosopher and philosophical theologian, Hart is aware that this purpose is not without a host of challenges if not outright impossibilities. This paperI will use Translation Studies as a methodological lens through which to assess Hart’s translation, especially in the intersections of purpose, audience, language choice, and the foreignizing choices in his NT.
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Introducing Ishmael: Secondary References to Abraham’s Firstborn Son in the Priestly Portions of Gen 17 and 21
Program Unit: Genesis
Christoph Berner, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
The paper argues that the explicit and implicit references to Ishmael in the covenant text Gen 17 and the birth story of Isaac Gen 21:1-5* do not belong to the earliest layer of the Priestly Abraham story. Rather, the figure of Ishmael was only introduced here through the hand of later (i.e., post-Priestly) editors, who sought to bring the Priestly text in line with the non-Priestly passages referring to Abraham’s firstborn son (i.e., Gen 16; 21:8-21). Since the analysis demonstrates that the Priestly Abraham story was not aware of (or did not care about) the figure of Ishmael in the first place, the paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for the literary history of the Abraham story as a whole.
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Economics of the Judean Temple-State under the Persian Empire
Program Unit: Economics in the Biblical World
Jon L. Berquist, Disciples Seminary Foundation
TBD
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The Child Snatched Away: Reading Revelation 12 through a Childist Lens
Program Unit: Children in the Biblical World
Sharon Betsworth, Oklahoma City University
The Revelation of John is a rich montage drawing upon imagery from the diverse cultures that the author was immersed in. In his vision, John of Patmos describes the experience of the early Christian community living in the midst of the Roman Empire. In the process, he draws upon the myths of the ancient Greeks, the scriptures of the Judaism, the Christian Gospel narratives, and the realities of life under Roman rule in the late first century CE. Revelation 12 incorporates all of these traditions into the narrative of the woman clothed with the sun, who gives birth to a son, a male child, who is snatched away and taken to the throne of God. This paper will focus specifically upon the child in the narrative. I will build upon Kathleen Gallagher Elkins’s study of feminist and childist interpretation, which uses Rev. 12 as a case study to apply both methods to the same text. I will delve further into the issues she defines as central to feminist and childist interpretation: visibility, agency, violence, and consequences. In the process, my paper will examine Hebrew Bible and Gospel antecedents to the child snatched away in Rev. 12. I will also examine two Greek myths, the birth of Apollo and the Hymn to Demeter and Persephone, and focus upon the ways and reasons that the child snatched away alludes to these Greek myths.
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The Pasture and the Battlefield: Domesticated Animals in the Song of Songs
Program Unit: Animal Studies and the Bible
Jared Beverly, Chicago Theological Seminary
The Song of Songs contains a number of references to domesticated animals, including sheep and goats (1:7–8; 4:1–2; 6:5–6) and horses (1:9); this paper examines their various roles in the Song, both in blurring boundaries and in reinforcing them. Domesticated animals, as nonhuman creatures adapted for human purposes, can represent a middle ground between nature and culture, and as a result, for some readers, they challenge the boundary between wilderness and civilization. Through the use of these creatures in the Song, this nature/culture blurring occurs all the more as the poet represents the lovers in animal imagery, often with the result of being unable to distinguish human from nonhuman. In addition, this domesticated animal imagery can be read as upending normative human gender hierarchies. In 1:7–8, the woman of the poem can be read as a shepherd to the man’s sheep, and in some interpretations of 1:9, the woman’s equine features hold power over the man. Nevertheless, in spite of the boundary blurring that these metaphors produce, they still provide little freedom to the actual animals imagined here; in fact, these metaphors depend upon the ownership and subjugation of domesticated animals. For instance, while many scholars celebrate the relative sexual freedom that the poem’s human characters seem to experience, the refusal of such freedom is a frequent feature in the lives of domesticated animals. It is true that, as animal studies scholars have pointed out, domestication need not be regarded simply as a coercive and anthropocentric process but rather can be seen as “companion species” living and evolving together; however, the metaphors of the Song typically use these creatures in ways that emphasize merely their use for human purposes rather than any intrinsic value they might have. Thus, for the reader concerned with nonhuman animals, the Song provides a complicated picture of gender and species constructions that can be read as unstable, but simultaneously these constructions are based on the human control of and domination over other animals.
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Sabbath at the Center of History and Theology: A Brief Look at the Influence of the Betä Ewosṭatewos Movement
Program Unit: Ethiopic Bible and Literature
Afework Hailu, Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology
Beginning from the end of the fourteenth century and particularly throughout the fifteenth century, the Betä Ewosṭateans were distinguished for their vigorous contention in support of the observance of Sabbath. They argued for this as a Christian tradition that needs to be (re)affirmed in the Ethiopian Church according to the tradition of ‘Apostolic Fathers’ as particularly taught in the Senodos and Didəsqəlya. Despite, the considerable resistance encountered by this movement – and others like it – by the seventeenth century these views were included in the official theological writings of the church. This brief study seeks to describe the role played by this group in the historical and political milieu of Medieval Ethiopia to demonstrate the divisive and cohesive influence of their theology. Towards this end I will make use of primary historical sources as well as tracing theological developments by looking at the translation and indigenous development of biblical interpretation and dogmatic treatise in the period.
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Economics on Display: A Persian-Hellenistic Background for Amos’ Social Criticism?
Program Unit: Book of the Twelve Prophets
Stefan Beyerle, University of Greifswald
The book of Amos presents a dense sequence of prophecies of judgment and doom. Not only socio-historical approaches in exegesis emphasize the prophet’s historical context in the mid-eighth century: Under Jeroboam II. the Northern Kingdom experienced a phase of consolidation and economic prosperity. All the more radical worked Amos’ criticism of economic advancement and pleasure (cf. Am 2:6–8) within this assumed historical setting. However, nearly our entire knowledge about unjust economic relations in eighth century Israel stems from prophetic messages, and not least from the book of Amos. Consequently, in order to avoid a circular reasoning, this paper asks for a different historical setting of Amos’ social criticism in the Persian or Hellenistic era and will review the feasibility of such a dating.
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Thorny Theologizing and Broken Bodies: The Place of Paul's Cracked Body in His Theology in the Making
Program Unit: Second Corinthians: Pauline Theology in the Making
Reimund Bieringer, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
tbc
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Reading Jeremiah and Hananiah from Beginning to End
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
Michael J. Biggerstaff, Ohio State University
In his confrontations with other prophets, Jeremiah never failed to call them liars. Except once. In Jeremiah 28:11, after an initial confrontation with Hananiah, Jeremiah silently “went his way.” Only after receiving a new word from YHWH did Jeremiah re-confront Hananiah and call him a liar. His uncharacteristic passivity during his initial contact with Hananiah has generated several veins of thought. Yet, interpreters struggle to keep the end of the story (where Jeremiah is vindicated and Hananiah dies) out of their analyses of the story itself. As a result, Jeremiah is understood to be the true prophet of YHWH who knows Hananiah is lying from the very beginning.
In this paper, I will offer a reading of Jeremiah and Hananiah that challenges the assumption that Jeremiah always knew Hananiah’s message was false. By beginning in chapter 27 with the creation of the yoke, I will assert the narrative informs us how Jeremiah understood the prophet Hananiah before YHWH told him Hananiah was lying. When Hananiah confronted Jeremiah in ch.28, he interacted with Jeremiah’s message to the people and prophets in ch.27. A close reading of Hananiah’s message highlights the uncertainty and ambiguity in Jeremiah’s response. By so reading, Jer 28:11 becomes the climax of the story, emphasizing Jeremiah’s belief in the legitimacy of Hananiah. Thus, I assert it was only with YHWH’s new message that Jeremiah learned that Hananiah, too, was lying.
One implication of such a reading of Jeremiah suggests the story of Hananiah may have served a didactic purpose. Jeremiah’s reaction highlights the prophet’s reliance on continual revelation. Without it, any given prophet was subject to conveying outdated and, thus, false information. Thus, I contend that, while the story’s conclusion ensures the vindication of Jeremiah, it does not negate the validity of reading the story from beginning to end and witnessing a window into ancient Israel’s worldview regarding prophecy.
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Iphigenia in Classical and Canonical Fiction
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
Mark G. Bilby, California State University, Fullerton
Iphigenia, the mythic daughter of Agamemmnon best known from Euripides’ twin plays, Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris, figures significantly in the earliest Greek and Christian fiction. As Anna Lefteratou has shown, core Iphigenian tropes and plot elements (e.g., the near sacrifice of a virgin, an intervening letter, the recognition of an ostensible stranger, a miraculous escape) reappear in the novels of Chariton, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus, as well as the Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Apocryphal Acts of John. Each novelistic appropiation repurposes Iphigenian themes in new ways, such as to convey romantic love, negotiate new juxtapositions of barbarian vs. Greek/civilized identity, and/or to illustrate claims of religious triumphalism.
This paper argues that the Gospel of Luke and the canonical Acts of the Apostles, so often segmented from discussions of imperial fiction, convey thorough, thoughtful, and strategic appropriations of Iphigenia myth. The core appropriation, a veritable retelling of Iphigenia among the Taurians, emerges in the Ephesian saga of Acts 19:21-20:1. Both share a plot of a major temple of Artemis and her “god-fallen” statue being threatened by foreigners. Both also share two main messengers representing the Artemis cult, detail choral chanting, turn on the delivery of a letter, enact near/mock sacrifice, and picture deus ex machina final redemption. Acts 17:1-9 contains a briefer account following similar Iphigenian plotlines, as does the story of the Emmaus road theophany in Luke 24:13-35. These clear appropriations also raise interesting possibilities for seeing Iphigenian themes elsewhere in the plot twists and character developments in Luke and Acts.
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Sophia on Stage
Program Unit: Wisdom and Apocalypticism
Joshua Billings, Princeton University
My paper considers the discourse of wisdom (sophia) at the end of the fifth-century BCE in Athens. It outlines the emergence of new conceptions of wisdom based on notionally autonomous intellection, and their confrontation with traditional, religious forms of authority. To consider sophia in the late fifth century is to interrogate the grounds of intellectual authority – whether it is based in theologically-grounded activity or in human thought, or, put another way, whether it relates to the unseen and unknowable or the apparent and demonstrable. Late fifth-century culture sees the rise of intellectual authorities claiming to be able to demonstrate and teach their sophia, a practice that ultimately institutionalizes itself under the name of philosophia. Sophia, which was earlier a domain of divine, fundamentally unanswerable intellectual authority, becomes, over the course of the fifth century, a human capacity that could be questioned, debated, and transmitted.
The paper traces the shifting senses of sophia by looking at scenes of contestation in Attic drama. Such contestations (or agones) become a kind of dramatic set-piece in the later works of Euripides, where they stage debates between two parties as to what true sophia is. The most famous example of the form, and arguably its definitive instance, is found in the (fragmentary) Antiope, which was famous in antiquity for its confrontation of different ways of life. From the Antiope, the agonistic form is picked up by Aristophanes in Frogs, whose juxtaposition of Aeschylus and Euripides can be seen as a confrontation between a traditional, religious-civic conception of wisdom, and a novel, individualistic variety – though one that confuses and complicates these oppositions in comic manner. Finally, the question of sophia and the form of the dramatic agon furnish some of the building-blocks of Euripides’ Bacchae, in which a series of scenes of contestation hinge on what constitutes wisdom.
Across these different texts, the paper traces the way that ideas of wisdom and the wise shape the contested intellectual modernity of the late fifth century in Athens. I argue that all these contests hinge on the opposition between a more or less traditional understanding of wisdom connected to religion and communal activity, and a novel conception of wisdom as individual intellectual achievement. Even as these different conceptions are quite starkly opposed, I suggest we can see in all these dramatic instances an effort to balance the different ideas of sophia by investing intellectual inquiry – even the most avant-garde – with a kind of divine sanction. The dramatic contests can be understood as attempts to come to terms with the shifting grounds of intellectual inquiry by reconciling religious and philosophical conceptions of sophia.
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The Materialists' Bible: Scholarship, Polemic, and Propaganda in an Age of Revolution
Program Unit: History of Interpretation
Jonathan Birch, University of Glasgow
The spectre of philosophical materialism haunted European thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: in the Christian imagination materialism was widely associated with atheism, paganism, amoralism, and libertinism. More recently, this worldview has been celebrated in some historical scholarship as the intellectual cornerstone of the ‘radical Enlightenment’ and the birth of modern democratic rights and freedoms. Neither interpretation captures the complexity and nuances of those who aligned themselves with this metaphysical stance. By the late eighteenth century, one could easily find confirmation of the worst fears of Christian theologians in the more sensationalist and lascivious underground literature of the age. From Thomas Hobbes onwards, however, professed materialists brought a seriousness of moral purpose to their interpretations of the Bible and the construction of their political theologies, which belied their reputation as dissolute enemies of the Gospel. This paper enters the early modern history of materialism through the biblical hermeneutics of two opposing factions within the so-called radical Enlightenment, both fighting for the moral soul of Europe and its people: the dissenting Enlightenment of the British Unitarian Joseph Priestley, and the militantly atheistic Enlightenment of the ‘coterie holbachique’, spearheaded by the eponymous French aristocrat Baron d’Holbach. The paper will show the limits of metaphysical commitments as a predictor of religious and political judgements, and sketch the afterlives of their conflicting assessments of the Bible.
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Slavery and the Sword: An Intertextual Reading of Jeremiah 34
Program Unit: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible
Shelley L. Birdsong, North Central College
Jeremiah 34 is chock-full of allusions, which twist the prophetic sword of irony into the heart of King Zedekiah and his people. Because they recapture their slaves shortly after releasing them, Jeremiah “grants” to the slave-owners a “release to the sword.” Unfortunately, scholars have long-ignored the literary mastery of this text, focusing instead on the genetic relationships between Jeremiah 34 and the biblical manumission laws. My aim is to refocus on the narrative allusions in Genesis, Exodus, and 2 Samuel, which more effectively highlight the political and theological message of Jeremiah 34, namely the denouncement of slavery and the sociopolitical institutions that support it.
The narratological, political, and theological emphases in this paper depart significantly from previous intertextual scholarship on Jeremiah 34. In the past, scholars such as David (1948), Kessler (1969), Sarna (1973), Lemche (1976), Chavel (1997), and Leuchter (2008) have stressed the intertextual quotation of biblical law regarding slavery in Jer 34:13–14. Because it varies slightly from the regulations in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus, they have belabored the question of historical textual transmission and redactional development. Consequently, Jer 34 has become entrenched in a technical and theoretical debate concerning textual emendations and historical contexts. Instead, I am interested in the theological and political implications of the allusions to other narratives in Jer 34. Accordingly, my work follows more closely with Miller (1984) and Terblanche (2016) who focus on the intertextual allusions in Jer 34 as narratological devices with theological or social significance. Still, neither of these writers examines the allusions to narratives; instead, they still prioritize the legal codes. Moreover, Miller focuses on sin and judgement, while Terblanche emphasizes economics and a distributive economy. My research will attend to the issue of slavery and the literary tools used to stress that theme. In particular, I will be rereading Jer 34 in light of 2 Sam 12—the parabolic condemnation of King David for taking Bathsheba and killing Uriah with the sword. Putting these two monarchical stories into dialogue will shed meaningful light on our understanding of the critique of the final Davidic king, Zedekiah, and how prophets use story and irony to speak truth to power.
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“The Ways of the Egyptians” in the World of the Mekilta De-Rabbi Yishmael
Program Unit: Midrash
Josiah S. Bisbee, Brown University
In 1968, Ben-Zion Watcholder released an article titled, “The Date of the Mekilta De-Rabbi Yishmael,” in which he challenged some basic foundational presuppositions for an early date for the Mekilta. In section II, he cites particular passages in the Mekilta which seem to echo knowledge of the iconoclastic movement of the Byzantine Empire. All of which, leads Wacholder to conclude that the Mekilta de-Rabbi Yishmael (MRI) is a post-talmudic compilation — a medieval, pseudepigraphic forgery, performed by the hand of a single author, sometime during the reigns of Leo III (717-741 CE) and Constantine V (741-775 CE). While, Wacholder’s arguments are indeed provocative, it is not the goal of this paper to pick apart every textual detail he presents to substantiate his final conclusion. That was already accomplished, successfully (in part), by Menachem Kahana in appendix A (pp. 514-20) of his “‘The Critical Edition of Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael’ in the Light of the Geniza Fragments” (1986). Rather, the goal of this paper is to demonstrate the existence of other allusions in the Mekilta that seem to suggest knowledge of an ancient Roman context, sometime between the 2nd and 4th century CE, rather than a Byzantine one. In particular, this paper draws attention to specific Ancient Egyptian and Ancient West Asian customs and myths, as well as archaeological evidence — such as excavated “magical” lamella with inscribed names of deities for lost objects — which suggest the Mekilta’s knowledge of the ancient world, as well as recently excavated synagogue art, which suggests ancient Jewish knowledge of midrashim present in the Mekilta’s interpretation of Exod 13:19 and 14:1-10.
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Towards an Agrarian New Testament: An Evaluation of Ecological Readings of Paul
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
Jonah Peter Bissell, Duke University, Divinity School
Since the publication of Lynn White Jr.’s “the Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (1967) Christian theologians and Biblical scholars alike have been hard pressed to search the Christian tradition for theological funding for positive ecological engagement. As a result of this endeavor, it has been revealed that the Christian tradition, identified by White as the culprit guilty for the onset and exacerbation of our current environmental crisis, has been historically misinterpreted by anthropocentric communities, whose theological formulations have resulted in an ecologically degenerative Christian dogmatics. Thus, theologians and Biblical scholars alike have tirelessly sought to reinterpret the Christian tradition revealing the ecological sensitivity espoused by the Biblical tradition itself. Among such pioneers are New Testament scholars who have attempted to read Paul’s letters ecologically, interpreting the Pauline material with a view towards positive ecological engagement. However, despite the recent surge in such ecological readings of Paul, NT scholars have consistently failed to identify and/or justify the interpretive strategies employed in their various construals of Pauline texts. The strategies employed range from: historical-critical readings of recovery, which seek to recover the original meaning of Paul’s authorial intent in attempt to generate contemporary eco-ethical action; personal-ascetical readings, which contend that modern ecological appropriation must take place through the liturgical embodiment of NT eschatological texts; doctrinal construct readings, which attempt to construct an eco-theological conceptual lens through which other Scriptural texts are interpreted and appropriated ecologically; narrative readings, which place modern readers within the substructural Pauline creation narratives to incite modern ecological activism; ethical principle strategies, which seek to identify general ethical principles from Paul’s particular situational ethics; and reconstructive readings, which seek to read Pauline scripture from the perspective of the Earth in order to construct an inventive eco-theological tradition from Christian Scripture. Given such hermeneutical diversity, if any substantive progress is to be made in the ecological interpretation of Paul, NT scholars must first identify (and/or formulate) and validate the hermeneutical strategies by which ecological interpretations can proceed. To foster such methodological progress the following paper presents a survey of all available ecological readings of Paul followed by an evaluation of each interpretive strategy according to its hermeneutical and exegetical validity. To conclude, the paper gestures towards a promising hermeneutical trajectory for future “ecological” readings. Ultimately, this paper exposes the inherent weaknesses of NT/Pauline ecological interpretation, and suggests a fruitful way forward for “ecological” engagement with the NT.
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A Tale of Two Handmaids: Intertextuality and Postcoloniality in the Book of Ruth and The Handmaid’s Tale
Program Unit: Bible and Film
Benjamin Bixler, Drew Theological School
This paper will explore an intertextual reading between the book of Ruth, Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and the Hulu TV series inspired by the book. While Atwood references Genesis 30 in the epigraph of her novel, the book of Ruth also lends itself to a reading along The Handmaid’s Tale due to Ruth’s self-declaration as a handmaid in response to Boaz’s question, ‘Who are you?” In addition, Ruth’s setting also matches that of The Handmaid’s Tale, with the dystopian setting, patriarchal social structures, and a theocratic system marked by superficial piety.
Ruth’s self-identification as a handmaid and subsequent reading alongside of the character of Offred in Atwood’s novel and the TV series reveals that the ways in which Ruth is an oppressed character. Through the lens of postcolonial critique, a number of factors become evident in the biblical text. While others have noted Ruth’s hybridity, her status as a model minority and a perpetual foreigner, and the ways in which she displays mimicry, I choose to focus on Ruth’s ambivalence and Ruth’s body as a site of colonization. This postcolonial analysis reveals that Ruth is not a passive heroine in the story, but rather resists the colonizing efforts of the text.
This decolonial reading then opens up new interpretations of Ruth. In the same way that the TV series offers a more resistant Offred than the original novel did, I too look for a resistant reading of Ruth. This reading considers redemption for Ruth outside of her redemptive purpose in providing a son for Naomi and looks for ways in which Ruth undermines the colonized situation in which she is placed. In this way, the story of Ruth has resonance for today in the same way that Atwood’s novel has re-entered the popular imagination, addressing concerns over what happens when women take back some form of control from a system designed to oppress them?
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Children of the Devil: John 8:44 and the Theology of Hate
Program Unit: Early Jewish Christian Relations
Stephen Black, Vancouver School of Theology
As much as John 8:44 is an embarrassment for most Christians, it is a celebrated text for hate groups. While many Christians try to defang this troubling Johannine verse, hate groups weaponize themselves with it. The stain of this verse is difficult to remove. Even within well-meaning exegesis, a shadow of anti-Semitism often remains. When considering the hermeneutics of hate groups, however, one does not need to dig very deeply: anti-Semitism is obvious and explicit - indeed, it is celebrated. This paper will survey interpretations offered concerning John 8:44 by such entities as Robert Bowers, the Klu Klux Klan, Christian Identity Ministries, and more. It will touch upon the ideologies/theologies that make their interpretations attractive for those who adhere to them. These disturbing interpretations serve as a reminder that the work of the academy is important. Ethically sensitive, historical nuanced, and hermeneutically sophisticated interpretation of the New Testament is essential. The alternative is hate and death.
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For Those Who Don't Have an Ear to Hear: Mark 14:47, Matthew 26:51–52, and Luke 22:36, 38
Program Unit: Synoptic Gospels
Stephen Black, Vancouver School of Theology
Mark 14:47 tells an odd episode where Jesus is being arrested and one of his followers, wanting to defend him, cuts off the ear of a slave of the high priest. Jesus doesn’t say or do anything in response to this. There are no teachings in Mark here (or elsewhere) that explicitly affirm non-violence. Is the reader to conclude that there are circumstances where violence might be appropriate? Perhaps Mark 14:47 is one such example? The text provides the reader with no direction on the matter. This story has an interesting shelf life. Presuming Marcan priority, both Matthew and Luke inherited Mark’s odd little tale, and had to make decisions what to do with it. Matthew, seemingly troubled by Mark 14:47, adds a pithy saying: “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:51-52). This effectively removes the ambiguity present in Mark leaving the Matthean reader no room for doubt. Matthew’s addition is ideologically supported by Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:38-42, 43, which makes the case for a non-violent response to opposition explicit. Matthew makes it clear that those who seek to advance their cause through violence, will themselves perish through violence – even if their cause is just. Luke develops the episode in an entirely different way by adding new material to what he finds in Mark. Earlier that evening, just after the Last Supper, Luke’s Jesus tells asks the disciples, “the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one” (Luke 22:35-36). In response, the disciples realize they have two swords already and show them to Jesus, to which Jesus responds, “it is enough” (Luke 22:38). Jesus’ response is unclear, and this lack of clarity sets the stage what comes later. When Jesus is being arrested, one of his followers asks whether they should use the swords they showed him earlier. Without waiting for an answer, one of them strikes and cuts off the ear. Jesus responds with impatience, “Stop! No more of this!” In Luke the reason why one of his followers starts swinging a sword around is presumably because they believed this is what Jesus wanted. They presumably thought this because of what Jesus had earlier said (Luke 22:36, 38). The reader of Mark’s and Matthew’s versions of this story leave the slave missing an ear. In neither of these Gospels does Jesus heal this unfortunate man. Luke is presumably not satisfied with this and adds a healing. Perhaps Luke’s Jesus heals the slave because Jesus is more implicitly responsible for this violence than is the case in either Mark or Matthew?
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Pasting Newsprint on the Walls of Beit Shean: René Kalisky’s Bible Reporting
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Chloe Blackshear , University of Chicago
We are familiar with the Bible as prooftext. Particularly in the United States, Bible verses appear in political speeches, in sermons, as well as in op-eds and think-pieces; passages are drawn in to contemporary situations to clarify and to justify, to support actions or decisions or conclusions. During and in the wake of the recent US government shutdown, for example, discussion of biblically-justified walls produced a new flurry of invocations. Dr. Robert Jeffress, in an NPR interview in February, 2019, for example, recalled his inauguration day sermon: “I told the Old Testament story of Nehemiah, whom God ordered to build a wall around Jerusalem to protect the citizens. And, as an aside, I said Mr. President, God is not against walls.”
Often, responses aim to complicate the biblical record, though inevitably sometimes these responses attempt to one-up the initial citations, whether or not the maneuver is ironically or parodically tinged: “I can find you more!” Indeed, part of the role of biblical scholarship, and part of the result of other kinds of more sustained biblical re-use in art or literature, might be to counter such techniques (and the idea of the Bible as a monolith at all) with rich detail, with complication, with analysis: not, “I can find you more!” but “no, it is more than just that!”
Belgian playwright René Kalisky’s play, Dave au bord de mer, moves such conversations out of the domain of specialists and, strikingly, draws the very complications forward for contemporary goals. Rather than referring back to the biblical text as a repository of useful argumentative devices, or even of ethical or moral instructions, Kalisky’s play draws forward ancient ambiguities, thrusting them into the public eye. He does so, rather than with Nehemiah’s walls, with those of Samuel’s Beit Shean.
In Dave au bord de mer, the biblical conflict between Saul and David is transposed onto a beach in 1975 Israel; David and Shaoul ben Qish are at once their ancient selves and current-day avatars (Dave and Qish, an immigrant musician and a real-estate speculator). The play melds biblical speech and colloquial language in a disturbing and heady mixture. It also, as this paper will argue, stages a complex collage of biblical news and current events, words and images, conflating and conmingling biblical Beit Shean and its modern incarnation. Bodies and walls are juxtaposed.
This paper will explore the manifestations of Kalisky’s mediatized mode, reading Beit Shean with Beit Shean in Dave au bord de mer as well as reflecting on Kalisky’s broader ideas about the Bible’s vital contemporary political relevance. Kalisky offers, I suggest, an unsettling but potent example of the ways in which the Bible might be mobilized, appropriated, and re-used in and with media, not as a source of truths, but as a mechanism to instigate an engaged and complex response in an audience: in Kalisky’s case, walls are by no means stable, but rather only point to destabilized ideologies.
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Paul and Jerusalem: Assessing an Interassembly Donation
Program Unit: Polis and Ekklesia: Investigations of Urban Christianity
Thomas R. Blanton IV, Universität Erfurt
This paper will examine several issues concerning the collection and attempted donation of funds from various early Christian assemblies in the northern Mediterranean region to the ekklēsia in Jerusalem: (1) Was Paul was associated with collection efforts for the early Christian assembly in Jerusalem only, or for assemblies in other cities as well, and what does this imply? (2) What different rationales have been provided for the collection, both by Paul himself (1 Cor 16:1–4; Gal 2:10 [?]; 2 Cor 8–9; Rom 15:25–28) and by recent interpreters of Paul? (3) Is the donative effort best characterized as an instance of collective almsgiving? (4) How do donative practices, including but not limited to the Jerusalem donation, relate to the issue of class among their recipients? More specifically, we ask whether and to what extent donative practices within and between early Christian assemblies enabled a class of laborers including Peter, James, and John in Jerusalem, and Paul in the northern Mediterranean, to gain a livelihood, in whole or in part, by extracting surplus value generated by the labor of others.
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Toward a Framework for Interpreting the "Ancient Economy"
Program Unit: Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy
Thomas R. Blanton IV, Universität Erfurt
This paper interacts with recent and past discussions in the subfield of economics known as New Institutional Economics, economic anthropology, studies of the ancient economies of Greece and Rome, and studies of early Christianity in economic context (esp. Boer and Petterson) in an attempt to identify the main elements that should be considered under the heading of “the ancient economy,” especially as this applies to the study of early Christian groups and writings.
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Reading and Writing Daniel: The Transmission of the Danielic Traditions in the Second Temple Period
Program Unit: Transmission of Traditions in the Second Temple Period
Amanda M. Davis Bledsoe, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
My paper addresses the question of the transmission of the Book of Daniel in the Second Temple Period through study of the physical, paratextual features of the Dead Sea Daniel manuscripts. This means looking beyond the mere words on the page to rather how the page itself conveys meaning, that is, the so-called ‘new’ or material philology. This paper will provide a brief analysis of each of the eight individual manuscripts, assessing the scribe’s general approach to the text they were writing including preparation for writing, writing practices, and evidence of (secondary) use. These descriptions will then be used to gauge measures of manuscript formality and to discover both trends, as well as notable divergences, in the transmission of the Book of Daniel at this time.
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Missives and Mythologized Past: Narrativizing Identity and Association in Aramaic Letters
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
Seth A. Bledsoe, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
This paper explores two sets of letters—one biblical (Ezra 4) and one from an ancient archive (Elephantine, TAD A4.5–7)—that feature narratives of past events that contest both the legitimacy and loyalty of a community in the context of Achaemenid Persia. In Ezra 4 we find a set of letters embedded within a fictionalized narrative that also comprise narrativized accounts of a community’s past whose identity is anchored with respect to the occupying empires mythic past. In a strikingly similar scenario, among the documents discovered at Elephantine there are a set of missives which—though not embedded within a fictionalized meta-narrative—comprise a narrative account of a community’s past as a way of establishing the communities identity. In the former, biblical account the letters are challenging the Judean community’s legitimacy by suggesting that their building activities places them outside the purview of Achaemenid authority. The adversaries to the Judeans base their arguments by referring to “annals” of the past that make it clear the Judeans are not, in fact, part of the empire, but instead are opposed to it. The Elephantine letters, which come from a Judean perspective but of a community in a diaspora context, make the opposite argument: that the Judeans of Elephantine and their desired building activities place them squarely within the empire’s ideology. They do this, though, in the same way as the biblical letters, by alluding to a mythic past as confirmation of the community’s legitimate status within the empire. Lastly, in addition to the letters’ inverse relationship in terms of narrativizing identity on a vertical axis (minority group vis-à-vis the empire), both sets of letters are likewise making a horizontal claim of group identity by arguing for an in- and out-group among the competing minority communities. In the biblical case, the adversaries argue for inclusion by alluding to a shared past and cultic identity; in the Elephantine letters, however, the Judeans call out their adversaries (the local Egyptian community) by referencing their dubious past. In sum, both sets of letters use similar rhetorical devices—allusions to mythic “pasts”—as a means for making claims about group identity on vertical and horizontal axes. The Judean adversaries in Ezra use the past to argue for inclusion in the Judean community (horizontal), but then later use another past to argue that the Judeans’ current activities are outside of and opposed to the empire (vertical). The Elephantine letters use the past to argue that their temple-building indicates conformity to the empire (vertical), while the Egyptians current activities sets them in opposition to and outside of the law-abiding Judeans (horizontal).
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On Reading Isaiah in the Light of Psalms: The Beauty of Holiness
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Joseph Blenkinsopp, University of Notre Dame
The Hebrew Bible is commonly associated with a religion of the written word: the commanding word of the law, the challenging word of prophecy. Yet the temple singers, with their close contacts with the circles which carried forward and contributed to the traditions which eventuated in the book of Isaiah, demonstrated that the word is not incompatible with other modalities of religious experience and expression, affective and even mystical, given personal and social enactment in joyful liturgies, song, dance, ritual prayer and lament. The beauty of the psalms resounds throughout the book of Isaiah, and the Isaian vision of the Creator God, Lord of nature and history beyond the bounds of Israel, is echoed and joyfully proclaimed by the psalmists.
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Dionysus, “Inventor of New Blessings” (Legat. 88): Philo's Use of Greek Religion in his Embassy to Gaius
Program Unit: Philo of Alexandria
René Bloch, Universität Bern - Université de Berne
Forthcoming
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Hazor: An Example of Working with Well-Stratified Archaeological Remains and Variant Texts
Program Unit: The Bible in Ancient (and Modern) Media
Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, Princeton Theological Seminary
Hazor presents a unique opportunity to study physical remains in conjunction with biblical texts. Detailed publication of the well-excavated, stratified site allows a reconstruction of the site from its Late Bronze Age settlement that ended in a 13th century B.C.E. conflagration through its Iron I-II settlements, destruction in ca. 732 B.C.E., and abandonment. Divergent biblical texts in Joshua, Judges, and I and II Kings may then be considered in light of the actual events that transpired at the site. Together, the physical remains and the various texts suggest a reconstruction of Israelite traditions, both oral and written, of the conquest and settlement of the site.
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Brave Priestesses of Philippi: The Cultic Role of Euodia and Syntyche (Phil 4:2)
Program Unit: Cultic Personnel in the Biblical World
Isaac Blois, Biola University
Much has been written about the role of the two “brave women of Philippi” who are brought in at the close of Paul’s letter to the Philippians only to receive what appears to be a round slap in the face for their misbehavior. Euodia and Syntyche have apparently made it onto the apostle’s naughty list because they have failed to demonstrate the sort of unity in mission for which he is pleading from the community of Christ-followers there as a whole. And yet, despite this apostolic reprimand, it is clear from the context of the letter that these two women hold significant roles as leaders within this cultic community, bearing a recognizable career as Paul’s co-athletes in the struggle for the gospel. As leaders within the Philippian Christ-community (most likely among Paul’s addressees, “overseers and deacons,” in Phil 1:1), they would have borne a significant role in the sending of the community’s emissary, Epaphroditus, to perform cultic duties (i.e., completing that which was lacking in their λειτουργίας to Paul, cf. Phil 2:30) alongside Paul on behalf of the Philippian community, in addition to sending the cultic offering of monetary funds (referred to in the letter as a “fragrant offering,” “an acceptable and pleasing sacrifice to God,” Phil 4:18) to Paul during his need in prison.
Combining scholarship on cultic language in the New Testament by e.g., Vahrenhorst, Stettler, and Patterson, with that on women in Philippi by Ascough, Dahl, Malinowski, Lamereaux, Portifaix, and others, this paper will argue that Paul’s exhortation for Euodia and Syntyche to “think the same thing in the Lord” is an appeal for them to return to a missional attitude of cultic service that both participates in the humility of Christ and recalls the shared goals that began their former (co)leadership roles.
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Hegemonic Masculinity, Divine Provision, and the Near Sacrifice of Isaac.
Program Unit: Biblical Literature and the Hermeneutics of Trauma
Liz Boase, Flinders University
The near sacrifice of Isaac presents a traumatic rupture in the family saga of Abraham and Sarah. After the fateful journey to Moriah, the family unit is torn apart. Abraham descends the mountain alone, and father and son never again appear together. Replete with gaps and indeterminacy, the sparse yet hauntingly graphic narrative leaves the audience questioning the motivations and emotions of its main protagonists; what was going through Abraham’s mind? why did he comply? why did God impose such a harsh test, and what was achieved through demanding such obedience? The question of the character of God looms large and is open for multiple interpretations. One interpretation, as expressed within the dystopian, post-apocalyptic TV series The Walking Dead (season 7, episode 1 “The Sacrifice of Isaac”) is that the command to sacrifice is an expression of hegemonic masculinity in which coercion and violence are used as a means of gaining control and submission. Whereas The Walking Dead sustains the image of hegemonic and toxic masculinity, the divine portrayal in Gen 22 is, perhaps, resolved by angelic intervention and divine affirmation. Bringing contemporary trauma theory, the biblical narrative and The Walking Dead into dialogue, this paper explores the possibility of reading Genesis 22 as a post-exilic trauma narrative through which the community explores the paradox of a God who both tests and provides.
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Roman Factors in the Creation of Rabbinic Identity
Program Unit: Early Jewish Christian Relations
Kristin Bocchine, University of North Texas
Greek and Roman authors from the first century B.C.E. to the third century C.E. included Jews within novels, histories, graffiti, edicts, inscriptions, satires, and poems. In both written and visual representations of Jews during the Roman Empire, despite moments of blatant stereotyping and antisemitism, it is clear that Romans knew some information about Jewish cultural, religious, and political practices (for example circumcision, Sabbath keeping, aniconism, monotheism, Temple tax, and avoidance of pork). In fact, this knowledge sometimes translated into formal imperial policy. After the First Jewish Revolt (67-70 C.E.), Roman officials transferred the Temple Tax into the fiscus Judaicus as punishment. Imperial officials knew Jews paid this tax for the up-keep of the Temple, so once Titus destroyed the Temple, the same kind of tax was utilized as a form of shame on the Jewish population since revenue from the fiscus Judaicus went to the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus (Josephus, Bellum Judaicum 7.218; Cassius Dio 66.7.2). Furthermore, Roman authorities applied their specific knowledge of Jewish ethnic identity to enforce the tax forcing suspected Jews to prove their identity (Suetonius, Domitianus 12.2). In the second century C.E., the Emperor Hadrian even went as far as to ban the practice of circumcision, a possibly anti-Jewish measure, leading to the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 132.
While Romans learned about Jewish practices and beliefs in the early empire, Judaism and Jews underwent a transformation. After the end of the Second Temple Period in 70 C.E., Jewish history and traditions transitioned into the Rabbinic Period. This shift was more than temporal, rather fundamental elements of Judaism and Jewish identity changed. Scholars know little about the transition from Second Temple to Rabbinic Judaism because after the first century C.E. there are few Jewish sources until the Mishnah (c. 200 C.E.). Greek and Latin texts and images provide a new approach to this problem. Roman ideas about Jewish identity from the first century B.C.E. to the second century C.E. highlight important ethnic markers like circumcision for Jews. Scholars like Martin Goodman and Andrew Overman noted how Flavian emperors utilized their victory over the Jews in the First Revolt to legitimize their rule while simultaneously enforcing imperial notions of Jewish identity through the fiscus Judaicus, an unashamedly physical conception of identity. Second Temple Jewish sources, meanwhile, emphasized Jewish religious practice and belief over physical characteristics of Jewish identity (see John J. Collins and Daniel M. Freidenreich; Mark 2.18, 24; 7.3; 10.2; Rom. 2.25-29). Greco-Roman ideas are closer to later Rabbinic notions of Jewish identity despite their earlier composition. This paper analyzes the role Roman ideas and the enforcement of these ideas played in the creation of Jewish identity in the Rabbinic Period. As a result, it contends that Roman knowledge of Jews and Judaism as an ethnic minority in the early empire later contributed to the development of Jewish conceptions of their own ethnic identity in the Rabbinic Period.
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Adapting K–12 Literature Circles for the Undergraduate Biblical Studies Classroom
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Kim Bodenhamer, University of Mary Hardin-Baylor
Literature Circles are an effective way to engage students in classroom discussion of the biblical text and with challenging secondary literature. Developed in K-12 education (Harvey Daniels, Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups, 1994) and proven to be an effective method, Literature Circles are highly adaptable to the college classroom. Offering more than a guided small group discussion, the Literature Circle is a structured, scaffolded activity designed to nurture lifelong readers by fostering curiosity and personal connection to texts. In the elementary education model, students are assigned “roles” for discussion and complete worksheets prior to small group discussion. The worksheets for the corresponding roles (Daniels’ roles are: Discussion Director, Literary Luminary, Connector, Summarizer, Character Coordinator and Word Wizard) prompt students to generate questions and observations specific to their role before gathering for a peer-led discussion. While the role worksheets in their most basic form are effective at generating discussion in an introductory class, the Literature Circle worksheets can also be adapted to prompt students toward discipline-specific concerns at a higher level. This presentation will demonstrate several options for adapting and implementing Literature Circles in both introductory and upper-level biblical studies classes along with assessment techniques.
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The Revolt of the Workers in Nehemiah 5 and in Akkadian Literature and the Resolution of the Conflict by Decreeing "Liberation" (Akkadian andurārum and Hebrew derôr)
Program Unit: Literature and History of the Persian Period
Daniel Bodi, La Sorbonne - University of Paris 4
Following W. W. Hallo’s “comparative-contrastive” approach, this paper points out similarities and differences between two cases of social upheaval and revolt and the manner in which they were resolved. On the one hand, we analyze the revolt of the corvée workers in Judah whom the Persian governor Nehemiah conscripted to work on his project in Jerusalem. Neh 5 describes their hard times and a revolt. A famine has put a strain on the farmers as they struggle to work for Nehemiah, to pay the imperial taxes and feed their families. Some took loans against their fields in order to get through the famine and pay the tribute. Defaulting on these loans forced some to give up their fields, or to sell their children as indentured servants to pay off their debt. The work stopped as they revolted until Nehemiah instigated a general liberation from debts. On the other hand, the accounts of workers’ revolts seem to be something of a taboo in Akkadian literature. We compare it to the only Akkadian text that speaks of the revolt of the workers found in the Epic of Atraḫasīs that describes the revolt of the Igigi irrigation canal workers against the Anunnaki. The resolution of their conflict described by the Akkadian term andurāru “liberation,” or “return to the previous state.” In Mari as well as in the Mesopotamian and the Hittite worlds this practice is devoid of the notion of social justice. In the biblical world, however, as found in Neh 5, which seems to be based on the notion of derôr “release (from debts), liberty,” found in Lev 25 and Deut 15, the idea of social justice is present. The newly translated Mari tablets show that the custom of andurāru liberation from debts is known and practiced by the Northwest Semitic populations since the time of the Amorite farmers.
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An Overlooked Composite Allusion to Genesis 15:6 in Pseudo-Philo’s Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum
Program Unit: Intertextuality in the New Testament
Tavis Bohlinger, University of Durham
Pseudo-Philo’s rewriting of Scripture is undergirded throughout by God’s covenant with Abraham, a point observed by scholars of Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum (LAB) since Cohn’s seminal article of 1898. What is missing from the scholarly corpus, however, is both the recognition and examination of Pseudo-Philo’s composite allusion to Genesis 15.6, “And [Abraham] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” This short yet profound statement from the covenant ceremony in Genesis 15 is nearly ubiquitous in early Jewish literature as a explicit citation. The allusion in LAB’s Latin has been modified slightly, but enough that most commentators have overlooked the reference. To complicate matters, the allusion is not located in LAB’s rewritten narrative of Genesis, but is voiced by Joshua during the covenant ceremony of Joshua 24. In LAB 23.5, Pseudo-Philo weaves together a composite allusion including elements of Genesis 11.29; 15.6, and Joshua 24.2-3 in a new speech by God to his people.
In light of this state of affairs, my paper argues two related points. First, I go beyond Jacobson and Konrad, who suggest the influence of Genesis 15.6, to demonstrate the presence of a composite allusion, through an examination of the relevant text of LAB 23, Joshua 24, and Genesis 11 and 15. Whilst Genesis 15.6 in LAB is not a verbatim citation, as found in other early Jewish writings, it is masterfully woven into a novel divine speech composed by Pseudo-Philo including key elements from the story of Abraham. Second, both the form of the allusion and its location in the narrative suggest thoroughgoing implications for how we understand the theology of Pseudo-Philo. If LAB is a covenant-saturated work, then the allusion to Genesis 15.6 by God himself demands our attention. This paper contributes to the study of LAB through the identification and elaboration of an overlooked composite allusion to Genesis 15.6 and from early Jewish literature.
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Boiling Drink, Denial of Resurrection, Hur in Paradise, and a Qur’an within a Scripture: Intratextuality and the Structure of Surat al-Waqi‘ah (Q 56)
Program Unit: Linguistic, Literary, and Thematic Perspectives on the Qur’anic Corpus (IQSA)
Anne-Sylvie Boisliveau, Université de Strasbourg
The study of intratextuality—as multiple relations between a part of a text and other parts of the same text—can sometimes prove as fruitful as the study of intertextuality: the multiple relations of a text to other preceding texts. Surah al-Waqi‘ah (Q 56) possesses textual and literary features that can easily be compared to other surahs. More specifically, a group of surahs—Surat al-Saffat (Q 37), Surat Sad (Q 38), Surat al-Zukhruf (Q 43), Surat al-Dukhan (Q 44), and surrounding surahs—share themes and vocabulary with Q 56. A boiling liquid that evildoers are to drink in Q 56:52–56 is mentioned in Q 37:62–68 and Q 44:45–46; arguments against the belief in resurrection in Q 56:47–48 are close to those in Q 37:16–17; the famous Huris in Paradise (Q 56:22–23) are shared with Q 37 and Q 38, etc. Moreover, understanding of the self-referential passage in Q 56:77–78 is usually aided by the opening of Q 43 about umm al-kitab. Based on a close analysis of these intratextuality cases and similar ones, in terms of vocabulary, themes, self-references and literary devices, this paper intends to provide hypotheses on the structure of Q 56.
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Micah 2:9 and the Traumatic Effects of Depriving Children of Their Parents
Program Unit: Bible and Ethics
Blessing Boloje, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany
This paper shall attempt to examine Micah 2:9 and the traumatic effects of depriving children of their parents against the background of Israel’s social ethics of marginalized minority (poor, homeless aliens, widows and orphans). The family is essentially indispensable bedrock for the development of capacity for devotion and intimacy not only with God and other human beings but also primarily serves as the venue where spiritual and moral values are extended across generations.
Micah 2:9 is located within the unit of Micah’s oracle (2:8–11) that describes victims of exploitation and oppression as “my people” (עַמִי) while his opponents play the role of enemy (אוֹיֵב). These enemies are not only greedy and ruthless marauders who despoil their helpless victims and captives (2:8), but also those who undermine Yahweh’s honor as patron of women and children of his people. The crimes of verse 9 cut to the heart of Israel’s social ethics (cf. Ex 22:21–22; Deut 24:17–18) which are given special attention in the prophetic critique of the major administrators of Israel and Judah (Jer 7:6; Hos 5:10; Zech 7:10). Micah’s rhetoric indicates progressive intensification as those less-privileged are taken advantage of. The language is extravagant and the hyperbole communicates God’s outrage at such callous behaviour.
Micah underscores that children deprived of parents are victims. Separating children from their homes is tantamount to removing them from their potential to be Yahweh’s image bearer, flourishing in the land that Yahweh has graciously given to his people as a glorious inheritance. This again is an egregious violation; namely, stripping God of his הֲדׇרִי (splendor) by taking away the weak and helpless children, the future of the nation, and robbing them of their destiny.
Since the family constitutes a fundamental setting for human development and nurture, the traumatic effects of separating or depriving children of their parents, which could be devastating and lifelong, are of supreme ethical concern. Micah’s rhetoric of children deprived of parents, invites readers to the urgent ethical concerns for compassion and care for those suffering especially, the most vulnerable in society. Truly, the tears and suffering of those whose rights are being violated (to imagine and see children weeping, and parents bereft of their children) speaks.
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Reading the Roman Holidays of the Kalends of January and Saturnalia as Hanukkah in b. Abodah Zarah 8a
Program Unit: Religious Competition in Late Antiquity
Catherine E. Bonesho, University of California-Los Angeles
Mishnah Abodah Zarah prohibits rabbinic Jews from interacting with non-Jews on the two popular Roman holidays of the Kalends (of January) and Saturnalia. In their interpretation of these holidays, the Yerushalmi and the Bavli imagine origin myths that criticize Roman rule and authorize rabbinic authority. The Yerushalmi (y. Abodah Zarah 1:3, 39c) disparages the Kalends and Saturnalia separately: Saturnalia is merely derived from a Hebrew phrase meaning “hidden hatred,” while the Kalends is linked either to a Roman general’s suicide or to Adam’s fear of the dark during the winter solstice. The Yerushalmi’s tales thus denigrate Rome by associating its holidays with hatred and darkness. On the other hand, the Bavli (b. Abodah Zarah 8a) traces the origin of both the Kalends and Saturnalia to a somewhat different tale of Adam and the winter solstice than that found in the Yerushalmi. In the Bavli, Adam’s fear of the dark causes him to fast for eight days, and later to observe an eight-day festival. The Bavli explicitly distinguishes the festival days celebrated by Adam from those that are perverted into the idolatrous festivals of the Kalends and Saturnalia. The Yerushalmi’s and Bavli’s tales of Adam exhibit numerous differences, particularly the rhetoric against gentiles (specifically, Rome) and their holidays is much more negative in the Yerushalmi compared to the Bavli. I argue that one reason for the lessened rhetoric against gentiles in the Bavli’s origin myths is the Babylonian interest in advancing the rabbinic version of the winter holiday of Hanukkah. Numerous details indicate that the Bavli has Hanukkah in mind for the tale of Adam and the winter solstice, including the reference to eight-days, the use of the rabbinic term yom ṭob for Adam’s festival, and the prevalence of light. The Bavli even offers an alternative spelling for Saturnalia that associates the holiday with the Semitic root nwr, meaning light or fire. The specifics of Saturnalia and the Kalends become the interpretive details by which the rabbis connect Hanukkah to light and Creation. Taken together with the reinvention of Hanukkah in b. Shabbat 21b, the assertion that Hanukkah can also be traced back to Adam shows that the holiday is a key concern of the Babylonian rabbis. The lessened rhetoric against gentiles in the Bavli’s origin stories for the Kalends and Saturnalia is not because the rabbis do not find the holidays problematic, but instead is because they want to use these holidays to promote Hanukkah. Finally, the popularity of Saturnalia and the Kalends in Late Antiquity, even possibly among ancient Jews, may also account for why the Babylonian rabbis take up these idolatrous festivals and turn them into the Jewish festivals of Adam. The rabbis reinvent Hanukkah, appropriating facets of the popular Roman holidays of the Kalends and Saturnalia in order to compete with the Jewish celebration of non-rabbinic festivals.
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The Image-Text Dialectic: Contemporary Theory and Ancient Visual Culture
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible, History, and Archaeology
Ryan Bonfiglio, Emory University
Since the 1970s, the study of ancient Near Eastern iconography has advanced various aspects of Old Testament research. Despite the many insights gained, the precise nature of the relationship between ancient art and the biblical text has remained somewhat under scrutinized within the fields of iconographic exegesis and archaeological studies. In contrast, the image-text relationship is a prominent and persistent topic of concern within the burgeoning field of visual culture studies. Particularly important is the work of W. J. T. Mitchell. In his volume Picture Theory, Mitchell develops a what he calls the image-text dialectic. This theory posits that divisions between visual and verbal representations are neither static nor stable. Rather, all forms of media exist along a continuum of representational practices that exhibit both visual and verbal characteristics at one and the same time while never being purely image or text. While Mitchell’s image-text dialectic is not intended to be a comprehensive theory that adequately accounts for all visual and verbal interactions across time and culture, it does offer a framework for conceptualizing the nature of the image-text relationship in particular historical and intellectual settings. The purpose of this paper is to explore how Mitchell’s theory can inform understandings of the image-text relationship in the Near Eastern world. Two particular dimensions of ancient visual culture will be considered: the textuality of ANE art as a type of linguistic system and the interactions between inscriptions and iconography on discrete mixed-media artifacts.
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Eschatological Mirrors: 2 Cor 11:2 and Contemporary Texts on Marriage
Program Unit: Second Corinthians: Pauline Theology in the Making
Adam Booth, Duke University
In 2 Cor 11:2, Paul presents his relationship to the Corinthian church as that of a parent who has betrothed a virgin to Christ. This paper seeks to better understand this image by studying various ways in which contemporary writers spoke of the desirable attributes of virgin brides and of the marriages into which they entered, concentrating on the writings of Pliny the Younger and Plutarch. Though they both somewhat postdate Paul, they have the advantage of having clearly set out views on marriage which they present as traditional. Both of these writers present an image of close, companionate marriage in which the wife actively participates in a process of being formed in her husband’s image as his mirror, often transferring parental language to the husband. For instance, Pliny’s wife Calpurnia begins the study of literature so as she can converse with her new husband about one of his interests. Pliny and Plutarch both present a young woman as well prepared for such a marriage if she were sheltered and had learnt but a few basic skills from her parents. It is often noticed that Paul’s use of the term paristēmi positions the marriage as a future eschatological event. This image, then, may be understood as an instance of Paul’s mimesis language in an eschatological key: As such, closer study opens up the possibility of investigating how Paul varied and developed the eschatological dimension of his calls for imitation, and how he envisaged the roles he, other Christians and Christ would play in this process.
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Judge, King, Priest, Prophet: The Invention of Authority in Deuteronomy 16:18–18:22
Program Unit: Book of Deuteronomy
Francis Borchardt, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Hong Kong
This paper uses the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour to examine the ways in which Deuteronomy 16:18–18:22 erects a framework of divine authority within the society it invents. This study argues that as this passage establishes the foundations for legitimacy in the judicial, royal, cultic, and prophetic realms it renders them ultimately dependent upon a not–entirely–explicit concept of divine control. As such, the society created by this passage is made impotent and ultimately inaccessible except through the figure of Yahweh. No official, and indeed nobody who claims membership within this society can be authorized except through conformity with divine will. This construct places the figure of Yahweh at the nexus of an impregnable matrix of power. The result is that the claims made for the society manufactured by this section of Deuteronomy can only be questioned or criticized by the creation of an entirely different framework.
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Manufacturing Tradition by Performing the Past in Hellenistic Jewish Literature
Program Unit: Transmission of Traditions in the Second Temple Period
Francis Borchardt, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Hong Kong
This study will examine the concept of tradition from the perspective of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory. It will argue that, whether conceived of as a general category of human experience, or a specific group of figures, customs, texts, and past events, tradition does not simply exist as an artifact. That is, it is not a stable entity that can be picked up and used as the explanation for behavior. Instead, this paper will suggest that tradition is created through performance by spokespersons in identifiable settings, along distinct paths, and for precise goals. Investigating tradition through this lens will demonstrate that tradition is never an independent dataset that can be utilized by social actors to support their goals. Rather, tradition is produced by these actors with their goals in mind. This paper will show how this manufacture of tradition operates by highlighting its production in the prologue of Greek Ben Sira, Josephus’ Against Apion 1.38–42, and the prologue of the Sibylline Oracles.
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The Book of Hosea as Literature of Crisis in the Neo-Assyrian Period
Program Unit: Book of the Twelve Prophets
Anna Maria Bortz, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
The beginnings of the Books of Hosea and Amos can be seen as a focal point for the composition of the Book of the Twelve. The literary growth of these "early" writings is closely intertwined with the growth of the Book of the Minor Prophets as a whole. Yet, the literary stages as well as a dating of these books are highly disputed.
Taking the first of the minor prophets as an example, this paper attempts to interpret selected passages of the book of Hosea against the background of the emergence of the Neo-Assyrian empire. The influence of Assyrian military power and especially the aggressive westward expansion during the reign of Tiglat-Pileser III. has brought fundamental changes upon the small states in the Levant. Hence, it is possible to understand early passages in the book of Hosea as directly reflecting the political turbulences starting with the appearance of the Assyrians on the global scene. Relying heavily on written propaganda, it comes as no surprise that Assyrian presence in the Levant would have influenced the literary production in Israel and Judah.
The emergence of the literary kernel of the Book of Hosea (c. 5-9*) and its unconditional prophecy of doom was most likely triggered by the fall of Samaria. Its literary growth and its new addressing to Judah thereby mirrors a process of coping with this disaster. For not only was the Northern kingdom of Israel first truncated, then conquered, dispersed and its cult statue taken as war spoil, a similar situation later also befell its sister nation in the South with the truncation of Judah and the siege of Jerusalem by Sanherib in 701 BCE. So the first literary stages of Hosea can be understood as a theological reappraisal and timely reaction to the historical events.
Especially focusing on the divine punishment, this paper will explore how the book of Hosea and its later Judean audience deals with the events of second half of the 8th c. BCE and which theological mechanisms are employed to interpret the behavior of YHWH during the Assyrian presence in Israel and Judah.
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Julian the Apostate and the Narrative Subsumption of Christianity: Re-reading against the Galilaeans
Program Unit: Greco-Roman Religions
Brad Boswell, Duke University
Roman Emperor Julian ‘the Apostate’ shocked the fourth-century world when he enthusiastically converted from the Christianity of his upbringing to paganism. Though his personal conversion has long drawn popular and scholarly attention, his ensuing endeavors to convert the empire have been insufficiently explored – most especially the role of his anti-Christian treatise, Against the Galilaeans. Yet, this text made an impact. Some 60 years after Julian died, Cyril of Alexandria deemed it necessary to write an enormous refutation, lest Christians in Alexandria become “prey for demons”.
Modern scholarship has largely failed to consider why (let alone offer a satisfactory answer) Julian’s arguments were so compelling. One recent and otherwise good study suggests that Against the Galilaeans stemmed more from “feelings unamenable to argument” than “intellectual conviction”, and it skeptically asks whether Julian’s aim “was ever to produce a refutation of Christianity that was intellectually compelling to any real degree” (Rowland Smith, Julian’s Gods, 190-200). From this reading, one might wonder how it could be that, as Cyril wrote in his refutation, Julian’s literary exposition could have ever ‘shaken a great many’, even ‘throwing those firmly rooted in the faith into confusion’ (Against Julian, Pr. 4.17-21).
In light of such a dearth, this paper traces what made Julian’s treatise so effective that nearly a century later, well after the further political and social entrenchment of Christianity in the Theodosian era, it could still be troubling members of the Alexandrian Christian community. The answer, in short, is narrative subsumption.
Alasdair MacIntyre has suggested that the conflict between some traditions reaches deeper than can be adjudicated by any shared standards of justification – such conflict becomes, rather, narrative conflict, wherein “that narrative prevails over its rivals which is able to include its rivals within it” and “to retell their stories as episodes within its story” (Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 81). In Against the Galilaeans Julian pursues precisely this strategy, extracting key ‘episodes’ – stories, characters, laws, etc. – from the Christian narrative and giving them an entirely reinterpreted place in his own narrative.
This paper quickly sketches the relevant details of Julian’s narrative before showing several examples (regarding cosmogony and sacrificial customs) of how Julian renarrates Christian ‘episodes’. Through these examples we will see that Julian was not simply out “to prove the falsehood of sacred Scripture, as though it were altogether contradictory to itself”, as Lactantius summarizes the strategy of another pagan critic (Inst. 5.2.12). Rather, Julian attempted to renarrate all of Christian history, doctrine, and sacred texts as fragmented pieces that are better understood within his more expansive Hellenic narrative. To the extent that he was successful, Christians would irresistibly find that they have been unwitting characters in a rival narrative the whole time – a strategy which begins to explain the otherwise inexplicable existential forcefulness of Against the Galilaeans.
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Boundaries and Black Sheep in Corinth: The Heuristic Value of Subjective Group Dynamics in Evaluating Derogation of Deviant In-Group Members
Program Unit: Social Scientific Criticism of the New Testament
David E. Bosworth, Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven
Social Identity Theory observes that in-group identity and boundary definition are solidified through adoption of prescriptive group norms. Deviant individuals within the in-group pose a complication by challenging in-group distinctiveness. Subjective group dynamics theory examines the interaction between group members when a member deviates from prescriptive norms. The “black sheep effect” (Marques, Abrams & Serôdio 2001) observes the tendency of in-group members to evaluate other in-group members more harshly than out-group members exhibiting similar behavior. This paper identifies the heuristic value of subjective group dynamics for New Testament interpretation. The social scientific approach is then tested and evaluated using Paul’s response to the immoral man of 1 Corinthians 5:1-13 as a case study. Black sheep effect offers plausible explanation for the absence of in-group bias in Pauline exhortation, demonstrating potential motive for relocation of the immoral man to the outgroup.
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The Natural World in Hebrew and Akkadian Prophecy
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
David A. Bosworth, Catholic University of America
How does the natural world fit into the divine-human relationship at the center of prophetic texts? References to the natural world (living creatures, geographic features, etc) appear in both Hebrew and Akkadian prophetic texts. Elements of the created order may appear as the stage on which events occur, an agent that acts in its own right, an object acted on by others, or a metaphor for something else. The paper will present an analysis of the references to the natural world in Isaiah 1–39 and in the Neo-Assyrian and Mari prophetic corpora. A corpus-based approach allows all aspects of the natural world’s appearances in the texts to emerge for study rather than only those aspects selected for attention. How are these references distributed? What elements of the natural world appear most frequently or in the most striking contexts? How often and in what contexts is nature used in the various types of ways? What patterns emerge from analysis of each corpus? How do the corpora compare to one another? What is the role of the natural world in the divine-human relationship?
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Understanding Early Christian Literacy in Its Social Historical Context
Program Unit: Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism
Pieter Botha, University of South Africa
Literacy has profoundly affected the history of early Christianity and of individuals in the Jesus movement, yet it received little attention from scholars until the last decade or so. Literacy found only an incidental place in work done on early Christianity; in general historians did not give literacy a prominent place in their efforts to understand social relations or social change. In the past 25 years, social history — interest in studying group behaviour and belief, the everyday activities, ideology, and opportunities of ordinary people — have become prominent, yet literacy still lacks proper acknowledgement. This paper reviews and extends the current perspectives on literacy among early Christians. Though the attitudes of early Christians to texts in general, and to their holy books in particular, was not radically different from that of surrounding society, it can also be shown that in this, as in other domains, the early Christians developed a sense of independence and originality. They did not deem themselves bound by certain cultural and religious traditions/conventions and this permitted them, in many ways, to be innovative. The development and success of early Christianity can, in many ways, be characterised as a religious revolution, and in this vein was the Christian conception of authoritative speech, as well as the status and use of writing. Christianity offered both a less reverential attitude to the written word but also a revolutionary commitment to spoken language. These attitudes resulted in interesting practices associated with authority, leadership roles, diversity in ritual, nuances in self-identification, gender roles and social relations among and between classes.
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Preparing a Meal for the Many: Or, How to Do Things with Blood
Program Unit: Mark Passion Narrative
Max Botner, Grand Rapids Theological Seminary
Among the debates over the significance of Mark’s Last Supper, none is more hotly contested than Jesus’s saying over the cup, “this my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many” (Mark 14:24). No doubt part of the issue is that Markan scholars trade in varying definitions of key terms such as “sacrifice” and “atonement.” Perhaps a more pressing issue, however, is the persistent obsession with detecting the singular intertext or type of sacrifice submerged just beneath the surface of Jesus’s words. While this approach is not without value—for instance, most interpreters would agree that Exod 24:8 informs Mark 14:24—it has tended to dominate the discussion in unhelpful ways.
This paper proposes to intervene in the current debate by proposing an alternative entrée into the language of Mark 14:24: the rhetoric of Markan blood manipulation. What we encounter in the cup-saying, I suggest, is not a theory about atonement or the death of Jesus, but, rather, the evangelist’s decision to index a particular element of the ritual complex—the application of blood to altars. This sacrificial metaphor would have significant purchase among early audiences of the Second Gospel, mitigating potential associations of the Lord’s Supper with meat sacrificed to idols, while at the same time preparing an appropriate meal for “the many,” all who desire to participant in the rich benefits of the Christ-event.
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More Than Just Death? Reassessing the Transmission of Hingabeformeln in the Disputed Pauline Epistles
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Max Botner, Grand Rapids Theological Seminary
Pauline scholarship has long been obsessed with questions concerning the origin and reception of the so-called Hingabeformeln (Rom 4:25; 8:32; Gal 1:4; 2:20; Eph 5:2; 1 Tim 2:6; Tit 2:14). Are these formulae entirely or only partially pre-Pauline? Do they derive from primitive exegesis of Isaiah’s fourth servant poem? And, perhaps most importantly, to what extent does Paul embrace the theology encoded in this material? As one might expect, disagreements abound. One issue, however, seems certain: when Paul talks about God “handing over” (παραδίδωμι) his son or about the messiah “handing over himself” ([παρα]δίδωμι ἑαυτόν), the apostle’s concern is precisely the death of Jesus. To say that Jesus “gave himself for our sins” (Gal 1:4) is simply to acknowledge that “he died for our sins.” Indeed, many English translations render παρεδόθη in Rom 4:25 as “[who] was handed over to death,” even though εἰς θάνατoν is not present in the text.
Accordingly, this paper sets out to scrutinize the communis opinio that the Hingabeformeln are merely another way for Paul and his interpreters to say that “Christ died for us” – whether one interprets the phrase in a political or sacrificial register. First, I show that the collocation (παρα)δίδωμι ἑαυτόν never operates as convention for death – much less the death of a martyr – in ancient Mediterranean literature. Paul and his early tradents, therefore, would not take for granted the modern equivalence between “he gave himself” and “he died.” Next, I interrogate Hingabeformeln in the context of Paul’s disputed letters – i.e., Eph 5:2, 1 Tim 2:6, and Tit 2:14. In these instances, we find that language of self-giving is remarkably underdetermined. The reason for this, I argue, is not that these writers intend an equivalence between “gave himself” and “died,” but because they assume the act of self-giving entails more than just death, namely, incarnation.
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Herodium as a Reflection of Herod’s Policy in Judea and Idumea
Program Unit: Archaeology of the Biblical World
Jonathan Bourgel, Université Laval
On the basis of Josephus’ writings, most scholars conclude that Herod the Great (37–4 B.C.E.) started building Herodium in ca. 24–23 B.C.E, on the location where, some 16 years earlier (40 B.C.E.), he won a crucial battle against the partisans of his rival Mattathias Antigonus, the last Hasmonean king.
There are no grounds to doubt that those critical events, during which Herod almost lost his life, left a deep and lasting impression on him and that he vowed to erect a commemorative monument at the place where he triumphed over his enemies. It is also likely that at the outset he intended Herodium to be his burial site. However, the fact that Herodium was not designed to be merely a memorial but also a palace complex, a fortress and an administrative district capital makes it obvious that other factors lay behind its construction as well. Furthermore, archaeological data point to an earlier date for the building of Herodium and show that it underwent several construction phases during Herod’s reign.
This paper proposes a partially refined chronology for Herodium and aims to discern the specific historical circumstances behind each of its construction phases. In other words, and although great caution is needed in establishing and using an archaeological chronology based on typological and stratigraphic considerations, the study will attempt to anchor the chronology of Herodium in the general chronology of Herod's reign. It will be grounded on the analysis of textual evidence (primarily from Josephus’ writings) combined with the most updated archaeological information and geographical data.
It will argue that Herodium’s location on the traditional boundary between Judea and Idumea largely determined its establishment and development. On the one hand, Herod first conceived and built Herodium in the 30s of the first century B.C.E. as a fortress refuge at the gate of Idumea against any attempt at revolt coming from Judea. To this end, Herodium marked the border between Judea and Idumea. Herodium may even have been considered a potential alternative center of power outside the turbulent capital city. But, on the other hand, the transformation of Herodium into a toparchy capital (in the 20s of the first century B.C.E.) also improved the kingdom’s administrative organization and enabled better communication between the two Idumean toparchies and the rest of Judea; in other words, it contributed to the full integration of Idumea into Judea.
Thus, while as a fortress Herodium functioned as a border marker between Judea and Idumea in the early years of Herod’s reign, as a toparchy capital it was aimed to be a border eraser.
Finally, it is not unreasonable to think that Herod’s choice of Herodium as his burial place derived from his desire to be buried next to the Judean-Idumean border area, as a reflection of the sometime conflicting components of his identity.
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Jerusalem in Rome and the Galilee: Encountering the Holy City from the Street in Jewish and Christian Mosaics
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
Ra'anan Boustan, Princeton University
The ongoing excavations in the fifth-century synagogue at Huqoq in lower eastern Galilee have revealed a series of impressive floor mosaics. Among the mosaics discovered at Huqoq, none has elicited more interest than the enigmatic Elephant Mosaic. In our view, the panel depicts the siege of Jerusalem in 132/1 BCE under Antiochus VII Sidetes and the subsequent military alliance between the Seleucid king and the Hasmonaean high priest John Hyrcanus. This historical episode appears in a wide range of extant sources from the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods, from Diodorus Siculus to Josephus to Plutarch, and continued to circulate within the tradition of both classical and Christian historiography throughout the first millennium.
The present paper analyzes the use of urban architecture within the panel, in particular the arcade in the middle register whose nine arches frame the armed Judaeans and their leader. In mosaics, representations of cities, including Jerusalem, frequently incorporate colonnaded streets, an indication of their importance in the visual vocabulary of urbanism. Their presence in mosaics reflects the increased significance of the street as a primary site of religious and civic displays in late antiquity. We argue that, within the context of the Elephant Mosaic, the arcade was intended to conjure for the viewer the city of Jerusalem and, moreover, to connect the synagogue building in the village of Huqoq to this renowned setting of momentous events in Jewish history.
We consider the role played by colonnaded streets in late antique depictions of Jerusalem, in particular the relationship of the arcade in the middle register of the Elephant Mosaic to Jerusalem in the fifth-century mosaic in the apse of the Church of Santa Pudenziana in Rome. The representation of Jerusalem in the church’s apse mosaic offers the Christian viewer an opportunity to visually participate at street level in the religious life of that city and thus feel a sense of kinship with a community whose sacred center was a city located nearly 1500 miles to the east. We argue that the arcade in the Elephant Mosaic served a similar function. Through its visual encomium to the glorious past and built environment of Jerusalem, the Elephant Mosaic made the holy city present to synagogue-goers at the heart of a rural village in the Galilee. The panel, thereby, forged a link between the space of communal worship in this relatively modest village and the wider network of urban centers, both in Palestine and beyond.
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Michael Swartz’s Vision for the Study of Early Jewish Mysticism and Magic
Program Unit: Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity
Ra'anan Boustan, Princeton University
This paper will offer introductory reflections on Michael Swartz’s The Mechanics of Providence. Particular stress will be placed on Swartz’s methodological approach to the study of early Jewish mysticism and magic, which stresses balancing attention to textual issues, on the one hand, and to the dynamic contexts of ritual performance, on the other.
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A Marbleless New Jerusalem: A Reading of Revelation from the Cultural Context of Ephesian Marble-Workers
Program Unit: John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern
Anna M. V. Bowden, Brite Divinity School (TCU)
This paper offers a reading of Revelation from the cultural context of marble-workers in Roman Ephesus. I begin with a brief introduction to the Ephesian marble economy and the various jobs such a large enterprise demanded. Next, I explore two passages from the cultural context of Ephesian marble-workers – the final “great earthquake” (16:17-21) and John’s description of the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:12-27). First, an earthquake destroys not only marble-clad Rome and her imperial provincial cities, such as the seven addressed in chapters 2-3, but also the empire’s source of marble – its mountains (6:17-21). Through the destruction of the imperially enmarbled cities of Asia Minor and the elimination of mountains, John’s God erases the entire imperial marble economy. Second, while other condemned imperial goods from the cargo list (18:11-13) are mentioned in John’s description of the New Jerusalem (21:12-27), marble is left out. John’s New Jerusalem is marbleless. The effect of John’s rhetoric, therefore, is not merely to scorn the marble economy, but through the silent force of omission, to eradicate it. In his eschatological visions of the establishment of God’s world, John erases the livelihood of marble-workers making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to imagine their future in the new city.
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Intertextuality and Liturgy: A Study of the Relationship between Hab 3 and Pss 29, 77, and 18
Program Unit: Israelite Prophetic Literature
Samuel Boyd, University of Colorado Boulder
The difficulties inherent in a translation of Hab 3 present themselves on a variety of levels, including lexical, syntactical, and issues of text criticism (particularly the history of the transmission of the text). While some of these issues will no doubt remain debated, a recent examination of the relationship between Hab 3 and certain psalms via intertextuality has aided in interpretative issues of this complex chapter in Habakkuk. This study seeks to utilize these insights regarding Hab 3 and its intertextual relationship with Pss 29, 77, and 18 in order to highlight the liturgical importance of Hab 3. Therefore, the focus is not the historical development of Hab 3, or whether it is original to the book of Habakkuk, vital as those questions are. Rather, the study will focus on the literary relationship between Hab 3 and Pss 29, 77, and 18 as they present themselves to the reader. Such an examination via intertextuality allows one to limn the combined effect of the various components of each of the three psalms on the liturgical importance of Hab 3, thereby allowing for a deeper understanding of the meaning of Hab 3 as the literary heir of texts expressing Israel’s hopes for deliverance and freedom.
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The Meaning of ḫmt in KTU 1.14 ii 12 and 1.14 iii 55: Contextual and Comparative Considerations
Program Unit: Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy
Samuel Boyd, University of Colorado Boulder
The phrase b.ẓl.ḫmt appears often as a restoration of KTU 1.14 ii 12 in El's instructions to Kirta, translated as “in the shade of the tent.” This restoration seems certain given its occurrence in KTU 1.14 iii 55, which is the parallel narrative passage. However, this restoration and the passage in KTU 1.14 iii 55 are the only occasions where the word ḫmt appears in the Ugaritic lexicon and therefore its translation has been debated. Gray, eschewing the notion of “tent” or “pavilion,” opts instead for “pen” or “coop,” viewing the word not as the place for incubation rites or cultic dwelling for people, but rather as a structure where the king went to get “sacrificial animals.” Given its sparse attestation in Ugaritic, the translation “tent,” which is based on related roots elsewhere in Ugaritic and comparative linguistic data, is non-descript. The function of such a word in the Kirta Legend and a more precise understanding of what the word ḫmt connotes would be beneficial for interpreting KTU 1.14 ii 12 and its parallel passage KTU 1.14 iii 55. Various avenues of study, including an examination of related words in Ugaritic, a contextual assessment of the relevant passages in Kirta, and comparative evidence in Geʿez and Arabic (as well as an excursus regarding a proposed cognate in the HB), will be presented. I argue that, although Ugaritic texts are sparse and as a result these local attestations and literary contexts are inconclusive, comparative evidence indicates that the occurrence of ḫmt in KTU 1.14 iii 55 and restored in KTU 1.14 ii 12 likely has the notion of a cultic tent and not a mere “pen” or “coop,” as Gray suggests.
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Esther through the Looking Glass: The Refraction of Ethnographic Constructs in Greek Esther
Program Unit: Greek Bible
Cameron Boyd-Taylor, Trinity Western University
George Stirling argued some time ago that the genre of apologetic historiography in Hellenistic literature developed in direct response to Greek ethnography. An analogous argument can be made for certain prose romances. Both genres provided a means by which native authors could contest the depiction of their ethnic group by Greek authors, and advance a rival identity. This typically involved the appropriation and redeployment of constructs drawn from ethnographic literature. My paper will examine such strategies at work in the three versions of Esther extant in Greek (the Oʹ-text, L-text and Josephus) with specific reference to the charge of xenophobia. Taking up a critical term from Bakhtin, we might speak of dialogic discourse. The various constructs of Jewish ethnicity voiced within the fictive world of Greek Esther simultaneously address the claims of Greek ethnographers.
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Why Mahlon and Chilion Died According to the Targum
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Christian Brady, University of Kentucky
This paper will examine Targum Ruth’s explanation of why the sons of Naomi died in the land of Moab, its relationship with Midrashic traditions, and relevance for dating the exegetical strata of Targum Ruth.
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"In the Midst of the Children": Finding Jesus in the Gospel of Judas
Program Unit: Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism
David Brakke, Ohio State University
This paper proposes a new solution to the textual problem of Gospel of Judas 33:18–21 and thereby interprets Jesus’ arrivals and departures as key to the gospel’s structure and its understanding of the saved.
The gospel offers a brief summary of Jesus’ earthly ministry as the prologue to the four appearances of Jesus to his disciples and/or Judas that follow. The summary concludes, “And many a time he is not revealing himself to his disciples, but nhrot you are finding him in their midst.” The Coptic nhrot must be corrupt, and most scholars have accepted the original editors’ suggestion that it is related to the Bohairic ḥroti, “child,” and they translate, “but as a child you are finding him in their midst.” As others have pointed out, however, ḥroti is attested almost always as a plural (Crum 631a), and the text lacks the indefinite article (ou) for “as a child.” These problems are overcome if we understand nhrot as “the children” and thus as the extraposited antecedent of “their” in “in their midst” (Layton, Coptic Grammar §330). That is, “And many a time he is not revealing himself to his disciples, but you are finding him in the midst of the children.” The sentence does not, as previous translations suggest, contrast the manner in which Jesus appears to the disciples—as himself or as a child—but to whom and how Jesus relates—to the disciples by mere appearance or to the children by being found in their midst. (It is possible that “you are finding him” should be emended to “he is being found.”)
So understood, the sentence provides an appropriate segue from the prologue to the body of the gospel, in which Jesus comes and goes from the disciples. Three appearances are marked by Jesus being said either to come or to appear and, in two cases, then to depart (33:20–36:10, 36:11–37:20, 37:20–44:14); a fourth appearance, to Judas, follows, ending with departure on a luminous cloud (44:15–58:6). An epilogue, describing Judas’ handing over of Jesus, concludes the gospel.
Jesus’ coming and going provides the gospel’s structure, and it corresponds to the gospel’s division between the disciples and their followers, on the one hand, and the saved people, on the other. When the disciples ask Jesus where he has gone after he leaves them, he replies, “I went to another great and holy race” (36:11–17). The chosen race does not consist of “offspring of this aeon” (37:2), but presumably of “the children” in whose midst Jesus is found when he is not appearing to the disciples. Jesus is to be found, not in his fleeting appearances to the disciples nor in the thanksgiving over the bread that they and their successors celebrate, but only among the children of the great and holy race, whose absence from the gospel’s narrative space its readers are invited to fill.
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Late Bronze Age Temple Architecture and Cultic Activity at 'Umayri
Program Unit: Archaeology of the Biblical World
Kent V. Bramlett, La Sierra University
Discovery of a Late Bronze Age temple at Tall al-‘Umayri, Jordan, provides insight into Bronze Age religious practice in the southern Levant. Analysis of the architectural plan and use of space suggests modes of community participation in cultic activity. Improvised clay figurines and a predominance of platter bowls found in several of the rooms indicate worshiper participation in votive and sacral activity. Comparison with contemporary cultic sites elucidates similar ritual behavior at sites typically designated Canaanite.
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So Many Learning Goals, So Little Time! A “Critical Introduction” to a Biblical Writing as Omnibus Assignment
Program Unit: Teaching Biblical Studies in an Undergraduate Liberal Arts Context
George Branch-Trevathan, Thiel College
First-year students in my course on “Interpreting Scriptures: Jewish, Christian, and Islamic” are asked to learn something about the contents of these canons and about how people interpret them in pursuit of “lives of meaning and purpose,” to use a phrase from my institution’s mission statement. Since the course is part of a core curriculum, they also need to learn how to locate and evaluate secondary sources and to communicate orally and in writing. To make some progress towards each of these learning goals, I invite students to present a “critical introduction” to one writing of the Hebrew Bible. Working in groups of two or three, they scour textbooks, dictionaries of the Bible, commentaries, and sometimes articles and monographs to find multiple answers to questions on which modern scholars seeking to describe the original meaning(s) of biblical texts have often focused: Who wrote it (the question of authorship)? When was it written (date)? Was the book originally written as it appears now or were parts added at different times (literary integrity)? What is the work’s literary structure (outline)? What are the main claims that the work makes (themes)? What does the author intend to accomplish with this writing (purpose)? This ten-minute presentation will briefly describe this assignment; invite audience members, working in small groups and utilizing prior knowledge, to outline a critical introduction; and then invite the audience as a whole to discuss and assess the assignment.
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Four Logia from Fragmentary Early Christian Papyri
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Rick Brannan, Faithlife/Appian Way Press
Sayings of Jesus are all over in Christian writings. They are found in the New Testament gospels, of course. They are also found in canonical material outside of the gospels. They are found in apocryphal gospels, acts, and apocalypses as well as works of early Christian writers. But the papyri, those incomplete fragments of theological tracts, homilies, commentaries, liturgies, hymns, and who knows what else, also contain mention of sayings of Jesus.
This paper examines four logia that occur in three relatively early papyri (P.Amh. Gr. 1 2, AD/CE 300–399; P.Iand. 5.69, AD/CE 300–399; and P.Gen. 3.125, AD/CE 150–249). These logia are not cataloged in Stroker's “Extracanonical Sayings of Jesus,” which organizes and presents extracanonical sayings of Jesus from a wide array of sources.
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“[God] Has Put Infinity in Their Mind” (Eccl 3:11b): Qohelet’s Quest to Comprehend the Incomprehensible
Program Unit: Wisdom and Apocalypticism
Heather Woodworth Brannon, Emory University
Qohelet’s persistent pursuit to understand the logical underpinnings of reality leads him to chase the unattainable. Furthermore, his reluctance to address God directly in order to provoke illuminating discussion exemplifies his perception of God as a distant deity. Many commentators consider Ecclesiastes 3:11 to be an example of such distance between God and humanity. In 3:11, God sets ʿôlām in the lēb, yet prevents humans from comprehending what God is doing. A majority of scholars place the exegetical emphasis on determining the most accurate meaning of the words ʿôlām and lēb without considering the larger ideas these words convey within the book.
This paper examines God’s direct role in Qohelet’s evolving perception of the infinite by analyzing the impact of God setting ʿôlām into Qohelet’s lēb in 3:11, within its wider textual context of 3:9–15, and throughout the remainder of the book (3:16–12:14). This impact cannot be ascertained without considering two related idioms in Qohelet—“I said with my lēb” and “I set my lēb”—which demonstrate epistemological shifts (between seeing and knowing) before and after God sets ʿôlām in the lēb. This paper sheds light on the relationship between divine intentionality (ʿôlām as a cognitive stimulus in the lēb) and human actions (Qohelet cogitating), which enable Qohelet to understand his own human limitations.
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Aversion as a Rhetorical Strategy in the Acts of Thomas and Buddhist Tradition
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Jo-Ann Brant, Goshen College
The Acts of Thomas version of Christianity requires complete sexual abstinence even within the bonds of marriage, a requirement treated by his Indian audience as a wholly new concept. Given that the Greco-Roman world was fascinated by all things Indian including their sexual asceticism and given that the Church in India, or elsewhere, apparently did not follow Thomas' call for extreme celibacy, Thomas presents a puzzle. I make sense of this puzzle by looking at how Buddhist stories contain a similar rhetoric of aversion in order to teach acceptance and generosity.
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The Fabulist Communication of Eden’s Talking Snake: Insights into Genesis 3 through the Lens of the Early Mesopotamian Genre Fable
Program Unit: Wisdom and Apocalypticism
Dana Brattlof, Harvard University
Readers have long appreciated the unique communications of the varied hands involved within the works of the Hebrew Bible. Each literary form and genre, utilized by its individual authors, uniquely delivers what the other has not. The writing of Genesis 2 through 4 plus 6 stands as evidence, as its various textual ideas are presented through the employ of the genres of narrative, dialogue, poetry, and fable. Yes, that’s right, fable.
A main characteristic of the early genre fable is not only its presentation of competitive, yet wise and witty talking animals, but also its wisdom like content with ends that surprise. Genesis 3 fits the bill of fable with its “crafty talking serpent” and its “lack of death” ending that have been documented topics of conversation among biblical scholars since the early seventeen hundreds. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, no known scholars have explored the text of Genesis 3 with the early literary genre of fable as wisdom literature in mind.
This paper will fill this void, as it investigates the larger work of Genesis 2 through 4 plus 6 through the lens of early contest literature as generational wisdom. This paper maintains that the author of Genesis 3 drew upon early Mesopotamian literary structures and forms, like the Legend of Etana with its embedded fable of the Snake and the Eagle, to present itself as something familiar, yet surprisingly unique, a message of wisdom’s beginning expressed best through the genre of early fable.
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The Provincial Contexts of Paul’s Imprisonments: Legal Procedure and Social Connectivity in Roman Greece and Asia Minor
Program Unit: The Historical Paul
Cédric Brélaz, Université de Fribourg - Universität Freiburg
Recent scholarship has convincingly shown that the various references to ‘chains’, to ‘prisons’ and to the apostle being a ‘prisoner’ in Paul’s letters were not meant to be metaphorical, but should rather be understood as many proofs that the apostle suffered several imprisonments in the cities he visited in Asia Minor and Greece. Thus, these mentions should be added to the many cases where, in Acts, Paul is depicted as undergoing law enforcement actions, as in Philippi where the apostle is said to have been put in jail or in Corinth where he is said to have been brought before the governor himself for a hearing—not to mention the long judicial sequence in Judaea of Acts 21-26. Whereas the narrative of Acts suggests that the apostle, when facing repressive measures, had direct contact with prominent representatives of provincial or local authorities (governors, local officials and institutions, members of the local elite), a different picture emerges from the multiple experiences of prisons described in Paul’s letters. In particular, the references to the staff of the governor’s headquarters (which is most probably the meaning of praitorion in Phil 1:13) as well as to the members of the emperor’s household (Phil 4:22) hint at a substantially different social connectivity for Paul during his imprisonments. This paper will address the issue of the discrepancies in the way the experiences of prisons of the apostle are depicted in Acts as opposed to Paul’s letters and will discuss the legal and social context of Paul’s imprisonments in the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, relying on evidence other than NT. It will be argued that: 1. The reasons which led local or provincial authorities to take measures against Paul had mainly to do with the basic requirements of law enforcement in local communities of Asia Minor and Greece and were not primarily related to the Christian nature of the apostle’s preaching; for that reason, Paul was considered and treated as any other individual disrupting public order. 2. Contrary to what is suggested in Acts, Paul certainly had few opportunities to have direct access to local officials or to Roman governors to argue his case; Paul’s connectivity, in particular within provincial administration, was limited to people of much lower rank. These remarks will shed additional light on two interrelated issues that are much discussed in recent scholarship: the attention paid to the first Christian groups by local and Roman authorities in the mid-first century, and the intention of the author of Acts in emphasizing the procedural dimension of Paul’s arrests and his connection with high-level people.
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Reading the Holiness Material alongside Isaiah in the Persian Period
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Mark Brett, Whitley College
Accepted paper for the IBR annual meeting in 2019, Isaiah research group
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An Unexpected Shame: Jesus’ Silence (Mark 14:60–61a) in Its Socio-historical and Narrative Contexts
Program Unit: Gospel of Mark
Scott K. Brevard, Loyola University of Chicago
Silence is a key feature in the Gospel of Mark, but most attempts to analyze silence get overshadowed by the “Messianic Secret” motif. This provides a monochromatic or simplistic understanding of silence in the gospel. On the contrary, silence is, as Michal Beth Dinkler has argued, “multivalent, contextually-driven, and rhetorically powerful” (2013: 17). This often goes unnoticed in one of the key moments of the gospel—Jesus’ trial (14:53–65)—where Jesus’ silence (14:60–61a) is seen as a seemingly positive action. Morna Hooker went so far as to claim that Jesus’ “silence emphasizes his innocence” (1991: 359). Like Hooker, a majority of commentators fall back on the lack of any formal charge to justify the silence. However, many treatments of this pericope fail to take into account the broader narrative motif of silence or consider the socio-historical implications of failing to reply to an accusation (14:60). This study seeks to better understand Jesus’ silence during his trial by looking at the narrative multivalence and the socio-historical context of honor challenges and ripostes. By comparing Jesus’ silence to other instances of silence in the narrative and attempting to understand this scene as an instance of an unanswered honor challenge, Jesus’ silence is no longer seen as a positive action but instead a further instance of his increasing shame in the Passion Narrative.
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"Sing in Me, Muse": Converging Soundscapes in the Prologues of the Odyssey and Hebrews
Program Unit: The Bible in Ancient (and Modern) Media
Jeffrey E. Brickle, Urshan Graduate School of Theology
While reflecting radically different eras, outlooks, genres, and styles, both Homer’s Odyssey and the Epistle to the Hebrews capitalize on the theme of an epic homecoming. The “hero” of each work seeks to lead his people on a journey fraught with danger in order to arrive safely at the intended telos. This essay will explore the prospect that the opening of Hebrews may aurally evoke the opening of the Odyssey, a well-known cultural text celebrated in antiquity for its literary characteristics, frequently deemed a mimetic exemplar, and deeply embedded in the psyche and paideia of Greco-Roman society. By investigating (1) key shared words and concepts, (2) the distinctive sound signatures developed by these prologues, (3) subjecting both prologues to the principles for euphonious composition advocated in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s On Literary Composition (which, incidentally, begins with a quotation from the Odyssey and frequently cites Homer), and (4) examining aural resonances between these passages, the essay will attempt to demonstrate the value of utilizing sound mapping for interpreting biblical texts. Importantly, the study will evaluate the auditory effects obtained when Dionysius’s recommendations on elements such as word order, melody, rhythm, variety, and appropriateness are factored into our comparative analyses. This essay will advance the preliminary inquiry into this topic proposed by the author in his contribution to Sound Matters: New Testament Studies in Sound Mapping, volume 16 in Cascade’s Biblical Performance Criticism series.
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The Labor of Freedpersons is Never Free
Program Unit: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible
Sheila Briggs, University of Southern California
This paper was invited for the joint session with the Slavery, Resistance, and Freedom unit.
It juxtaposes Paul's ambiguous statement about the opportunity for an enslaved person to be manumitted in 1 Corinthians 7:21 with two sets of texts, one from the Greco-Roman world and one from post-Reconstruction America. Both ancient and modern texts place significant limits on how far formerly enslaved persons can benefit from their labor. In the Greco-Roman world this occurs through the obligations of freedpersons to their former owners, now their patrons. In modern America racial and gender divisions of labor prevent freedpersons from exercising skills they may have acquired while slaves. In both historical contexts the Pauline statement reinscribed the economic vulnerability of the formerly enslaved.
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Priests Getting Paid: The Rhetoric of Money and Authority in Leviticus 6–7 and the Marseille Tariff
Program Unit: Biblical Law
William Briggs, Baylor University
In spite of its potential to offer insight into the cultic prescriptions and personnel in the Hebrew Bible, the inscription known as the Marseille Tariff (CIS I 165; KAI 69), a Punic document from circa the 4th-3rd centuries BCE that enumerates dues for priests from various sacrifices, has given rise to a small body of research. Much of this research is devoted to lexical and epigraphic issues. Indeed, investigations of the Marseille Tariff such as those of Mathias Delcor and Paul G. Mosca have focused largely upon how best to interpret the inscription’s frequently obscure, difficult, or technical vocabulary. Despite the work of David Baker, who compares the structure of the Marseille Tariff and Leviticus 1—7, and James Watts, who examines the rhetoric of the Marseille Tariff in relation to Leviticus, connections between the Marseille Tariff and the biblical text remain largely unexplored.
This presentation builds on the work of Baker and Watts in trying to address this lacuna within scholarship. To do so, it compares the Marseille Tariff and Leviticus 6—7, a text that prescribes the priests’ portion of the offerings of the Israelite cult, with regard to the rhetorical intent, techniques, and setting of each document. An examination of the Marseille Tariff in comparison to Leviticus 6—7 demonstrates significant differences between the two documents, particularly with respect to their rhetorical settings, appeals to authority and enforcement mechanisms, threatened punishments for the violation of their respective prescriptions, and sequence of offerings. This examination concludes that the Marseille Tariff asserts its authority over its audience through its physical setting in a temple and its appeal to an external political body that developed and enforces its prescriptions for offerings. Furthermore, it discourages observable cultic violations through threats of punishment. In contrast, Lev 6—7 asserts authority over its audience by presenting itself as oral proclamation from Yahweh and Moses, the ultimate religious authorities in Israel’s hallowed past, while threatening punishment for failure to follow instructions in private settings. In addition, by placing the ʿolah (whole burnt offering) first in the list of offerings, Lev 6—7 presents a selfless ideal for offerings that provides cover for the priests’ more mundane, quotidian economic concerns, unlike the Marseille Tariff, which simply lists the meatiest and most expensive animals first. The study of the rhetoric of these two texts thus offers a path for the comparison of the Marseille Tariff and the biblical text that allows for these texts to be mutually illuminating, particularly with regard to the roles of cultic figures in the ancient Mediterranean and the ways in which they sought to gain material resources and assert authority over their audiences.
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Some Remarks on the Eshmunazor Inscription
Program Unit: Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy
Françoise Briquel Chatonnet, Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique, France
A new study of the inscription on the sarcophagus of Eshmunazor II, king of Sidon, now preserved in Louvre Museum, suggested a new reconstruction of the history of his reign. It will be argued that there was only one expedition in Egypt, at the beginning of his reign, which can be linked with that of the Persian king Cambyses.
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Slavery and Politics in the Epistle to the Galatians
Program Unit: Paul and Politics
Joseph E. Brito, Concordia University - Université Concordia
The following presentation will focus on Paul’s language on slavery in his letter to the Galatians. Using an intersectional approach (Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, 2012), I wish to explore the theme of ethnic minority and slaves within this “imaginary” community (Benedict Anderson, 1983) in parallel with the socio-cultural tensions alluded in his letter but present not only in the province of Galatia. Using the works of Davina Lopez (2008) and Brigitte Kahl (2010), I wish to extend the socio-historical examination of the Galatian community by concentrating on the topic of the disenfranchised. To do so, I will begin by analyzing the political rhetoric on Roman “Libertas” and its contrast with the notions of slavery. I will then briefly present the socio-cultural landscape as illustrated by Stephen Mitchell (1993), Davina Lopez, and Brigitte Kahl, focusing on the ethnic tension between the Gauls and the Romans. At last, I will proceed to examine the letter to the Galatians, focusing on Paul’s language on slavery – which differs from his letter to the Corinthians or Ephesians. In Galatians, rather than addressing slaves, providing advices to both owners and slaves, or introducing himself as a “slave of Christ Jesus” within his salutation, Paul’s language on slavery instead focuses on lineage (the descendants of Sarah and Hagar), the body (enslaved to the elements of the world), or as identity marker (e.g. the uses the metaphor of “slave of God”). In these sections, Paul contrasts the notion of slavery with liberty (see Gal. 3:28, 4:22, 4:31, 5:1, and 5:13), while also contrasting the flesh with the spirit. Furthermore, his call for fraternity is also embedded with language of slavery (Gal. 5:13). While previous scholarship has focused on the dichotomy between Jewish and Gentile identity (see for example, Atsuhiro Asano, 2005), this research wishes to center the conversation at the periphery; how would an ethnic minority, non-citizens, and slaves interpret Paul’s message in light of the Roman rhetoric of Libertas? How does the enslavement of the flesh, the fruits of the flesh, or the comparison between the son of the Free-Woman and that of the Slave-Woman play into the imagination? How does the dichotomy between the spiritual and material world was interpreted? I therefore wish to address how Paul’s language on slavery interrelates with notions of ethnicity, citizenship, and Libertas. By focusing on the body, lineage, and the metaphors on slavery found in this letter, I wish to present Paul’s letter to the Galatians in the larger socio-cultural context of 1st century Galatia. I will therefore demonstrate how this rhetoric influenced the affirmation of communal identity, while also proposing ways in which that Paul’s language on slavery in the context of Roman Libertas could have been interpreted.
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Neurology, Narrativity, and Iconography in the Genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:1–17)
Program Unit: Bible and Visual Art
Edwin K. Broadhead, Berea College
I am asking how recent studies in brain signaling and memory intersect with New Testament texts. My analysis moves beyond mental reflection and seeks to engage, at the foundational levels of the brain, recent insights into neural signaling. This brings into play the dynamics of human evolution. The genetic legacy of the brain is subsequently shaped through experience, and this shaping is expressed in the form of neural signaling. These pathways flow naturally into memory and narrativity. Every engagement with a text is a neurological event, a type of remembering and reformulating. Thus, it is clear that we who work in narratives have much to learn from the field of neurology.
I wish to demonstrate the interconnection of neurology, narrativity, and iconography in the genealogy of Matthew 1:1-17. Here I seek to move from thinking about the genealogy to thinking, as much as possible, from within the genealogy—to move from the focus on what it says to the question of how and why. This approach unveils the way in which the opening lines of the Gospel of Matthew may sponsor different manifestations of God’s history with Israel. I will employ from brain research the established categories of semantic memory and episodic memory, but I will also propose a new category of iconic memory. I will demonstrate this new realm through two iconic representations of the genealogy—the Byzantine image of Michael Damaskenos and the modern illumination of Donald Jackson. If the category of iconic memory can be sustained by critical analysis, then it represents a contribution from narrative studies to the field of neurology.
The genealogy of Jesus, when seen through the intersection of narrative and neurology, may serve as a semantic memory, as an episodic memory, and as an iconic memory. In its function, the genealogy may be compared to a Hebrew Torah scroll. The scroll has semantic value as a revered object, it has episodic value as the story of Israel, and it has iconic value as a window onto a particular form of Jewish experience and identity. The more the semantic value transits to episodic and iconic mode, the more this tradition becomes adaptive, autonoetic (self-aware), and autobiographical. Through these processes, the roll of the dead becomes a scroll of living tradition.
Moreover, the genealogy points to a much larger process of remembering. In forthcoming publications I will argue that the entirety of the Gospel of Matthew is shaped by such neural and narrative processes.
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Parabolic Rhetoric and the Recklessness of Lukan Liberality
Program Unit: Gospel of Luke
Amanda Brobst-Renaud, Valparaiso University
Though scholarly discussions of fables frequently include parables from the Old Testament (2 Sam 12:1-13 and 2 Kgs 14:9), efforts to clearly distinguish New Testament parables from fables and vice-versa are prevalent. The polysemy of fables and related literature, however, frustrates a tidy separation of the genres. With respect to ancient authors, Aristotle and the author of Ad Herennium include parabolai among literature associated with fables (Rhet. 20.3, Rhet. Her. 6.10), which affirms the tendencies for ancient authors to associate fables with various other genres. In this presentation, I argue that the polysemy and ubiquity of fables and related literature open the way for a consideration of the similarities between fables and New Testament parables on the basis of their rhetorical function and their mimetic qualities. Plutarch’s Lives and Luke 14:7-24 serve as illustrations for this investigation.
The rhetorical function of parables in the New Testament, in some cases, is similar to that of fables in bioi. Both fables and Lukan parables 1) assume a rhetorical or educational context, 2) support the overarching argument, and 3) possess mimetic qualities by illustrating behaviors to emulate or avoid. In particular, Lukan parables respond to comments, questions, and underlying attitudes or behaviors of the audience and advocate mimesis through story.
To illustrate the parables’ rhetorical function and the ways it is similar to fables’ rhetorical function in bioi, I examine Luke 14:7-24 and Plutarch’s Lives. In both cases, the authors present characteristics to emulate and to avoid via parables and fables, respectively. These examples illustrate the authors’ tendency to place parables and fables in the service of mimesis. The comparison of these two authors also reveals that Luke advocates for behaviors of reckless generosity, in advocating that his audience give to those who cannot repay (Luke 6:34-35, 14:14) and, at the same time, critiques those who refuse to join the banquet (14:17-20, 24, 15:28, 32). In ways similar to fables in bioi, the Lukan parables entice audiences to mimesis.
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Exegesis as Theological Compendium: Luther’s Commentary on Genesis as an Alternative Systematic Theology
Program Unit: History of Interpretation
Brian R. Brock, University of Aberdeen
Martin Luther never wrote a systematic theology. But in his mature years he did respond to the demands of the students he was training for the reformed ministry for a comprehensive survey of his views of God and the Christian life. He undertook this task by embarking on the gargantuan journey of a line by line commentary on the biblical book of Genesis. For the last ten years of his life Luther lectured twice a week on the book of Genesis, completing the final chapter only months before his death. Luther’s pedagogically and theologically motivated decision to display the coherence of his mature though in the genre of theological exegesis instead of a systematic survey was methodologically significant. Two methodological assumptions for his decision to present his mature theology in exegetical form stand out. First, Luther’s Logos-Christology foregrounds the enscripturated mediation of Christ in Christian life. For Luther studying scripture is a work of familiarizing one’s self and the believing community with the contours of the living voice of Christ that is the essential component of faithful Christian thought and action. Second, teaching Christian faith and belief by following the sequence of divine acts as set out in the narratives of Genesis highlights the ebb and flow of God’s activity. God gives Godself to creatures not as “system” but within the sequences of historical events. Luther’s decision to teach his theology by exegesis thus represents a rejection of the claim that the coherence of theology is best preserved by third order reflective and systematizing description of the intellectual coherence of God and creation. Believing faith is instead best handed on through the imaginative reentry of the details of the complex events of God’s life with the patriarchs. These presumptions allow Luther to read the canonical book of Genesis as encapsulating the essence of the life of faith necessary for believers in all subsequent times and places.
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Traditional Figures and Textual Authority in Ben Sira’s “Praise of the Ancestors”
Program Unit: Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature
Alma Brodersen, Universität Bern
Ben Sira’s “Praise of the Ancestors” (Sir 44-50) describes several traditional figures but in highly varying detail. For example, Moses is praised in 6 verses (Sir 44:23-45:5), Aaron in 17 verses (Sir 45:6-22), and Josiah in 4 verses (Sir 49:1-4). Nehemiah appears once in Sir 49:13, and Eleazar is only mentioned as the name Phinehas’ father in Sir 45:23 and as the name of Ben Sira’s father in Sir 50:27. Hannah and Ezra are not mentioned at all. Ben Sira’s praise also includes other figures such as Enoch (Sir 44:16; 49:14) and the High Priest Simon (Sir 50:1-21). Based on the Hebrew and Greek texts, this paper will give a survey of the use and interpretation of traditional figures in Ben Sira’s “Praise of the Ancestors”. Special emphasis will be placed on the relation between Ben Sira’s text and texts today included in or excluded from the Hebrew Bible. How does the description of these figures differ from texts in- and outside the Hebrew Bible? Which role do textual authority, oral tradition, and the political and cultural context play in Ben Sira’s interpretation of traditional and contemporary figures? Can textual authority explain why some leaders are described extensively while others do not appear at all?
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The Roads Not Taken: Why Jesus Went up to Jerusalem
Program Unit: Historical Jesus
David A. Brondos, Comunidad Teologica de México
To address the question of what led Jesus to embark on his final and fatal trip to Jerusalem, we must consider the aims of his ministry. At the heart of that ministry was his proclamation of the reign of God, which stood in stark contrast to the unjust and oppressive social, political, economic, and religious realities that he encountered in Galilee. Jesus’ love for others and his conviction that he had a special and unique authority from God to speak and act in his name led him to dedicate himself to teaching and healing those in need and to call on others to follow him, trusting fully in the God he proclaimed so as to be able to live in his same love, free from fear. In order to prepare the disciples closest to him to carry out a ministry similar to his own, he adopted an itinerant lifestyle. This itinerancy not only enabled him to teach his disciples and followers to depend on God to meet their needs, but also helped to keep Jesus out of the reach of those who might seek to arrest him or do him harm.
At some point, Jesus evidently came to the conclusion that he had gone as far as he could in accomplishing his objectives both among his followers and the people he had served in Galilee. He must also have believed that prolonging his ministry in Galilee would put his life in greater danger due to the conflict which that ministry was increasingly generating. After reflecting on the options open to him, he apparently decided that he could only hope to accomplish his aims fully by going up to Jerusalem to announce his message regarding God’s reign there and continuing to denounce aggressively the injustices perpetrated by the system imposed by Rome and by the Jewish authorities whom the Romans had established in power. Jesus must have been aware that sooner or later those authorities would seek to silence him by arresting him and perhaps even having him executed. From his perspective, however, if his activity on behalf of others was going to cost him his life at any moment, the best option was to go to Jerusalem to speak out and stand up boldly and openly to those authorities. Only in that way could his life, message, and death have the impact he desired on his followers and the population as a whole, bringing many to trust fully in God as he had so that they might practice freely the type of love he had proclaimed and embodied throughout his ministry, all the way to its end. Although we cannot know what Jesus expected to happen following his death, he appears to have believed that God would not let his death be in vain, but would instead make it the means by which many would be transformed and liberated as they followed him in dedicating themselves to serving God and others in the way that he had.
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Dead Sea Scrolls Scholarship in Oxford, Past, Present, and Future: A Paradigm?
Program Unit: Qumran
George J. Brooke, University of Manchester
This paper will review the several phases of Dead Sea Scrolls Scholarship in Oxford. The paper will consider briefly the 1950s and 1960s when there were multiple theories about the sectarian compositions and their authors, will engage with the values and challenges of the consensus approach led by Geza Vermes in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and will consider more recent work characterised by contextualisation. Consideration of future prospects will enable reflection on the nature of detailed analysis, the place of comparative methods, and the role of multidisciplinary interactions.
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Breaking Up the Party: A Reconsideration of the Coherence of 1 Corinthians 1–4
Program Unit: Rhetoric and Early Christianity
Timothy A. Brookins, Houston Baptist University
Interpreters have identified numerous themes in 1 Corinthians 1-4: party strife, conflicts of leadership, human wisdom, baptism-based allegiance. Over the last thirty years, the dominant way of explaining the coherence of these themes has centered around the figure of Apollos and the domain of Greco-Roman rhetoric. Interpreters reduce the four “parties” alluded to in 1:12 to two parties, a Paul party and an Apollos party. They understand “human wisdom” as a reference to the practices and values of Greco-Roman rhetoric. And they impute to the Corinthians a preference for Apollos as a superior orator to Paul. This paper offers a different account of these chapters. It identifies the dominant reading as an “apologetic reading,” which sees Paul defending himself and trying to reassert his preeminence over Apollos. Against this reading, the paper offers an “exemplary reading,” which sees Paul establishing a wisdom of the cross, consisting in a message of cruciformity and embodied in himself and Apollos.
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Patriarchs, Priests, and Sons: Foreign Women in the Old Testament and Their Transformation from Other to Israelite
Program Unit: Women in the Biblical World
Sarah A. Hardman, Southeastern University
Often when thinking of an inclusive culture one does not immediately reach for the ancient Israelite context; however, when looking at scripture, another story is told. The foreign women of the Old Testament are not only permitted to become Israelites, but they are able to transition into positions traditionally regarded only by Israelite males. The otherness of these women is an opportunity and strength used by YHWH to transcend the cultural confines of the upmost marginalized of society. This research will provide a definition for the foreign Other, define the Israelite identity, and show how in the stories of Hagar, Zipporah, The Queen of Sheba, Rahab, and Ruth provide examples of these marginalized people stepping into roles of profound influence in the Israelite community. Despite the negative criticism against foreign women the positive examples of these women are much more excessive than the stigmas against them.
The Israelite identity is defined by three things: faith in YHWH, hesed, and hospitality which are all given biblical evidence from the stories of Abraham, Rahab, and Ruth. In the examples of these foreign women otherness is a power which allows these individuals to transgress the boundary of Israel’s restraints and regulations. This gives the opportunity for true service to YHWH. Categories such as the patriarch, priest, son, and wise are given to the doubly marginalized individuals whom society often deems unable to participate in the Israelite context.
YHWH has close, intimate, and productive relationships with each of these individuals that transcend past the cultural confines of both the ANE and Israelite cultures. Even in modern thought it is difficult to see those who lead the people in faith and virtue as the most marginalized group of people in our cultures. The faith, hesed, and hospitality of these women are pillars for the Israelite identity that they display alongside of the Israelite people who firmly proclaimed YHWH.
These women should be imitated for their boldness and empowered status throughout their narratives. Hagar, a woman who goes with her son into the desert, becomes the head of her household and a patriarch. Zipporah becomes the priest who circumcises her son when her husband angers God and Ruth who becomes the highly praised “son” in her narrative.
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Martyrdom of Ignatius of Antioch
Program Unit: Ritual in the Biblical World
Leendert Brouwer, Universidad Peruana Unión
This paper explores the martyrdom of Ignatius of Antioch as a ritual-like practice. It is theoretically informed by Frend’s (1965) and Bowersock’s (1995) emphasis on the importance of respectively the Jewish and Roman context for the origin of martyrdom. While highlighting the role of these contexts that structure thought and action, they overlook the role of the martyr as a ritual agent. This study, using Bell’s (1992) ritual theory, interprets the martyrdom of Ignatius as performance, a ritual-like practice. The source material used consists of Ignatius’ letters to the churches, which do not describe his martyrdom but give his anticipation and perspective on it.
Bell (:164) distinguishes between three features of performance: multifaceted sensory experience, framing, and a totalizing objectification of values. Performance is about experiencing something. Yet, even when martyrdom is assumed as performance, it may have had non-performative elements. Besides “multi-sensory experience,” the “framing” is another important aspect of martyrdom as performance. The “framing” sets an experience off from routine reality. An actor is ‘framed’ by various elements such as a stage, curtains, tickets, audience, etc. Yet, taken separately any of these elements do not necessarily involve an actor in a theatre production. Curtains may refer to a living room in a home, and tickets may have been purchased for a boat ride. Therefore, the framing refers to the whole set of elements. The “totalizing objectification of values” is done through a “microcosmic portrayal of the macrocosm” (Bell 1997:160). Bell (:160) further comments “since the real world is rarely experienced as a coherently ordered totality, the microcosm constructed on stage purports to provide the experience of a mock-totality, an interpretive appropriation of some greater if elusive totality.”
All three elements can be recognized in the martyrdom of Ignatius. “Spectacle,” Bowersock (50) writes, “was an important element in martyrdom in the early Church. . . . No early martyr was taken aside discreetly and executed out of sight, just as no interrogations were conducted in small towns.” Martyrdom was ‘framed’ by various elements such as an amphitheater, audience, wild animals, etc. The “microcosmic portrayal of the macrocosm” is present as well. Ignatius adopted the Hellenistic idea that entities on earth have their counterpart in things in heaven. He assumed a relationship between microcosm and macrocosm and applied this idea to his understanding of the Church and its ministry (Chadwick 172). The earthly Church is a microcosm which reflects a heavenly counterpart, the macrocosm.
The key contribution this study seeks to make is help us understand Ignatius’ eagerness for martyrdom. While showing that the martyrdom of Ignatius was primarily a ritual-like practice, this practice is found to be ambiguous. It was not simply an instrument to achieve social integration or the transmission of beliefs. His martyrdom did not resolve the tension within the churches. Ignatius knew that this tension was part of a larger apocalyptic picture, the battle between Christ and Satan. Through ritual-like practice he participated in this battle, employing a “poetics of power” fostering unity of the church.
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Honour as Dignity: Retrieving a Concept from the First Century Context of Christian Marginalization
Program Unit: Ideological Criticism
Alease Brown, Stellenbosch University
It is well-established that “honour/shame” culture was pervasive in first century Roman/Palestine. What is less established is the extent to which the honor/shame culture influences readings of scripture. This paper argues that the lens of honour/shame radically alters the meaning of New Testsment texts typically understood as relating to non-violence. Scriptures from the gospels and Revelation are examined to establish that the cultural context and intertextual cues point to honor and dignity as themes of key verses rather than non-violence.
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Redescribing for Whom? Retrospect and Prospects in the Classroom
Program Unit: Redescribing Christian Origins
Ian Phillip Brown, University of Toronto
First articulated by Burton Mack (1996), and maintained through three SBL volumes, the project of Redescribing Christian Origins focused on two themes: providing a social theory of religion with early Christianity as the data and imagining new beginnings for Christianity apart from the Luke-Acts-Eusebius narratives. In many respects, and especially within the Seminar and among its members, this project has succeeded. But to what extent has the redescriptive project affected scholarship outside of the seminar? To what extent can an SBL seminar’s redescription gain traction in and influence a field already oversaturated with publications? Is it even possible to affect our field in such a way? This paper reviews the impact of the Redescribing publications, assesses that impact, and suggests a new location towards which our redescriptive efforts might be focused: the classroom. Redescribing Christian Origins may not be able to impact the field in the ways that we hope, but there is untapped potential in redescribing the ways in which we introduce early Christianity to students. It is here, in the introduction to early Christianity, that I argue our redescribing project can be the most effective.
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Hearing the Gospel of the Kingdom
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Jeannine Brown, Bethel Seminary (St. Paul, MN)
Accepted paper for the 2019 Tyndale House Scripture Collective Scripture and Church Seminar
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Cataloguing the Gerald and Barbara Weiner Collection of Ethiopic Manuscripts
Program Unit: Ethiopic Bible and Literature
Jeremy Brown, Catholic University of America
The Institute of Christian Oriental Research (ICOR) at the Catholic University of America has recently launched a project to catalogue the more than 180 Ethiopic codices in our collection, the majority of which are a part of the Gerald and Barbara Weiner collection of Ethiopian manuscripts. This presentation will describe the process by which the catalogue is being prepared and will give a report on the progress of the project. This will include an exploration of a number of the remarkable manuscripts in this collection. Special attention will be paid to a number of uncommon scribal features as well as to the texts and illuminations contained in the manuscripts.
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Usurping Noah’s Masculinity: A Reexamination of Genesis 9:20–27
Program Unit: Genesis
Jordan Brown, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The terseness of Genesis 9:20-27 has given rise to a diverse array of interpretations. The debate is centered on the actions of Ham, who has clearly done something offensive to Noah, yet the text is not explicit as to the nature of this offense. The traditional view of this passage is that Ham is engaging in accidental voyeurism. However, more recently it has been argued that Ham’s transgression was sexual in nature, as the act of “uncovering nakedness” (גלה ערוה) is a common idiom for sexual intercourse. This option was explored well in an article by Bergsma and Hahn in 2005, who argue that Ham was in fact sexually violating Noah’s wife. Bergsma and Hahn rightly examine the prohibitions against “uncovering nakedness” in Leviticus 18 as a key to interpreting this Noahic story. However, their analysis mishandles the relevant passages in Leviticus 18 and their conclusion introduces new difficulties into Genesis 9:20-27.
This current paper engages in a thematic and linguistic analysis of Genesis 9:20-27 in light of its connection to Leviticus 18. It seeks to build off of Bergsma and Hahn’s argument, yet introduces an alternative perspective, namely, that the voyeurism was in itself an act of sexual abuse. Furthermore, this paper explores the concept of nudity in the ancient Near East to argue that Ham’s actions damaged Noah’s masculinity, with the result that Ham asserted his power within Noah’s family.
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Commentary in and around the Bible: Paratextual Commentary on the Sin of Moses
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Ken Brown, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
The line between biblical transmission and reception is fluid and open-ended, as new editions of the texts themselves routinely incorporate interpretive elements directly on the page. Such paratextual forms of reception include added glosses, clarifications, “double translations” and section titles, inserted into the text, as well as marginal notations, interlinear translations, footnotes, sidebars, colophons, prefaces and appendices, set before, after, and around it. Such elements appear in a wide range of manuscripts and printed editions from earliest times until today, and often exercise an outsized influence on the text’s interpretation. This paper will focus on the phenomenology of rewriting within such paratextual comments on the Hebrew Bible, with a focus on the case of the sin of Moses (and Aaron) in Numbers 20:12. This verse is famously obscure, condemning Moses and Aaron to die in the wilderness for failing “to trust in me [that is, YHWH], to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites,” without explaining how they failed to do so. This has led to a massive amount of commentary, of various kinds, in various contexts. This paper will compare examples of paratextual commentary on this verse from antiquity to modernity, with a focus on how they reuse and modify the text on which they are commenting. What do they repeat from the verse? What do they omit, rephrase, and add? Such a comparison offers a concrete basis on which to consider the nature of (paratextual) commentary more broadly.
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Reading 4Q51 through Scripta Qumranica Electronica
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Historical Books
Bronson Brown-deVost, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
The Samuel scroll 4Q51 has raised numerous questions about the textual history of the book of Samuel, yet the scroll's current fragmentary state creates numerous problems for interpretation and for describing textual affiliation. The Scripta Qumranica Project provides an online research environment within which various reconstructions of the scroll can be formulated, analyzed, and even visualized. Indeed, we will never know for sure what text did or did not exist in the gaps between the scroll fragments that have survived, but the usage of a scientifically oriented research environment provides a control for evaluated the horizons of what is possible and even probable. I will highlight several instances from my current research that have benefitted from tools and analytical approach of Scripta Qumranica Electronica and will discuss their implications for the text critical usage of 4Q51 within the field of Samuel studies.
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Paul's Travel Decisions in Acts and Malaria: A GIS Approach
Program Unit: Archaeology of the Biblical World
Daniel C Browning Jr, University of Southern Mississippi
Over a century ago, William M. Ramsay suggested that Paul’s movements in Asia Minor, as reported by Acts, were partly dictated by the region’s physical terrain coupled with the apostle’s propensity to suffer from recurrent malaria. Ramsay’s claim, now largely ignored, is reexamined in this study through a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approach to assessing malaria risk for travelers on ancient Roman roads.
A GIS model for malaria risk in antiquity, based on risk factors refined by contemporary studies, was constructed, refined, and verified against control data obtained in Italy prior to malaria eradication efforts. The resulting model provides a tool for assessing various text sources from antiquity, including travel accounts.
An overlay of Roman road data permits assessment of malaria risk to travelers on specific routes in antiquity. In this case-study application is made to the journeys of Paul, specifically to travel decisions by Paul in Acts 13:13-4 and 16:6-10. The model results and related research strongly suggest a reevaluation of Ramsay’s premise, with potential implications for understanding the Acts passages and Pauline studies. This contribution is only one of many possible applications of the model and demonstrates the potential for adapting the technical capabilities of GIS to the task of evaluating nuanced textual sources.
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Partial Correction? A Discussion of One Non-Palimpsest and Variant Qur’an Fragment, Possibly Seventh Century
Program Unit: The Qur’an: Manuscripts and Textual Criticism (IQSA)
Daniel A. Brubaker, Independent
There exist many physical alterations to the writing in Qur’an manuscripts of the first several hijri centuries, and by now I have catalogued thousands. Every “correction” offers us a dual witness: First, a witness to the moment of the manuscript’s original production, and second, a witness to a later moment when something was felt to be incorrect and thus warranting the effort of alteration. I have focused most of my attention in recent years upon merely cataloguing and describing instances of correction. In this work, I have found that, with rare exceptions, corrections bring the rasm (consonantal skeleton) toward a state that conforms to that of the dominant edition now standard. But what does it mean when a manuscript has been corrected in multiple locations yet elsewhere, sometimes even on the same page, remains significantly out of conformity with the edition now standard, and even perhaps out of conformity with the permissible range described in the qira’at rasm literature? This paper gives attention to one horizontal-format fragment of twelve folios located in the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, MS.474.2003. The fragment, which begins with bi-ma kanu (Q 6:157), contains about thirty instances of physical alteration, yet its rasm remains variant (when compared to the now-standard rasm) in other places. These variants include not only the rather common orthographic variations involving the medial ’alif, for example, but also instances involving full words, including a number of instances of missing text when compared with the (so-called) ‘uthmanic rasm. In this paper, I describe the fragment’s physical and textual features preliminary to a consideration of what they indicate about its time or origin and of correction, and what the fact that some corrections were made in this fragment but, elsewhere, a non-uthmanic rasm was permitted by the correctors to remain may mean. Along the way, I discuss the relationship of some of this manuscript’s particular features to similar ones in other early Qur’an fragments, particularly fragments containing the same passages. Finally, I consider whether the weight of evidence supports the possibility that this fragment is a survivor of ʿUthman’s campaign of standardization/suppression.
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From Rhetography to Rhetosomatics: Expanding the Insight of Embodied Rhetoric
Program Unit: Rhetoric of Religious Antiquity
Bart Bruehler, Indiana Wesleyan University
The term and analytical tool of rhetography emerged in the practice of sociorhetorical interpretation (SRI) in the early 21st century to bring the persuasive impact of graphic images prompted by the visual elements of biblical texts into the consideration of interpreters. Rhetography has matured into a critical and initial element in the interpretive analytic of SRI. However, cognitive science, which encouraged the development of rhetography, has expanded to explore how other senses and embodied experiences affect cognition. This paper will propose expanding rhetography to rhetosomatics, broadening the scope of analysis to include all kinds of embodied simulation in our consideration of how sacred texts persuade human beings. The story of the call of Levi in Luke 5:27–39 will serve as a test case for analyzing the role of embodied simulation in the rhetoric of a gospel text.
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The Church Slavonic Version of the Antiochene Text of Samuel-Kings and the Study of the Proto-Lucianic Problem
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Alessandro Maria Bruni, Ca' Foscari University of Venice
The paper discusses a number of textual features of the second Church Slavonic version of 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings (1–4 Reigns), which provides LXX scholars with new significant material for the study of the so-called Antiochene recension, a text-type found in only five Greek minuscule codices (N° 19, 108, 82, 93, 127 according to Rahlfs’ numbering) that is commonly linked with the name of Lucian of Antioch. The redaction was shown to be composed of different layers, the earliest of which was named proto-Lucianic, since its characteristic readings are to be found in several sources preceding the historical Lucian, namely the Qumran scrolls, Josephus, the Vetus Latina and the writings of some Church Fathers. Several scholars assume that the Antiochene recension constituted (or probably constituted) the Old Greek text of LXX. which was translated from a Hebrew source, differing from the Masoretic text.
The Church Slavonic tradition of 1-4 Reigns is very relevant to the study of the Lucianic problem, since one branch of that manuscript heritage in its entirety attests to the Lucianic text. The evidence in question is represented by the second Church Slavonic translation of 1-4 Reigns, which, in quantitative terms, constitutes a minority group in the Slavonic biblical corpus. It has come down to us in two manuscripts, written in Serbian orthography and dating from the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries. The Slavonic version remains unedited and research into its textual features is still in the beginning stages. However, it has already established that it represents a complete witness not only to the Antiochene text as a whole, but also to its proto-Lucianic textual stratum.
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Halakhah: Of Sacred Time and Space
Program Unit: Ritual in the Biblical World
Alaine Thomson Buchanan, School of Urban Missions
Beginning with a basic explanation of the halakhic method of interpreting the Jewish Scripture, this paper explores how the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament expanded the purpose and parameters of Sabbath observation as found in Gen 2.1-4, Exod 20.8-11, and Deut 5.12-15 for their respective audiences. By considering 4Q216 vii.5-17, 4Q218 i.1-4, CD x.14-xi.18, and the Synoptic Gospels (Matt 12.1-8, Mark 2.23-28, and Luke 6.1-5 and Matt 12.9-14, Mark 3.1-6, and Luke 6.6-11), we will consider how the observation of sacred time and space serves as an act of renewal that is believed to prepare humanity for eternity.
The authors of the DSS and the NT used halakhah to emphasize their perspectives of how the Sabbath law should be observed and practiced within the context of their communities. Both have similar intentions (to follow the example of God for “resting” from work on the Sabbath Day) through a halakhic approach, yet the emphasis seems to be on sanctification (becoming more like God) by pulling away from society and focusing on what cannot be done in the DSS and by embracing society and focusing on what should be cone in the NT.
The tentative conclusion is that the authors of the DSS seem to tighten halakhic rules and admonitions for Sabbath conduct as based on their concern for worshipping God in the correct way and on the correct day. On the other hand, Jesus seems to loosen Pharisaic halakhic rules of Sabbath conduct all the while maintaining the integrity of observing the Sabbath. Jesus was not concerned about the calendar. Rather, for Jesus, human need overrides the halakhic prohibitions for the Sabbath.
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Rethinking the Middle and Passive Voices? Uncontestable Examples of a Passive Aorist Middle and Further Conclusions from the Reexamined Analysis of 443 Examples from Mark and 1 Corinthians
Program Unit: Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics
R. Anthony Buck, University of Oxford
In Koine Greek, the aorist and the future both have distinct forms for the middle and passive voices, unlike the present, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect, which only have one form that covers both middle and passive voices, otherwise known as a mediopassive voice. Given that Modern Greek aorists only have a mediopassive form, it is right to question whether the Koine Greek would make a middle/passive voice distinction in only the aorist and the future but not in any other tense-form. To that end, a tool of analysis for mediopassivity was developed and applied to all examples of the aorist and future middle-voice-forms and passive-voice-forms in the books of Mark and 1 Corinthians, so as to determine whether the traditional distinction between middle and passive voices holds for the aorist and future middle and passive voice-forms.
Investigating the conclusions of a companion paper being presented at the 2019 International SBL in Rome (which found using the same analytic tool and dataset also employed in this paper that the aorist and future middle and passive forms each function as full mediopassives in light of lexemes exhibiting both middle and passive forms), the initial results produced by the analytic tool are reevaluated for possible malformations in the dataset. After considering four possible malformations of the data, the possibly controversial discoveries remain intact. To further verify the analysis produced by the tool, the dataset is examined for two uncontestable examples of perhaps the most controversial element of the results, namely the aorist middle voice functioning as a passive voice.
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Don’t Go Whoring with Those Qedešot!
Program Unit: Cultic Personnel in the Biblical World
Stephanie Budin, Independent Scholar
It was common practice in the ancient world to have both male and female cult functionaries to attend to the needs of gods and goddesses. In Mesopotamia the entu-priestess functioned opposite the en-priest; in Egypt the female heneret entertained the deities while male priests organized their daily meals. Democratic Athens left regal religious functions to the Arkhon Basileus and his citizen wife, the Basilina. Even Rome had its vestal virgins to balance the city flamen. But this paradigm breaks down in the Levant. Unlike Mesopotamia, Syria, or Egypt, there was a palpable dearth of female cult functionaries in Bronze Age Canaan and Iron Age Israel-Judah, as is evident in the texts from Ugarit and the Hebrew Bible. What few female cult functionaries did exist were actively resisted in the texts. This paper examines this lacuna and considers how the absence of women from public religious roles as expressed in the Hebrew Bible is a continuation of earlier, non-monotheistic practice as well as an enforcement thereof. Finally, I consider the impact of this absence in the social status of women.
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This Changes Everything: Spiritualists, Theosophists, and Rethinking Early Christian Historiography
Program Unit: Inventing Christianity: Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, and Martyrs
Denise Buell, Williams College
Indebted to Karen King's What is Gnosticism?, this essay adds another facet to our understanding of factors contributing to the formation and implications of the category of "Gnosticism." The meanings of "Gnosticism" and narratives about early Christian history were and continue to be informed by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spiritualists and theosophists. Their reconstructions of early Christian history and interpretations of biblical and early Christian sources directly and indirectly shaped methodologies and interpretive approaches to early Christian history that persist even in the face of new discoveries such as those at Nag Hammadi. Recognizing the alternative interpretive possibilities in these forgotten or ignored modern interpreters opens up new ways to assess the limits and possibilities of current interpretive frameworks.
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The Book of Esther and the Temperance Movement
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Kathleen Buligan, University of Toronto
Accepted paper for the 2019 IBR meeting, History of Interpretation research group
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Stobaeus and Hermes Trismegistus in the Neoplatonic Tradition
Program Unit: Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity
Christian H. Bull, University of Oslo
In the Anthology of John of Stobi, better known as Stobaeus, excerpts from Hermes Trismegistus appear side by side with philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and the followers of Pythagoras. The present contribution will situate Stobaeus near the turn of the fifth century and show how his chapter titles place him in the Neoplatonic tradition of Iamblichus, whom he also excerpts copiously. Following Iamblichus, Stobaeus makes the Egyptian Hermes the inventor of number and astrology, and the fount from which Plato and Pythagoras received their wisdom. A comparison with Cyril of Alexandria will show that Hermes Trismegistus seems to have played an important role in the Neoplatonic Academy of Athens in the early fifth century, before Proclus took over and gave the Chaldean Oracles pride of place.
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Seekers of Refuge: How Deuteronomy Frames the ger
Program Unit: Poverty in the Biblical World
Michael Bullock, University of Nottingham
Despite translations such as “foreigner” or “resident alien” which highlight the otherness of the ger, the Hebrew term itself holds no such connotation. In promoting its ethic of love towards the vulnerable, Deuteronomy does not talk of “the foreigner” or “the stranger”, instead using language associated with Israel’s ancestors: ger/guwr. This paper will argue that the choice of the word ger was chosen to help frame the debate about how certain outsiders were to be brought in to the community. Ger does not hold the negative connotations of other words for foreigners and its association with the word guwr is critical to understanding the empathy that is being sought through Deuteronomy’s use of the term ger. In commanding love for the ger, rather than the foreigner or the stranger, Deuteronomy frames the vulnerable outsider in light of Israel’s own experiences, evoking sympathy and prompting action. How we frame the debate in modern times is of equal importance: migrant, immigrant, refugee, foreigner, Mexican, Syrian, European; the language of the debate can be as important as the subject of the debate, and learning from Deuteronomy’s vision for the ger, we can better put forward a positive and persuasive biblical answer to contemporary crises.
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Being Constant in Prayer and Charity: Exploring the Theological Significance of Almsgiving in the Qurʾān in Conversation with Biblical and Post-Biblical Literature
Program Unit: Qur'an and Biblical Literature
Stephen Burge, Institute of Ismaili Studies
The Qur'ānic injunction that believers should ‘be constant in prayer and in the giving of alms’ (aqāmū’l-salāta wa-ātū’l-zakāta) appears 24 times. This frequent repetition suggests that it is conceived as a fundamental part of Muslim religious life in the Qur'ān. However, although the phrase is associated with other actions, such as ‘sālihāt’ (‘good deeds’) in Q. 2:277 and ‘khayrāt’ (‘good actions’) in Q 21:73, most often the phrase is given without any further elaboration or description. This paper will explore why this stock phrase is used so often in the Qur'ān and why almsgiving is so theologically significant in the Qur'an.
This paper will first explore what the Qur'ān means by zakāt and sadaqa. Whilst later Islamic legal works make a clear distinction between the two forms of almsgiving, the Qur'ān appears to consider them as being synonymous (as does the tafsīr literature which nearly always glosses zakāt with sadaqa). There is, then, a need to consider what the Qur'ān actually intends to describe by the term zakāt. This paper will explore biblical and Post-Biblical literature to see whether this can help establish a clearer picture of what zakāt is.
The second part of this paper will explore how and why the Qur'ān pairs the saying of the prayers and the giving of alms, and the theological and social significance of both actions. In biblical literature the pairing of the saying of the prayers with the giving of charity is rare, only being openly referred to in Acts 10 and Tobit 12. Given the lack of evidence to suggest a linking of prayer and alms in the Bible, this paper will look at almsgiving in the Church Fathers and Rabbinic literature to provide a comparative backdrop to examine the Qur'ānic notion of the saying of the prayers and the giving of alms.
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The Enslaved Law in Galatians 3–4
Program Unit: Pauline Epistles
Katherine H. Burgett, Duke University
Concentrated within Galatians 3:19-4:31 are four different slavery terms Paul uses to describe the Law metaphorically: the Law is a παιδαγωγός (3:24-25), an οἰκονόμος (4:2), an ἐπίτροπος (4:2), and Hagar the παιδίσκη (4:22, 23, 30, 31). Paul’s extended treatment of the Law as a slave has largely gone unnoticed by interpreters of Galatians, who have focused instead on Paul’s images of humanity’s enslavement to the Law. While not discounting the importance of these images in Galatians, this paper also maintains that Paul’s Law-as-slave cluster of metaphors is a heuristic key for interpreting Galatians 3:19-4:31. Paul characterizes the Law as a slave with remarkable consistency, given his tendency elsewhere in his letters to pile up apparently mixed metaphors to make a complex point (cf. 1 Cor 3). This consistency is not linguistic; each Law-as-slave metaphor within the cluster depicts the Law as a different kind of slave with a different title. But this paper suggests that Paul’s Galatian auditors, entrenched in a slave society, would naturally have drawn on their experiences to connect the dots between these images that appear disparate to the modern reader. In doing so, these auditors would have understood the Law not as a menacing overlord (as interpreters are wont to characterize it), but as a vulnerable entity that proved insufficient to give life to the Galatians. Cast as a slave with some measure of influence, the Law may have limited power to figuratively “enslave” humanity. But it remains a slave, an entity under authority.
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Four Syriac “Orphan” Apocrypha Relating to the Birth and Death of Jesus
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Tony Burke, York University
Geerard’s Clavis apocryphorum Noui Testamenti combines four short “orphan” texts together in one entry numbered 309. These texts are: 1. the Epistles of Longinus and Augustus, 2. the Epistle of Ursinus, 3. the Epistle of Patrophilus to Ursinus, and 4. the Epistle of Ursinus to Patrophilus. Each of them features testimony from contemporaries of Jesus inquiring about events and portents related to his birth and death. Geerard’s brief notes state that they were published as appendices to Ignatius Rahmani’s edition of the Syriac Acts of Pilate in 1908. The proposed paper seeks to bring some clarity to Geerard’s notice by providing translations of the texts and identifying their sources, not only in Syriac Acts of Pilate manuscripts that have surfaced since Rahmani’s time but also in works by other Syriac writers that also transmit the stories. As it turns out, Rahmani excerpted the stories, without acknowledgement, from a text known as Prophecies of Pagan Philosophers about Christ. But the pieces do appear in other contexts, including the Chronicle of Bar Hebraeus, Solomon of Basra’s Book of the Bee, the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian, and in Arabic in Agapius of Hierapolis’ Kitav al-‘unvan. It is not clear at this point, where the short texts originated—did they begin as part of the Prophecies? or did the author of the Prophecies incorporate independent tales? The answer may mean a re-evaluation of the pieces as “orphan” texts, as well as a determination of whether the Prophecies as a whole should be considered an apocryphon.
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Calculating Numbers with Wisdom: Rev 13:18 in Its Greco-Roman Epigraphic Context
Program Unit: John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern
Clint Burnett, Johnson University
In this paper, I gather and analyze twenty-three inscriptional examples of calculations of Greek names with numbers, many of which are unknown to most scholars. This evidence suggests that John the prophet uses a standardized form of name calculation that appears in ancient Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt to calculate the name of the beast with numbers (Rev 13:18). In addition, I show through analyses of the archaeological contexts of some of these epigraphic name calculations that the practice was geared towards a group who possessed enough knowledge to calculate the name: the person who calculates the name, typically the person whose name is calculated, and their associates.
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Aspects of Magic in Exodus 31:18 and 32:15–20: The Writing and Destroying of the Tablets in Light of Ancient Egyptian Magic
Program Unit: Cognitive Science Approaches to the Biblical World
Julianne Burnett, University of Manchester
The aim of this paper is to examine the writing of the tablets (“by the finger of God” Exod. 31:18) and the act of destroying the tablets (Exod. 32:15-20) in light of ancient Egyptian magic practices. The writing of the tablets is recounted in several places in the Hebrew Bible, but here and Deuteronomy 9:10 are the only occasions where the tablets are described as written “by the finger of elohim.” The connection between the act of writing, the written word, magic, and divine activity is well attested in ancient Egypt. The Egyptian term for hieroglyphs is literally “words of god” (mdw-ntr). The deity, Thoth, was known as the “lord of magic” and “inventor of writing” and was often depicted holding a pen. Generally the ability to write was associated with engaging with magic and the divine and the written words were imbued with a certain power. Since the creation of written words was powerful and effectual, so too was the destruction. It is proposed here that the significance of the smashing of the tablets in Exodus 32 is intensified by understanding the nuances of Egyptian magic and drawing that into the discussion. The shattering of the tablets which were the “work of God” written “by the finger of God” is not just symbolic. The performative action of smashing an object in this context is presented as a necessary component for efficacy of the intended results. This action along with the burning, pulverising, and ingesting of the destroyed golden calf indicate an engagement in magic in light of the evidence mentioned above. It is against this backdrop that this paper proposes to take another look Moses’ actions in Exod. 31:18 and 32:15-20.
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Revisiting the Codicology of the Berlin Gnostic Codex (BG 8502)
Program Unit: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Dylan M. Burns, Freie Universität Berlin
One of the important artifacts in the study of Coptic Gnostic and apocryphal literature is the so-called ‘Berlin Gnostic Codex,’ BG 8502, which contains The Gospel of Mary, a short version of The Apocryphon of John, The Wisdom of Jesus Christ, and the Act of Peter. Although this single-quire papyrus codex was acquired and studied by Carl Schmidt even before the twentieth century, it was not published in its entirety until after the Nag Hammadi discovery in 1945, and in some ways this petit codex was and remains overshadowed by the NHC in scholarship. Fine work on the codicology of BG 8502 has been conducted by Schmidt, Till, and Schenke, as well as Robinson, but much work remains to be done, as highlighted by Krutzsch. BG 8502 also assumes new importance today, given the legend of its discovery in a tomb (cf. Nongbri), and the role that its leather cover plays in research into the possible monastic provenance of the NHC (Lundhaug/Jenott). In light of Nongbri’s monograph God’s Library and other recent contributions to codicology, this paper will re-introduce BG 8502 in comparison with other early Christian papyrus codices, asking new questions about its dimensions, binding, folia, ink(s), and—last but not least—its leather cover, which is famously said to contain an autograph testifying to its ownership by a monk.
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Jude 12 and the Common Meal of 1QS: Using One Sectarian Text to Better Understand the Interpretation of Spilades
Program Unit: Letters of James, Peter, and Jude
Andrew Burrow, Samford University
Abstract: The Greek term spilades in Jude 12 is difficult to interpret for a number of reasons, such as its surrounding literary context within Jude and its multifarious use within ancient literature. Additionally, it is intriguing that no textual variations for spilades are found in ancient manuscripts. Whatever meaning was intended by the author has been lost over time. Modern scholars typically support at least one of three interpretations for spilades: rocks, squalls, or spots. Of these three interpretive options, “squalls” has found the least support in modern scholarship. However, this paper argues that “squalls” is the more appropriate interpretation in the following way. First, this paper demonstrates how a comparative analysis between Jude 12 and another expression of meal rhetoric within Second Temple Judaism—the discussion of the Common Meal in 1QS—helps us to better understand the meaning of spilades. Second, by means of the comparative analysis, this paper reveals how concerns for and descriptions of correct/false doctrine within 1QS correspond to similar concerns and descriptions within Jude. Lastly, this paper demonstrates how these shared concerns and descriptions indicate that the best interpretation of spilades is “squalls.” In this way, a new analysis will be presented that lends more support to an interpretation of spilades that is presently disadvantaged in modern scholarship.
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Violent Atonement in the Gospels and Faulkner's Light in August
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Austin Busch, SUNY Brockport
William Faulkner’s *Light in August* (1932) rewrites the story of Jesus from the Gospels, transforming him into Joe Christmas, a (possibly) mixed-race man passing for white in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. The novel revises particular NT scenes (e.g., the Christmas story from Matthew and Luke; John 12’s account of Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet; Jesus’ cleansing of the temple; his betrayal by Judas; etc.). The points of contact between the Gospels and the novel are clear and become increasingly troubling as the narrative reveals Joe to be a tragically broken, but nonetheless violent and misogynistic criminal.
Chapter 19 rewrites Pilate’s condemnation and crucifixion of Jesus. Percy Grimm, a representative of the U.S. government, shoots the fugitive Joe and mutilates his body. He does this under the presumption that Joe is a black man who raped and murdered a white woman, but Joe’s parentage is never established and he did not commit the crimes of which he was accused. (He rather killed in self-defense a woman with whom he had been having an affair.)
Students often find the bigoted and brutal violence Joe suffers in this scene tremendously shocking, perhaps because it reveals their own violent expectations, or perhaps even fantasies, by overtly fulfilling them. From Percy’s point-of-view, which the novel may not entirely repudiate, Joe is a villain who gets his due; yet on the other hand, literally every accusation leading to his death proves either untrue or unverifiable, and from the moment of his birth to his lynching, he is as much a victim as a perpetrator of misogynistic violence. Arguably, the vomiting of the lynching’s onlookers materializes the readers’ response to the violence depicted: their appetite for retributive violence becomes over-sated and recoils on itself, making them sick.
Faulkner brings his troubling recasting of Jesus’ crucifixion into dialogue with other depictions of brutal violence integrated within various Christian ideological settings. *Light in August* features an abolitionist terrorist who transmits his faith to his children (a version of John Brown), a domestically abusive Calvinist patriarch, a white supremacist prophet, and a “defrocked” clergyman, all of whom overtly reflect on Jesus’ redemptive death. This reflection is particularly important to chapter 19 since Joe Christmas’s lynching so closely parallels Christ’s crucifixion—both, in the end, as a result of false accusations. The scene therefore brings into disturbing focus the violence at the heart of the NT accounts of Jesus. It forces students to question the social, political, and ethical implications of certain Christian theological interpretations of Jesus’ violent death, some of which originate in the Gospels themselves, and to ponder the costs that “Christian” communities might pay for embracing an ideology that centrally celebrates a divinely authorized act of unjust violence. *Light in August* prompts students to consider whether certain traditional interpretations of the passion narrative have the effect of normalizing or even glorifying—creating an appetite for—the kind of brutality that (mostly) black people actually experienced in the United States in the Jim Crow-era South, and beyond.
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Mnemonic Strategy in Nehemiah: How the People (Do Not) Remember the Exile in Nehemiah 9
Program Unit: Exile (Forced Migrations) in Biblical Literature
Aubrey E. Buster, Wheaton College (Illinois)
The understated reference to exile in Nehemiah 9 has recently prompted a re-evaluation of the passage’s dating. It is notable that such a catastrophic event is rendered simply, in half a verse, as the Lord giving the people “into the hand of the peoples of the lands” (wattittǝnēm bǝyad ʿammê hāʾărāṣōt; Neh 9:31b). Why does the exile not play a more prominent role in the historical recital contained in this chapter? In the course of answering this question, I will demonstrate how this (lack of) reference relates to the social mnemonic strategy that is outlined in this chapter, including the role of historical recital more generally in the Second Temple period, and the way in which the exile organizes and motivates mnemonic practice.
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Linguistics as a Two-Edged Sword, Cutting in Both Directions
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Randall Buth, Institute for Biblical Languages and Translation
Accepted paper for the 2019 IBR meeting, Linguistics and the Biblical Text research group
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Cognitive Linguistics, Stoneware, and How to Read κατά in John 2:6
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Randall Buth, Institute for Biblical Languages and Translation
For most of the last century translators and commentators have read John 2:6 as if it were answering the question "Why were there six large containers?" According to the chorus, they were for the purpose of Jewish ceremonial washings and cleansings. But that answer does not explain the mention of stone. More importantly, it does not deal fully with the Greek text κατὰ τὸν καθαρισμὸν τῶν Ἰουδαίων. We will survey the claims that κατά can mark a purpose or goal. Within cognitive linguistics we can ascertain the core meanings of κατά and raise the question about whether an additional meaning of "purpose" or "goal" is justified. In the past fifty years there have been remarkable discoveries of stoneware in Judea and Galilee. The discoveries have increased scholarly appreciation of the clean status of stoneware within the Jewish halaxa. Incidentally, that included drinking water. These stoneware have rightly been compared to the text in John but fuller discussions need to correctly read the Greek text. The additional phrase in John 2:6 is not necessarily answering why the containers were there, but also why they were made of stone, in accord with Jewish cleanliness prescriptions. Our Greek lexica and perhaps many recent translations may need amending.
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Inscriptions of an Empire: Qur'an and the Imperial Visual Landscape
Program Unit: The Qur’an and Late Antiquity (IQSA)
S. Beena Butool, Florida State University
Do inscriptions channel power? In the Islamic world, the written word of the Qur’an induces awe in its beholders. But can qur’anic imagery tell us about the ethical arguments for authority and command? As authors of this study, we argue that qur’anic verses, when inscribed on monuments, act as signposts for power. Our main inquiry in this study was to find out whether our initial assumptions about our argument were valid theoretically. Also, were these assumptions backed by any evidence from actual monumental inscriptions? In light of the immense work on Islamic architecture, we found a chasm in the study of Islamic art. Scholars did not perform a hermeneutical scrutiny of monumental qur’anic inscriptions. Although qur‘anic inscriptions have been studied both in their formal and functional aspects but apart from a few exceptions, their hermeneutical aspects have largely been ignored. Therefore, there is a huge scope for studying the content and the interpretation of qur’anic inscriptions, making our study both methodologically and theoretically valuable. The purpose of this paper is to explore the deployment of qur’anic verses within various types of Islamic monuments, primarily from the Umayyad and early Abbasid eras.
We study two monuments: the Nilometer and the Ahmad ibn Tulun Mosque in Egypt. We chose these two sites because they were both embellished between the seventh and ninth centuries CE, making them some of the first Muslim structures to feature qur’anic inscriptions. We raise two questions: Is the content (or meaning) of the inscriptions relevant? And, are qur’anic inscriptions a symbol of power? We argue that qur’anic monumental inscriptions can be mined for justifications of Islamic conquests, and for the transformation of dar al-kufr (sphere of unbelief) into dar al-islam (sphere of Islam).
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Exodus and Covenant in Second Isaiah: Reconsidering the Role of the Mosaic Covenant
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Seulgi Byun, Grove City College
Accepted paper for the IBR annual meeting in 2019, Isaiah research group
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When a Man Wrongs a Woman: Slavery, Concubinage, and Divorce in the Covenant Code and Deuteronomy
Program Unit: Pentateuch
Jay Caballero, The University of Texas at Austin
Most scholars acknowledge that the slave manumission laws in Deut 15:12-18 in some way replace the slave laws of the Covenant Code, found in Ex 21:1-11. The focus of such comparisons is often of the equivalence that Deuteronomy places on the time of service for male and female slaves. While Exodus frees the male slaves after six years, the female slaves are only freed if, having displeased their master, they are redeemed or if their master diminishes their rations. Consequently, lifetime slavery for females is a distinct possibility. In Deuteronomy, though, male and female slaves both go free after six years of service, and they are both to be sent out with flocks, food and wine. What has been overlooked, however, is Deuteronomy’s position on the practice of slave-concubinage. Ex 21 appears to provide that any female slave is subject to slave-concubinage while in slave status and that they could only be freed by redemption, if they displeased their master. Conversely, Deuteronomy has a predilection against unmarried females who have been sexually active. Deuteronomy prefers that sexually active females be married. It will be argued in this paper that Deuteronomy revises Exodus 21 in, not one but, two ways. First, as noted already, Deut 15 caps the time that a female slave is required to serve at six years, like her male counterparts. Second, Deut 15:12:18 and 21:10-14 constructively eliminate the practice of slave-concubinage among female Hebrew slaves altogether. Not only that but Deuteronomy even eliminates the practice of slave-concubinage upon females who have been captured during war. This revision of the Covenant Code meshes well with Deuteronomy’s overarching program of increased humanitarianism as well as its desire for sexually experienced females to be married.
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What’s a Young Colossian Doing in Smyrna? Hunting a Relevant Cosmology for Colossae
Program Unit: Greco-Roman Religions
Alan Cadwallader, Charles Sturt University
The cosmology of the New Testament letter to the Colossians has attracted repeated correlations with cosmological theories from the Greco-Roman world, though often filtered through Hellenistic Judaism. The reference to “elemental principles of the universe” (Col 2:8) in particular has invited comparison with a series of the more famous philosophers, from Plato, through Aristotle to Philo of Alexandria. However, one largely forgotten inscription invites a comparison that has yet to be entertained in Christian commentary, and for that matter, classical scholarship. Some time, early in the second century, a budding young scholar named Diodotus (probably named after the city’s patron god) ventured from Colossae to a reputed center of advanced learning, Smyrna. At the time, Smyrna boasted among a plethora of renowned teachers and orators, a leading exponent of the cosmology of Plato, a certain Theon. It is considered by some interpreters that Diodotus may have been seeking out Theon’s expertise, especially for his innovative (if obtuse) correlation of mathematics and cosmic order. Theon makes a telling comment that numbers provided the critical infrastructure of the universe, and combine to generate “harmony in the cosmos, good order in the polis, and moderation in the household”. The surface parallels to the key sections of the letter to the Colossians are arresting, and invite a consideration of the interest in cosmology that young Diodotus seems to have entertained, along with his fellow Colossians (and the inhabitants of other cities as well). Although qualified by critical issues regarding the surviving manuscripts of Theon of Smyrna’s Exposition on Mathematics, this paper proposes to mine the text to gain an appreciation of the interest in and nature of cosmological speculation, especially as impacting religion and social life, that appears to have been widespread in Asia in the late first and early second centuries.
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Women's Funerary Collegia: Rethinking an Antiochene Funerary Mosaic
Program Unit: Greco-Roman Religions
Alyssa M. Cady, Princeton University
The Tomb of Mnemosyne (c. late 4th century) lies in a necropolis just south of the Daphne Gate of ancient Antioch on the Orontes River. Excavated in a single, two-week season in 1935, the tomb derives its name from the spectacular mosaic pavement found inside of its main chamber, which depicts six female figures poised for the beginning of a funerary banquet. The mosaic’s exclusive depiction of women in a funerary setting makes it unique in the ancient world. I intend to expand upon the description of the mosaic with regard to the serving-wear, the figures represented in the both the central panel and border, and homosocial and aspirational aspects of the women’s self- representation. Furthermore, I believe that previous interpretations of the epigraphic evidence is inconsistent with iconography of the central panel, and I problematize the assumption that the mosaic is a product of a women’s funerary association.
In my presentation, I will give an overall assessment of the mosaic pavement, as well as a summary of my findings in line with, or departing from, previous scholarship. I accept the suggestion that the funerary mosaic represents a women’s association, though I am careful neither to overstate the association’s funerary aspects, nor specify the women’s commercial ties. Scholars have asserted that associations in general comprised primarily middle and lower-class members with such commercial ties, while archaeological evidence has shown that these associations frequently included both women and regulations pertaining to funeral rites. The women’s ability to purchase and remodel the Mnemosyne tomb complex speaks to a degree of wealth, a suggestion strengthened by the grave steles found in the tombs connected to the central chamber that primarily depict women in banqueting settings. The sub-elite status of these women is given by the rough quality of the steles themselves, as well as the fact that all of the tiles were repurposed from other mosaic. Furthermore, I suggest that the mosaic is as much convivial as it is aspirational; the wealth displayed in table-wear and costume, the ratio of servants to diners, and the posturing of the guests all speak to a self-representation on the part of the women that emulates the elite and imperial while stressing female kinship. Finally, I hope to expand upon previous descriptions of the mosaic by incorporating previously overlooked archaeological evidence recovered from the site, as well as secondary scholarship on the nature of associations, and identifying troubling features of the mosaic such as the table-wear and status of each figure. In the end, these women chose to depict themselves as enjoying the company of other women, sharing in the bounty of the living while commemorating dead. Their material remains have much to tell us about the nature of female homo-social relationships, autonomy and self-presentation.
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The Use and Operation of the Lord's Prayer in Christian Amulets
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
Robert Matthew Calhoun, Texas Christian University
Extant Christian amulets from Egypt often feature the Lord's Prayer -- in whole or in part; by itself or in combination with other (presumably powerful) texts. What about this prayer made it attractive, perhaps even ideal, among early Christians for their amulets? This presentation will seek answers from (1) the prayer's literary contexts in the Gospels and the Didache, and (2) the social context of its transmission to converts, as attested by early patristic authors.
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Crocodiles and Holy Terror: Eight Centuries of Growing Up with Jeremiah
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
Mary Chilton Callaway, Fordham University
Jeremiah is an unlikely subject for children’s literature, but he shows up persistently in various forms of Bible story books beginning in twelfth century France. In every age he is newly fashioned to embody religious ideals, pedagogical principles and the perceived needs of different social classes. The Jeremiahs of this literature continually slip from one persona to another, mirroring and challenging their young readers. As part of the reception history of the prophet, children’s Bibles reflect a range of political and cultural readings that illuminate a multivalent and changing Jeremiah.
Jeremiah for young readers began in the twelfth century, in Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica designed for university students between thirteen and sixteen years old. Fusion of biblical and apocryphal traditions into a compelling story created a new Jeremiah that engaged adolescent readers by offering them a prophet who was more magician and hero than stern preacher. By the fifteenth century its many readers had shifted down from university to school children. Medieval youth may have known a dour Jeremiah from stained glass windows and statues in their cathedrals, but in their story Bibles they met a feisty, colorful character.
In the seventeenth century Jérémie, as he was called in France, appeared again in a text for school boys. Nicholas Fontaine’s narrative Bible replaced the traditional presentation of Jeremiah as prefiguring of Christ with a bold rebel who began his work at the age of fifteen and was in trouble with the authorities throughout his life. Fontaine wrote from the Bastille, and his feisty Jérémie reflected his own embattled position as a Jansenist charged with treason as well as his pedagogical goal of training his students to resist tyranny. A very different Jérémie inhabited the French countryside, where peddlers sold inexpensive books of Bible stories.
In the eighteenth century Rousseau’s writings about education were popularized into guidelines for pedagogy around the time the Sunday school movement started in England. One of its founders presented Jeremiah to her young charges in order “to produce a rational faith, and a right practice.” Her Jeremiah shows no hint of resistance or anger, but is like a prescient adult among naughty children whose foolishness is made apparent to her readers.
Nineteenth and early twentieth century American Jeremiahs for children were a moral exemplar, but the morals, like the prophet himself, were shifting. By the end of the century historical-critical scholarship had influenced even children’s Bible stories, though not with scenes “such as would be repulsive to people of taste.”
From mid-twentieth century to the present young readers have been encouraged to emulate Jeremiah’s steely courage. From a 1942 comic book to a 2007 Japanese manga Bible Jeremiah is a defiant young man challenging political authority.
The paper includes theoretical observations about the use of children’s Bible stories as evidence for all readings of Jeremiah as cultural adaptation.
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The Paterfamilias in Myth and Ritual: A Cognitive Perspective
Program Unit: Bible, Myth, and Myth Theory
Dexter E. Callender, Jr., University of Miami
Advances within the broad inter-discipline of cognitive science offer new possibilities for positing myth as a conceptual tool of analysis. Some possibilities arise from the opportunity to re-examine and reformulate older theories. Such reformulation can contribute to more refined methodologies for the historical and comparative study of texts and traditions of the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean world of the Bible. This paper will re-examine Cassirer’s theory of myth as a symbolic form, as influenced by Hermann Usener and as influencing Northrop Frye, and will offer a reformulation of the theoretically promising elements of Cassirer’s symbolic form, so conceived, within the enactivist paradigm of current cognitive science. To demonstrate how such a reformulation can provide greater explanatory depth, both historically and comparatively, this paper will continue by considering the construct of the paterfamilias in relation to the Mesopotamian personal god and the “god of the father” of biblical patriarchal religion, the common elements of which have been long observed.
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Helping Students Negotiate the Variety of Jesuses in an Introductory New Testament Course
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Callie Callon, University of St. Michael's College
When students in an introductory New Testament course first encounter the diversity of the representations of Jesus among the four canonical gospels, many are often distressed. It can be challenging to help students negotiate this diversity without minimalizing or trivializing it, and to do so in way that they can relate to. I propose to simulate a brief demonstration of strategies that I have used in my own classroom that students have received positively. First, by having students read two brief newspaper articles that relate the same historical event, but each having their own editorial interest which reflects their respective audiences. This is roughly analogous to what students have to date learned in class about the evangelists. And second, by using myself as an example and the variety of ways perspectives of me differ depending on who I am engaging with at the time. For this latter component I find a bit self-deprecating sense of humor tends to be particularly well-received, injecting a note of levity to a situation which can otherwise be rather discomforting.
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Augustine on Genesis in Confessions 11–12: A Case of Hermeneutical Rhetoric
Program Unit: Early Exegesis of Genesis 1–3
Michael Cameron, University of Portland
Augustine spends two entire books of Confessions hunched over a single verse, Gen. 1:1. The painstaking exegesis of Books 11 and 12 raises two questions: What is he trying to accomplish? How does he try to accomplish it? These questions tie into larger issues about why Augustine wrote Confessions, about the interrelationship between its two major parts in Books 1-10 and 11-13, and specifically about how the Bible functions in them. This paper explores Augustine’s reading of Gen. 1:1 in Confessions 11-12 as a case of “hermeneutical rhetoric.” That is, it studies Augustine’s Ciceronian take on the exegetical process as an inventional resource in the rhetorical context of seeking his readers’ conversion and instruction. I argue that Augustine conveys not merely the original sense of Gen. 1:1, but what he understood and revalued in the text for the sake of bringing readers into the new scriptural world that he inhabited.
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A Matter of Interest: In Memory of Jonathan Z. Smith
Program Unit: Redescribing Christian Origins
Ron Cameron, Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT)
This essay examines retrospectively the characteristic interests expressed in the work of the late Jonathan Z. Smith whose advocacy of a method of "redescription" has inspired the work of the Redescribing Christian Origins seminar. Among his many interests, Smith's leading preoccupation was in theorizing the cognitive role that difference plays in making things interesting, leading him to his emphasis on the importance of understanding systems of classification and taxonomy. Smith's theoretical contributions to the study of religion are appreciatively assessed as methods to be employed in the ongoing scholarly project of imagining religion in light of Christian origins.
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Citing the Sibyl: Habits of Citation in Alexander Polyhistor, Flavius Josephus, and Theophilus of Antioch
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Warren C. Campbell, University of Notre Dame
Moments of citation often attempt to signify an author’s ingenuity, erudition, and authority. Yet, citation practices are frequently marked by textual recycling as authors appropriate existing citations without recourse to their authority’s source. Whether exchanged directly from author to author, or mediated by a florilegium, citations often reveal traces of their origins (continuing misattributions, replicating unusual variants, repeating the authorization of ‘agrapha’, etc.). The history of citing the Sibyl as testimony concerning the tower of Babel from Genesis 11:1–9 (Sib. Orc. III.97–105) provides a welcoming habitat to explore the dynamics of ancient citation practice with Jewish pseudepigrapha as its object. This paper traces two phases in the history of citing Sibylline material. First, it explores the way in which Sib. Orc. III.97–105 was paraphrased into prose by Alexander Polyhistor (preserved in Eusebius’ Armenian Chronicon) and then re-appropriated by Josephus without recourse to any hexameter Sibylline material. Second, it suggests that Theophilus of Antioch lifted his citation of Sib. Orc. III.97–105 from Josephus but updated the prose citation with his own Sibylline material set in hexameter. Accordingly, this lineage of citations highlights how secondary citations reveal traces of their true origins (Josephus’ secondary citation of Alexander) and how citations can simultaneously reflect conceptual dependence as well as major textual editing (Theophilus as a user and textual editor of Josephus). As this Sibyl testimony exchanges authorial hands, it receives philological and contextual morphologies, being molded and pressed into new contexts with fresh motivations. Accordingly, this chain of citations poignantly displays how the act of stabilizing a tradition through citation is, simultaneously, the loss of textual control.
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A Letter to Ethne in Christ: Construction, Content, and Coherence in Romans
Program Unit: Writing Social-Scientific Commentaries of the New Testament
William S. Campbell, Prifysgol Cymru, Y Drindod Dewi Sant - University of Wales, Trinity Saint David
Romans begins by presenting Paul as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God concerning his Son, the messiah of Israel, through whom the ethne have been called in the new era in which the righteousness of God has appeared apart from the Law. Paul seeks to explain the implications of this revelation in Christ to the gentile Christ-followers in Rome especially as it impinges upon the Law and the Jewish people. Wrong inferences, perversions of Paul’s teaching, e.g. that ‘the Law is sin’ (7.7), that ‘God has rejected his people’ (11.1), have been drawn by some, (3.8). Paul presents these indirectly in diatribe style in chs. 2-11 and constructs his letter around them. These rejected options indicate what Paul opposes, and in contrast to these Paul presents his own alternative pattern of life in Christ for ethne. Paul uses this indirect style to oppose misunderstandings of his gentile mission teaching, and to demonstrate what pattern of life he recommends for the ethne in Christ particularly for those who have conscience problems in relation to food and drink possibly associated with idolatry. Paul stresses that Jesus Christ comes from the Jewish people firstly to affirm the promises to the fathers as well as to enable the ethne to glorify God for his mercy (15.8-9). Since Israel has neither been rejected nor bypassed, customary Jewish patterns of behavior among ethne in Christ are still viable, and what seems ‘good’ to these must not be blasphemed (14.16). Nor is it acceptable for some Christ-followers to view themselves as displacing Israel in the purpose of God (11.19). Paul envisions both a restored Israel and non-Jews rejoicing together in a common worship, and his planned mission to Spain, with the help of the Romans, will work to that goal (15.24).
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The Archangel Michael in Narrative and Devotion: Texts, Sanctuaries, and "Lived" Devotion in the Eastern Christian World (First–Fourth Century)
Program Unit: Lived Religiousness in Antiquity
Ada Campione, Università degli Studi di Bari
The Archangel Michael in Narrative and Devotion: Texts, sanctuaries and "lived" devotion in the Eastern Christian world (1st-4th c.)
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The Relationship of Amos 4:1–3, 5:25–27, 6:1–14, and 7:7–17 to the Deuteronomistic History, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea
Program Unit: Book of the Twelve Prophets
Martha Campos, Bar-Ilan University
Study of the relationship of the Book of the Four (Hosea, Amos, Micah, and Zephaniah) to the Deuteronomistic History is currently underway. As for the book of Amos, scholars have discerned deuteronomistic additions in a few passages. The earliest oracles and sayings of the book have usually thought to have originated with Amos, the mid-eighth-century B.C.E. prophet. Some scholars have supposed that the earliest layer was composed then, and others have suggested that the earliest layer was composed at some time after 722 B.C.E. In this presentation I will examine the relationship of the four major passages in the book of Amos that discuss Israel’s exile to Assyria (Amos 4:1-3; 5:25-27; 6:1-14; and 7:7-17) to the Deuteronomistic History. Many of the texts in these passages are considered to be of the earliest layer of the book. These include Amos 4:1-3; 5:27; much of 6:1-14; and 7:7-8. Some of the rest of the texts are already considered to be of a deuteronomistic layer. Those widely accepted currently are: Amos 5:25-26 and 7:10-17. I will argue that the four Amos passages (4:1-3; 5:25-27; 6:1-14; 7:7-17) are deuteronomistic in their entirety. This means that date-of-composition models for the foundation layer of Amos should be adjusted and that the deuteronomistic layer should now include these four passages. This model will also affect the study of the relationship of the Book of the Four to the Deuteronomistic History.
Although the four Amos passages are about Israel’s exile, only Amos 7:10-17 is thought to refer to the Assyrian exile. Deportations that occurred before 722 B.C.E. are considered instead for the other three passages. I will demonstrate that the four Amos passages have long-range historical views similar to those of the books of Kings, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea. I will offer brief comparisons to passages in those books. Those passages also make evident that the four Amos passages blame the Israelite kingship for having caused the exile by it neglect of keeping YHWH’s covenant and commands. The sins described in the four Amos passages primarily belong to the kingship. I will show that the address to the cows of Bashan in Amos 4:1 does not refer to a group of eighth-century wealthy women, but to the kingship.
I will also suggest that because Amos 4:1-3; 5:25-27; 6:1-14; and 7:7-17 are deuteronomistic and draw from books such as Kings, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea, they should be ascribed an origination date after 587 B.C.E. The four Amos passages should also be considered as supplements to the Deuteronomistic History.
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The Pluses of the Vetus Latina in the Book of Esther
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Dionisio Candido, Universität Salzburg
In the context of the text critical research of the Book of Esther, in the last few years the role of the Vetus Latina has been acknowledged. Looking carefully at its text, besides the differences in comparison with the Old Greek, one can also notice some significant pluses: they are found both in the chapters of the book shared with Masoretic Text and in the so called Greek Additions. Their nature and purpose seem to be different, according to the literary contest in which they find themselves. The paper will deal with those pluses, in order to show their literary function and their possible relevance in the textual critical debate.
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Where Vetus Latina and Alpha Text Meet
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Historical Books
Dionisio Candido, Universität Salzburg
From the text critical point of view, the different texts of the book of Esther create a complex picture that still needs to be clarified. In particular, some readings of the Vetus Latina seem to be noteworthy especially in comparison with the main textual witnesses (the Masoretic Text, the Old Greek, the so called Alpha Text). With regard to the Book of Esther, Haelewyck counted at least ten readings in which Vetus Latina agrees with the Masoretic Text against the Old Greek and the Alpha Text. In this paper, I would, however, like to focus on those readings where the Vetus Latina is identical with or very close to the Alpha Text against all other texts (VL = AT ≠ MT = OG). For example, I will present the data for the reading "qui est Andicus", parallel to ὅς ἐστι Δύστρος Ξανθικός in Esth A 1; for the reading "magnum", parallel to μεγάλην in Esth 1,9; and the reading "et non adoras Aman?", parallel to καὶ οὐ προσκυνεῖς τὸν Αμαν in Esth 3,3. The said examples and some more will be presented and possible solutions will be offered.
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Lust and Weibermacht in Biblical Film
Program Unit: Bible and Film
Joshua Canzona, Wake Forest University
Lust is a popular theme throughout biblical film. It is often explored in connection with biblical narratives, which may be rendered faithfully, expanded upon, or creatively reinterpreted. Lust has also appeared independent of biblical narrative while remaining closely linked with scripturally-inspired morals and categories. In early film, lust is often treated in conjunction with weibermacht or “the power of women,” an artistic topos showing distinguished men brought low by feminine beauty and wiles. This presentation will explore how biblical lust developed on the screen with an emphasis on its role in giving rise to "the vamp" archetype and its close connection to violence.
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Reading Acts Apocalyptically
Program Unit: Book of Acts
Greg Carey, Lancaster Theological Seminary
Apocalyptic discourse presented a rich array of resources, some of which prove fundamental to the literary development and theological presentation of Acts. After examining alternative accounts of apocalypticism in ancient texts, this paper identifies discrete topoi, or building blocks, that animate Acts. From the outset Acts apparently defers apocalyptic expectation (1:6-7), but Peter’s speech marks the Holy Spirit’s arrival as a sign of the last days, linking the Spirit’s presence to the resurrection and glorification of Jesus. Dreams and visions, interpreted by Peter as gifts of the Spirit, drive key moments in the narrative, thereby rendering the mission to the nations as manifestation of the Spirit’s end-time work. Although angels are not unique to apocalyptic discourse, angelic speculation frequently occurs in apocalyptic texts, and angels intervene at key moments in Acts. The resurrection of Jesus, an inherently apocalyptic motif, constitutes a critical point of emphasis and controversy in the narrative. Acts is not a literary apocalypse, nor does it voice the keen cultural critique and urgent expectation of the literary apocalypses, yet its fundamental premises and narrative devices identify Acts as an appropriation and interpretation of apocalypticism.
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“Persia Is Everywhere Where Nothing Happens”: Imperial Ubiquity and Its Limits in Ezra-Nehemiah
Program Unit: Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah
Laura Carlson Hasler, Bates College
This paper challenges the usefulness of common binary terms through which analysis of empire in biblical scholarship often takes place: assimilation and resistance. Adapting a formulation from the arts collective, Bernadette Corporation, I argue against deploying terms, like resistance and assimilation, that can sidestep the complexity of the imperial encounter in Ezra-Nehemiah. I suggest that they should be replaced with terms that more adequately express the spatial, temporal, and non-binary ways that this and other ancient Jewish texts represent the Persian empire. In this paper, I contend that in Ezra-Nehemiah Persia is depicted as the geopolitical “everywhere” that forestalls autonomous action by creating multipronged provincial dependence. I then suggest textual sites where the limits of Persia’s projected ubiquity surface. These sites cannot be adequately described as sites of resistance, but rather serve as more ambivalent loci of imperial faltering, which implicate the returned Judeans as much as they authorize them.
In the first part of my argument, I contend that the borderless ubiquity of Persia is cast in both spatial and administrative terms. Second, this ubiquity is bent on provincial in-action. Third, this sense of imperial “everywhere” gives off the impression of seamless history and presence. Consequently, and by contrast, borders erupt on the apparently boundless imperial landscape at sites of activity, mobility, and fragmentation. Ezra-Nehemiah’s fragmented historiography, its accounts of the agonistic policing of its own ethnic boundaries, and the development of “mobile” rituals and spaces do not necessarily constitute moments of anti-imperial resistance. These ruptures, however, do expose the circumscribed reality of imperial geopolitics and the violence by which Persia creates indigenous alliances and cultivates dependence. Ultimately, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate alternative and more adequate terms (ubiquity, boundary, mobility) by which the imperial encounter might be represented in Jewish antiquity and beyond.
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Early Jewish Pseudepigrapha as Non-Western Historiography: A Comparison with “Possession Studies”
Program Unit: Historiography and the Hebrew Bible
Reed Carlson, United Lutheran Seminary
It has often been assumed that one of the primary functions of pseudonymous writing in early Judaism was a desire to legitimize anonymous or little-known works by means of attributing them to earlier, more authoritative figures. Without necessarily denying ‘authorization’ as an aspect of this phenomenon, several recent scholars have presented supplementary models for understanding pseudonymous writing in antiquity that attempt to transcend modern presuppositions around intellectual property and authorial intent (e.g. Hindy Najman, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Eva Mroczek). This essay aims to contribute to that discussion by comparing examples from early Jewish Pseudepigrapha with anthropological and ethnographic studies of contemporary spirit cults around the world where the spirits of dead ancestors are regularly hosted by professional mediums. Though at first glance, the cultural distance between these contexts may seem to prohibit such a comparison, I argue that so-called ‘possession studies’ can be enlightening for the study of early Jewish pseudepigraphy at a theoretical and analogical level. Four connections are highlighted: First, in contrast to popular stereotypes, as practiced in numerous contexts, spirit possession is often a positive and cultivated practice (rather than an affliction or a cause for social alienation). Possession is also often a corporate experience that is central to a community’s religious life. Second, these possession practices are usually regulated by established modes (and not just freeform nonsense). Anthropologist Michael Lambek has characterized this kind of spirit possession as a sophisticated “system of communication” that alludes to and comments on itself—even as it innovates. Third, spirit possession can function as a commentary on the “climate of affairs” for a community or individual. This is especially true in cultures that have experienced colonization. Fourth, spirit possession has been called a non-historiographical mode of describing the past and prescribing the future. It is a way of calling up trusted voices from a culture’s heritage and gaining their wisdom on new situations. It also puts historic figures into conversation with one another, though they were not contemporaries in life. Primary texts discussed include Daniel, Jubilees, and 11QPsa. Theorists include Lesley Sharp, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, and Paul C. Johnson.
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A Bias at the Heart of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM)
Program Unit: New Testament Textual Criticism
Stephen C. Carlson, Australian Catholic University
The Greek Text of the New Testament for the latest Nestle-Aland edition is being edited by the Institute for New Testament Research (INTF) in Münster using a novel technique called the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM). This study tests the CBGM against hypothetical scenario inspired by 1 John 1:7 and concludes that the “potential ancestor” criterion on which the method depends is biased against certain kinds of witnesses previously considered to be of utmost importance for reconstructing the text in 1 John, including Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus. This paper also offers some suggestions for addressing or ameliorating the bias in the potential ancestor criterion at the heart of the CBGM.
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Scaling Gaius and Diotrephes: Socio-Economic Stratification in 1 and 3 John
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Jon Carman, Baylor University
The three epistles penned by ‘John’ in the New Testament are exciting, if challenging, documents with which to work as they offer a fascinating glimpse into the real-life struggles of early Jesus Followers. And yet, for all the insight these letters provide into the goings-on of such communities, the Johannine epistles are not always read with an eye toward the urban milieu whence they most likely originate. More significantly, what they may say regarding the issue of socio-economic scaling and/or stratification is seldom pursued. Though scholars do occasionally make mention of the presence of wealthy members in the community on the basis of language in 1 John 3.17 and the presence of Gaius and Diotrophes in 3 John, little is said beyond the fact that there might be some ‘wealthy’ church members. Furthermore, no scholar of which I am aware has offered an economic scaling of the church(es) represented in the epistles. To be sure, there are good reasons for this. While the letters clearly bear witness to a concrete struggle in the life of early Jesus Followers, much remains opaque in the letters. Little is known about the author(s?) or the audience, nor is there any location for the communities mentioned. References to specific communities (i.e. the ‘elect lady’ and her ‘sister’ of 2 John) and/or people (Gaius, Diotrophes, Demetrius (3 John) occur, but the particulars of the life of the community remain few and far between. While it may not be possible to say much about stratification in the Johannine community, I would contend it is possible to say something. Thus, in the present study I propose to take what little can be said about the Johannine epistles regarding their socio-economic setting and bring it into conversation with Longenecker’s work on wealth scaling in order to help put as fine a point as possible on what one might ascertain about social stratification in 1–3 John. Indeed, when salient details of the Johannine letters are read in light of Longenecker’s wealth-scale, they can be seen to attest to members in their respective communities that run the gamut from ES4/ES5 to ES7. One catches a glimpse of a stratified group of Jesus Followers, with those in greater economic security responsible for bearing some of the key financial burdens in the community. This comports both with the broader attitude maintained by early Jesus Followers regarding wealth as well as the composition of some Pauline churches that featured a mixture of people from various social strata.
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The Cult of the Archangel Michael in Gargano, Fifth–Eighth Century
Program Unit: Lived Religiousness in Antiquity
Laura Carnevale, University of Bari Aldo Moro
This paper describes the Archangel Michael's “flee” into the West. It discusses the settlement of the Michaelic cult in Gargano (Apulia, Italy), the creation of a new sacred space and the construction of new religious experiences in the 5th-8th centuries CE.
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Competing Construals of Human Relations with Other Beings in Genesis 1–11
Program Unit: Animal Studies and the Bible
David M. Carr, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York
The biblical creation narratives have been a major focus of animal studies, from Derrida’s 1997 address to the Cérisy conference onward. Recently, the work of Hannah Strømmen (2014, 2018) has extended this focus to post-flood narratives about Noah, albeit with an overall synchronic focus on how the P (Gen 9:1-17) and non-P (Gen 9:18-27) might be read in relation to one another. Building on work done on Genesis 1-11 for the Kohlhammer International Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament, this paper explores the related and yet distinctly different accounts of human - ‘animal’ difference in the non-P and P strands of the Genesis primeval history, also as they relate to earlier Near Eastern cosmological reflections on the relations of humans to other beings. With Strømmen, but adding a diachronic dimension, this paper will argue that the discourses about humans and other species in the ‘creation’ narratives of Genesis are part of a broader cosmological treatments that extend to the end of the primeval history. This perspective then allows us to perceive these competing discourses about non-human beings as key initial foundations to broader biblical discourses about distinctions among beings and domination, from human-animal to male-female to Israelite-Canaanite and beyond.
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Does Linguistic Dating “Trump” All Other Considerations in Dating a Text?
Program Unit: National Association of Professors of Hebrew
David M. Carr, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York
In past work (e.g. 2011, 2016), this author has argued that linguistic data is particularly helpful in helping to identify large swatches of the Hebrew Bible that may well be relatively early (~pre-Second Temple period), but may not be as helpful in definitively establishing the late date of all material in biblical books seen by many scholars as exhibiting late forms of biblical Hebrew.
On the one hand, Joosten's work on pseudo-classicisms (1999 through 2018) has made a good argument that the ability of Second Temple scribes to reproduce classical biblical Hebrew (CBH) became increasingly limited. Therefore, scholars can plausibly conclude that large portions of the Bible that manifest virtually perfect CBH (and are not imitations of other parts of the Bible that similarly manifest CBH) may well date from a period prior to the breakdown of scribal structures that helped maintain that literary dialect. On the other hand, the end-date for this breakdown in the literary dialect is not as clear as is sometimes supposed. Moreover, problems such as linguistic modernization (briefly discussed in Hendel, Joosten 2018, pp. 54-55) raise questions about the extent to which the linguistic profile of some books can be a reliable indicator of the origin-point for the earliest editions of books, such as Song of Songs or Ecclesiastes, that we have good reason to believe were expanded and/or updated (see, e.g. 4QCantb).
[new paragraph] This is not to say that the Song of Songs is ‘Solomonic’ (on this see Carr, 2011 p. 455; cf. Hendel [and Joosten] 2018, p. 7). Nevertheless, this paper engages Hendel’s presentation and critique of this author’s work (Hendel and Joosten 2018, 5-9), particularly with regard to whether a book’s lack of CBH (~presence of Late Biblical Hebrew) supercedes all other considerations in proposing a date for some form of that work in the exilic or pre-exilic period of Judah and Israel’s history.
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Nazarenes, Nestorians, and the Semitic Milieu of Eastern Jewish Christianities
Program Unit: Jewish Christianity / Christian Judaism
Vincenzo Carrano, California State University - Long Beach
Simon Mimouni, Ray Pritz, and Petri Luomanen are the primary authorities on the Jewish Christian sect of the Nazarenes or Nazoreans. Both Mimouni and Pritz have denied a connection between the historical Nazarenes with the Mandaeans of Iraq. All three of the aforementioned scholars have also not incorporated eastern witnesses into their assessment of the Nazarenes, as they primarily focus on Greek and Latin patristic sources. As a corrective, I focus on the Semitic/Eastern witnesses to the Nazarenes; particularly in the Didascalia, the Kerdir Inscription, the Julian Romance, the Toledot Yeshu, the Book of Nestor Ha’Komer, and Quranic/Islamic references to the Nasraya/Notsrim/Nasara. Per the research of Francois de Blois, this paper will argue that the Nazarenes were a historical Jewish Christian group of a Syriac background. The name ‘Nazarene’ came to signify Christianity beyond the boundaries of the Roman empire, particularly by hegemonic forces seeking to denigrate Christians by reminding them of their Jewish origins. This term is also found as a self identification in the literature of the Church of the East, also known as ‘Nestorian’, classic examples being the Julian Romance or Vita of Mar Aba. This Church also retains a number of Jewish practices in terms of its exegesis, demonology, liturgy, scribal-scholastic traditions, and folk religious traditions. The assessments of Petri Luomanen, Annette Yoshiko-Reed (particularly Ch.’s 2,3, & 5 of Jewish-Christianity and the History of Judaism), Patricia Crone, Guy Stroumsa, and Francois De Blois will form the main theoretical and historical interpretation of the term ‘Nazarene’; while concurrently describing its use in Syriac, Judaic, and Arabic sources.
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Reading the Bible with a Migration Lens: New and Needful
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
M. Daniel Carroll R., Wheaton College (Illinois)
Accepted paper for the 2019 IBR meeting, History of Biblical Interpretation research group
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Mourning as Political Protest at Purim
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Jo Carruthers, Lancaster University
This paper takes a prompt from Botticelli's 'Mordecai's Weeping', a sixteenth-century Italian painting, which depicts the scene from the scroll of Esther in which Mordecai mourns over the published threat to the Empire's Jews. The paper will challenge the presumed passivity of weeping to explore the complex political claims and implications of public mourning in this and other aesthetic works inspired by Esther 4.
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Materialist Musings on Capital(s) in Persian Period Yehud
Program Unit: Economics in the Biblical World
Charles E. Carter, Seton Hall University
The canonical witnesses that date to and/or reflect upon the Persian Period present a fully functioning Temple Economy, though one beset by enemies from within and without. But how are we to evaluate these literary cultural artifacts? Are they normative? Idealist and ideological? Was Jerusalem the primary capital of the Persian Period province, or was it only its religious center? Did its status change during the Persian period and if so, what may have let to that change? The paper addresses these types of questions from a cultural-materialist perspective, with specific attention to methodology, material remains, and interpretive strategies. It raises issues central to the notion of both temple economy and temple states in anticipation of sessions on the temple state in subsequent historical periods.
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Rescuing the Eagles from the Vultures: Matthew 24:28
Program Unit: Animal Studies and the Bible
Warren Carter, Phillips Theological Seminary
To what end does the strange text of Matthew 24:28 refer to eagles (aetoi): “Wherever the corpse is, there the eagles will be gathered?
Some interpreters and translations try to make sense of the sentence by rendering aetoi as vultures (not eagles) and claim it depicts a common scene of vultures feeding on corpses. But various ancient writers are convinced that aetoi (Latin, Aquila) does not mean vulture; the term gyps (Latin, vultur) denotes vultures. Writers spanning Aristotle, Pliny the elder and Aelianus distinguish the two birds consistently with vultures eating carrion and eagles catching their own prey; eagles (aetoi 28x) and corpses (ptoma 21x) never occur together in the Septuagint nor in the rest of the NT nor in the Pseudepigrapha, nor in Philo, Josephus and Plutarch. Significantly, eagles in the Septuagint are commonly associated with imperial powers (16 of 28 uses) namely Assyria, Babylon, Egypt. God uses such powers to inflict punishment and then in turn punishes these empires. In six uses God is the super-eagle who saves from imperial powers. This association of eagles and imperial power is in the first century represented by Rome whether in texts (4 Ezra), on buildings, omens of eagles before battles, on coins, and of course the eagle standards (aquilae) carried into battle at the front of Roman legions that bear an image of eagles because “it is the king and bravest of all the birds; it is regarded by them as a symbol of empire…an omen of victory…a sacred emblem” (Josephus, JW 3.123). No one confuses these eagles with vultures.
In this light, the eagles gathered with the corpses in Matt 24:28 in the context of the return of the triumphant son of man suggests a scenario of battle in which the eagles are not actual birds but the standards of Roman legions that represent defeated Roman power. The eagles are “gathered together with the corpses.” Rome, an agent of God’s judgment in the events of 70 is now punished and destroyed at the return of the Son of Man to establish God’s empire. The verb “gathered together” (sunago) regularly appears in Matthew in scenes of eschatological judgment and condemnation. It must be noted, though, that in representing destroyed Rome as eagles gathered with corpses, the Gospel presents God’s triumph through the victorious son of man as a grotesque mimicking and reinscribing of the imperial strategies and worldview that the Gospel resists.
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Evoking the Massacre of the Innocents to Resist Tyrannies: Two Paintings
Program Unit: Bible and Visual Art
Warren Carter, Phillips Theological Seminary
Matthew’s scene of Herod’s slaughter of the infant boys of Bethlehem (Matt 2:15; known since Cyprian as the slaughter or massacre of the innocents) participates in the Gospel’s resistance to imperial tyranny by exposing its indiscriminate violence against defenseless subjects. The scene’s commitment to employ graphic exposure of the horrors of tyranny as the act of resistance has shaped a significant afterlife. The scene has provided for subsequent interpreters a template, a transferable triangular structure of power relations comprising tyrant (Herod), victims (the infants), and means of tyranny (military attack) that has proven to be adaptable in exposing/resisting numerous other acts of tyranny. This paper discusses two paintings as such acts of resistance .
The first work is Bruegel’s 1567 painting, the Massacre of the Innocents, whereby Bruegel employs this triangular structure to depict Spanish Catholic rule (Philip II) as the tyrant, the victims are a Protestant Dutch village, and the means of attack is a military attack on the Dutch village. Even as he contemporizes the Matthean scene in setting, characters, and clothing, Bruegel maintains a link with it not only by the work’s title and use of this triangular structure of power relations, but also by depicting numerous vignettes in which Spanish troops and German mercenaries slaughter only baby boys (no girls or adults are attacked). Bruegel creates an allegory that resists religious intolerance and imperial power. One indication of the effectiveness of his act of resistance in exposing imperial tyranny is reflected in a redacted version of the painting, thought to be authorized by the Hapsburg emperor Rudolph II, that tones down the stark violence by replacing scenes of violent murder with “acceptable” acts of pillage.
The second work, much less well known, is William Rimmer’s 1858 painting which uses the same triangular structure of power relations to participate in northern abolitionist discourse that resisted southern slavery by associating it with the tyrant Herod. In Rimmer’s stark doomsday depiction, the tyrants, depicted by a singular, macho soldier are southern slave owners and politicians, the means of violence is the institution of slavery, but the victims are not – at least primarily – African-American slaves. Rather, Rimmer depicts a white woman and infant under attack. Partly naked and partly clothed in red, white and blue, she is lady liberty or civilization attacked by the institution of slavery. Rimmer’s painting particularly constructs slavery as threatening to all liberty (no one is free unless and until all are free) but especially to that of white citizens. The painting was owned by Dr. Christopher Columbus Holmes, for whom it functioned as a call to arms against the enslaving herods who threatened societal and domestic liberty. Holmes served as commander of the Boston cadets who guarded Boston and Confederate soldiers imprisoned on Georges Island in Boston harbor.
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The Book of Fan: Interrogating the Deeper Expressions of Fandom as Religion
Program Unit: Bible and Popular Culture
Katelynn Carver, University of St Andrews
In considering fan culture, the phenomenon can fairly easily be mapped onto pervasive models of the religious. What emerges from this is a novel space for engagement of how fandom reacts to the potentially “heretical” within its own definition of tradition—perhaps most interestingly, how it reacts to such threats from in-universe and real-world threats to established beliefs and texts. This can include new additions to canon, new interpretations of canon, interference by meta-gods (original authors/creators), and the treatment of gods, the deitical, and religion in-universe. By affirming the ways in which fan culture does mirror religion, we are able to then dig deeper into analyzing the interaction of elements of non-fandom religion and/or god-like action within the fandom community, helping us to consider the weight of fan culture as a religious community that operates and sustains itself with a level of integrity well worth serious consideration and further exploration.
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The Marriage Injunction of Num 36: Zelophehad’s Daughters and the Intersection of Land Inheritance and Sex Regulation
Program Unit: Pentateuch
M. L. Case, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
In this paper, I argue that the account of Zelophehad’s daughters in Num 27 and 36 illustrates the implicit connection between proper allotment of ancestral land and the regulation of women’s sexuality in ancient Israel. Much has been written about these episodes, specifically about the law prescribing proper lines of inheritance. Numbers 27:8 permits a daughter to inherit in the absence of any sons, a place she holds ahead of any other kin of the father. In the case of the unmarried daughters of Zelophehad, the language used for their request for land suggests they see the land more as an inheritance than a simple dowry: Like a male heir, they wish to perpetuate their father’s name through possession of his land. They argue for the right to legally acquire the portion allocated for their father in the division of the land among the Israelites upon their arrival to Canaan, if he were still alive. Numbers 36 raises the concerns over proper land inheritance instigated by the previous stipulation: If the daughters marry outside their father’s tribe, the ancestral land will be removed from its rightful inheritors. The legal solution restricts the pool of marriageable men available to the daughters, for they must marry within their father’s tribe, or even within his clan, in order that the land remain properly allotted. This focus on land inheritance protocols, while important, limits us from examining the other element regulated in this account, namely the sexuality the daughters and sexual access to their bodies. If we understand the bêt ˀāb (father’s house) as the basic unit of ancient Israelite society, with restrictions placed on individuals based on their location within the bêt ˀāb, then a woman typically only controls her own sexuality if she is a widow or a divorcée. In all other cases, her father regulates a woman’s sexuality before marriage, as her husband does after marriage. The daughters of Zelophehad present a more dangerous category of unregulated women: unmarried, unengaged virgins with no male head of household. In this case, then, the addition of Num 36 to the account of Zelophehad’s daughters’ request in Num 27 not only mitigates the possibility of ancestral land leaving the tribe, but also places these unattached women back under the control of male heads of households, their new husbands.
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The Child in the Refrigerator: Narrative Death in 2 Kgs 4:8–37
Program Unit: Reading, Theory, and the Bible
M. L. Case, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
According to 2 Kgs 4:8–37, a barren woman from Shunem miraculously gives birth after demonstrating her faithfulness to the prophet Elisha. Later, when the boy becomes sick and dies, the woman once again displays her faithfulness to Elisha, which results in him resurrecting the child. Thus, unlike other miraculous birth narratives in the Hebrew Bible in which the promised child is destined for greatness (e.g., Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph, Samson, or Samuel), the child in this pericope serves no function other than to be born, die, and be resurrected. Using the “Woman in the Refrigerator” trope as an analytical tool, I argue that, due to his complete lack of agency, the text treats this miracle child as a nothing more than a plot mechanism benefitting the central characters, particularly Elisha. Comic book writer Gail Simone first articulated the “Woman in the Refrigerator” syndrome in 1999 to describe a common comic book trope where female characters are injured, killed, or depowered for the sole purpose of developing the male protagonists’ storylines. Since its inception, this trope has gained prominence in feminist critiques of popular culture in the West, particularly in comic book and gaming cultures. Simone named the trope after the death and literal refrigeration of Alexandra DeWitt, the girlfriend of the superhero main character, in Green Lantern #54 (1994). Not a fully-developed character in her own right, Alexandra's death acted as a plot device in the hero’s story, providing the motivation for Green Lantern to confront the villain. In this paper, I use the trope to analyze the child and his role as an innocent victim and plot device in this account. Though the “Woman in the Refrigerator” trope originated with female characters, any character, regardless of gender, can receive such a label. The tragedy of all these characters comes from the lack of agency they possess in their own lives, in their own stories, due to the fact that their plot lines only serve to further the hero’s arc. We, the readers, perceive the boy in 2 Kgs 4:8–37 as an innocent victim because, unlike other miracle children, he lives only to die, in order to highlight the miraculous power of Elisha.
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The Trauma of an (Un)civilized (Wo)man in Hosea
Program Unit: Biblical Literature and the Hermeneutics of Trauma
Jeremiah Cataldo, Grand Valley State University
Many biblical texts present a bigger, or larger than life, image of Israel and Judah. They do so for a purpose. Postexilic texts, for instance, emphasize the strength and virility of the masculine as the foundation for a restored society. Hosea, for specific, utilizes the metaphor of a whore, an uncivilized woman, as a negative transference (cf. Freud, R. Corradi, R. Leys) of that ideal on at least two levels: (1) the guilty audience is feminized; and, more intentionally, (2) it is cast as an uncontrollable woman that threatens to undermine the patriarchal structure and authority. While past academic studies have touched upon the metaphor of the woman as a description of conquest and displacement, which occurs in Hosea, this study will focus on the inverted image of masculinity as a social-psychological strategy, or pathway, out of the cycle of trauma. Hosea's strategy is clear: the more intense the negative transference of the metaphor, the more understandable the contours and expectations of a (possible) restored (masculine/civilized) society.
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The Use of the UBSGNT in Classrooms
Program Unit:
Jeff Cate, California Baptist University
As one who has used the UBS text since its third edition in my days as an undergraduate student until now in its fifth edition as one who teaches such students, I would like to express my personal remarks regarding its format and style as I’ve seen students use the text. There is a reason that the presentation of its text has not changed radically from edition to edition over the years—it has much to commend itself. But as the field of textual criticism advances and new resources become available—most notably the publication of the Editio Critica Maior—some of the original needs of the UBS text are no longer quite as necessary. This presentation will discuss recent and proposed changes to the UBS edition as it affects students learning Greek for the first time, with specific examples from the New Testament.
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Scribal Practices in Early Qur’anic Manuscripts from Fustat: The Role of the Copyist in the Transmission of the Qur’an
Program Unit: The Qur’an: Manuscripts and Textual Criticism (IQSA)
Éléonore Cellard, Collège de France
The qur’anic manuscripts from the first centuries of Islam are fragmentary and anonymous. We do not know anything about the context in which they have been copied. Who wrote the manuscripts? For what purposes? Where and when have they been produced? These kind of information are however crucial, first for shedding light on the scribal practices at the beginning of the written transmission, and second for understanding the value of the qur’anic textual variants found in these materials. Indeed, the discrepancies between two copies could be due to different factors: time gaps, regional distances, or distinct milieux of production.
In the manuscripts collection, originally stored in the ‘Amr mosque in Fustat, we recently identified two distinct early qur’anic fragments – now kept in Paris (BnF Arabe 330g) and St Petersburg (BnR Marcel 16 and Marcel 21/b) – showing very similar physical features, except in the size and orientation (vertical/oblong). The examination of both reveals that they have been written by the same copyist. This data represents thus a major breakthrough for our knowledge about early qur’anic manuscripts. It opens new perspectives in the reconstruction of the scribal habits. What is the exact relationship between these two manuscripts? Does this new identification help for locating a scribal activity in the vicinity of Fustat? What could we learn about the way of writing the Qur’an in early Islam?
By comparing their physical features (paleography, codicology) and their textual parallels – as we have the opportunity to compare the same qur’anic passages preserved in both copies – we would bring to light some aspects of the written transmission of the Qur’an in the early centuries and the role of the copyist within it. We would show first that an evident hierarchy was effective between manuscripts of different size and orientation, already at the beginning of the second century H. Then, we propose to examine the principle of copy according to an exemplar : what are the scribal rules in the transmission? What is the role of the supposedly copyist’s freedom in the way of writing the text or putting diacritics?
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Religion and Politics: Clement’s Use of Political Terminology for God in the Concluding Prayer (1 Clem 59–61)
Program Unit: Inventing Christianity: Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, and Martyrs
Jacob Cerone, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Clement’s petition on behalf of earthly, political leaders and his exhortation to submit to them in the closing prayer (59–61) has prompted several investigations aimed at parsing his and his community’s relationship with Rome and imperial rule. Was it friendly—as is suggested by his call for Christians (in Rome and Corinth) to submit to their rulers, with no reservations—or is there a counter-imperial subtext to be found therein?
This paper will argue that Clement’s subordination of the Christian to secular forms of government fits within his broader rhetorical argument that God has established and ordered the world (e.g., cosmos, nature, society, military, and the church) according to his will and that this order should not be transgressed. By deposing and replacing their presbyters, the Corinthian church has defied God’s order, and it is necessary for them to restore it by reinstating those presbyters. However, Clement’s reasoning from “order” opens his argument up to criticism. Christianity itself was an unsanctioned religion and Christians were known to refuse to participate within the imperial cult. This refusal to conform could be offered up by the Corinthians an example where the Christians in Rome refused to obey their God appointed rulers and were themselves guilty of transgressing the bounds of “order” established by God.
Clement navigates this possible charge by emphasizing God’s sole claim to sovereign rule and the Christian’s ultimate submission to him alone. All other rulers exist to exercise power according to his will. He reinforces this cosmology with the nexus of political titles he uses when speaking of or addressing God: God is ὁ μόνος ὕψιστος ἐν ὑψηλοῖς (59.3), εὐεργέτης (59.3), σωτήρ (59.3), βασιλεύς (61.2), κύριος (59.3; 60.1; 61.1, 2), δεσπότης (59.4; 60.3; 61.1, 2), and the giver of peace (60.3). Secular rulers, on the other hand, are υἱοὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων (“sons of men”; 61.2) and simply ἄρχοντες καὶ ἡγουμένοι (“those who rule and lead”; 60.4). Thus, Clement avoids entirely epithets such as βασιλεύς, κύριος, or δεσπότης. Within this context, this paper will contend that a large swath of designations used for God in the closing prayer have close ties to the political world and that in their attribution to God there is a counter-imperial subtext that functions as a reminder of where the Christian’s true loyalties lie, even when their rulers transgress their God-appointed bounds (61.2).
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A Lexicon of Job from Late Antiquity/Early Byzantium
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Reinhart Ceulemans, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
In this paper, I present a Greek glossary on the book of Job, which was composed in Late Antiquity or Early Byzantium and has not appeared in print. I introduce its manuscript witness and document how it was recycled in subsequent Greek dictionaries and encyclopedias from Byzantium. On the basis of a selection of entries, I present the methods and sources of the original glossary and compare them with the approaches of modern lexicography of Job.
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The Dogmatic Drag of Early Christian Transmission of the Greek Bible
Program Unit: Greek Bible
Reinhart Ceulemans, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
In this paper, I argue two points, both of them relating to the way in which Greek Christianity transmitted the text of the Septuagint and relevant to our modern text-critical approach.
First, I reflect on the fact that the transmission of the biblical text is an expression of Christian biblical interpretation as valid as (and in fact: more influential than) other forms of exegesis. Buried in text-critical apparatuses and hardly noticed, variant readings of the biblical text in fact inform us of different kinds of Christian interpretation, both reactive and active.
Second, I underline that Christian views on the Septuagint have shaped our current text-critical approach to that text in a manner the profoundness of which is not always realized enough. Some modern-day, Western scholarly conceptions of (and tools to deal with) the origins, transmission… of the Septuagint are still very much shaped by the views Early Christianity had on those topics—also those that are now known to be problematic. Referring to the Hexapla and Jewish revisions, I discuss the difficulties (and at time: reluctance) we experience when trying to escape what the late M.L. West called the ‘dogmatic drag’ (i.e., ‘obsolete views go on exercising a pull even after having been discredited, and they put a brake on progress towards a new position’; The Making of the Iliad, Oxford, 2011, p. 16).
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אלהי נכר (Foreign Gods) as an Organizing Theological Concept for Ancient Israel: Tapping Deuteronomy and Isaiah for Theological Insights for Community Reconstruction
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Ntozakhe Cezula, Stellenbosch University
Accepted paper for the IBR annual meeting in 2019, Isaiah research group
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Why No One Read Epiphanius' Book: Information Overload and the Biography of the Panarion
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Matt Chalmers, University of Pennsylvania
Epiphanius’ Panarion is an experiment in writing Christian difference into existence. A hefty work on heresies by a celebrity bishop who provoked strong personal reactions in his own time and ours, it has come to define a modern scholarly category of heresiology. It has also seen an uptick in recent attention, in work including (but not limited to) that by Alain Le Boulluec, Aline Pourkier, Averil Cameron, Andrew Jacobs, Todd Berzon, and David Maldonado-Rivera. The Panarion, however, at least in its full three volumes, never gets much ancient airtime. Heresiologists who explicitly refer to Epiphanius use the anonymous Anacephalaioses, within a short time attached to circulating manuscripts of the longer text. Augustine even thinks that the epitome was Epiphanius’ famous polemical work. And centuries later, when John of Damascus shapes his own extended De Haeresibus around the catalogue, he uses, again, the shorter Anacephalaioses.
In this paper, I use the panel focus on the biography of books to unpack the curious discrepancy between the Panarion’s effects and the evidence we have – or rather, that we lack – for its late antique readership. By attention to the Panarion between two historical moments and their different responses to information overload – the late antique and the early modern – I construct a case study that complicates the relationship between the trajectory of a text, its attributed author’s reputation, and its contents.
My paper has three brief components. First, I introduce the Panarion and justify understanding it, in its late antique context, as something of a poor fit for wide usage. Second, I note how the work, nevertheless, comes to function as prototypic for heresiography in early modernity. Third, I briefly suggest how this biographic approach helps us theorize not only how texts communicate differently through time, but how the conditions governing text use interface with real and imagined features of the texts in question.
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The Hermeneutics of Joshua
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Nathan Chambers, Wiser Lake Chapel
Accepted paper for the 2019 IBR meeting, Early Historical Books research group
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Joshua 1 as Anchor of the Prophets
Program Unit: Joshua-Judges
Nathan Chambers, Wiser Lake Chapel
Like Psalm 1, the first chapter of the Writings, Joshua 1 looks back to the Torah while also looking forward to the Former (and Later) Prophets. This paper investigates the dual directionality of Joshua 1 in two ways. First, I examine how the commission of Joshua in ch. 1 draws on both Numbers and Deuteronomy, interweaving their material concerning of Joshua. Second, I argue that the figure of Joshua is intended as a model of legal hermeneutics, interpreting and applying, and thus concretizing, the Torah in specific circumstances. Like Psalm 1, this points to a way in which the Prophets build on and appropriate the Torah.
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Sense Perception in 1 Sam 1–6
Program Unit: Book of Samuel: Narrative, Theology, and Interpretation
Nathan Chambers, Wiser Lake Chapel
Eli’s blindness is a frequently noted motif in the Eli stories. This paper sets out to further develop this standard observation in three directions. First, this motif is not limited to the pair sight/blindness, but includes a variety of sense-perception language, especially related to hearing. Second, this motif extends to a variety of characters in these narratives: Yhwh is a good of knowledge who looks on Hannah, appears to Samuel, and does what is good in his eyes; Samuel is ready to hear and reports his vision to Eli; Eli’s sons neither know Yhwh nor listen to Eli. Third, this motif of sense-perception is not limited to either 1 Sam 1 or 1-3, but carries into the ‘ark-narratives’ where blind Eli acts as lookout but can neither see the messenger nor discern the sound of the people and Dagon looses his head and hands, loci of sense-perception. Through a close literary reading, I propose to investigate how this motif ties 1 Sam 1-3 to the subsequent narratives and illustrates the prophetic principle that senseless people have eyes and ears but do not see or hear and so do not understand.
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A Message of Solidarity from the Younger Son and the Dishonest Manager to the Chinese Church: A Parallel Study of Luke 15:11–32 and Luke 16:11–13
Program Unit: Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics
Yi-Sang Patrick, Chan, Fuller Theological Seminary
The Chinese government’s market-based economic strategy has attracted many rural people to urban areas in search of better employment opportunities. However, despite its prosperity, there is wide income disparities in urban cities and many people are living at the subsistence level. Those migrant workers’ lives are bound by the government’s “hukou” migration policy. Some of them need to leave their migrant children in the rural areas as “left-behind children.”
In view of this, some churches in China narrowly define evangelism as the making of converts. The parable of the prodigal son (15:11-32) becomes one of the most frequently engaged parables that only focuses on the theme of repentance and forgiveness. The prodigal son represents sinners who are accepted by God; and the older son represents Pharisees who do not understand God’s forgiving grace. However, this traditional interpretation only connects 15:11-32 with the preceding two parables without noticing how it can be related to the subsequent parable of the dishonest manager (16:1-13). Michael Austin challenges this reading by arguing that isolating Luke 15 as one unit would allow the theme of “lost and found” to be the “dominant interpretative criterion.” This reading also misses Luke’s social teaching (14:1-24; 15:1-32; 16:1-9).
In this paper, I argue that Luke 15:11-32 and Luke 16:1-13 form a two-part challenge to the Pharisees regarding their use of resources, a challenge that requires active solidarity with those outside the socio-religious boundary, from acceptance to active sharing of resources. In regard to the issue of poverty and migration in China, this paper provides an alternative understanding to the parable of the prodigal son by demonstrating how 16:1-13 can provide an “interpretive clue to the meaning of the prodigal son.” This reading also pushes the church to engage more in society to bring both social and economic transformation.
To do that, this paper starts explaining how the “hukou” migration policy has resulted in the issues of poverty and discrimination among migrant workers. Then, in relation to the context of Luke 15-16, I argue that the core issues for some Pharisees are their seeking of self-glory and love of money that establishes a socio-religious boundary between them and the marginalized. Luke 15-16 is then set against the context of the growing tension between Pharisees and Jesus and the two parables (15:11-32; Luke 16:1-13) serve as consecutive responses to the Pharisees in relation to God’s social message. Afterwards, by showing the similarities between the younger son and the dishonest manager, I argue that they are both wise planners who can utilize their social resources to establish relationship with others for future benefit. This ironic appreciation forms the basis of Jesus’s social message that it is important to share the worldly resources with the poor for eschatological benefits. In contrast, the older son ironically fails to demonstrate this solidarity by refusing to join the celebration. The open-ended question from the father appears as a challenge to some Pharisees to break down the socio-religious boundary to align with God’s redemptive purpose.
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A Double-Edged Sword: The Transmission and Transformation of Ideas through Baptism in Rom 6:3–4
Program Unit: Ritual in the Biblical World
Kai-Hsuan Chang, Wycliffe College (University of Toronto)
Applying analytic tools from cognitive linguistics (image schema and conceptual blending theory), this paper explores the interplay between ritual and knowledge in Rom 6:3-4. It argues that ritual not only symbolizes and conveys ideas but may in turn shape the symbolized or conveyed ideas. Many cognitive linguists have indicated that human cognition is embodied: our ideas and language are constructed largely on the basis of recurrent patterns of bodily experiences. Thus, by providing recurrent pattern of physical practice, ritual can function as an instrument of teaching and transmission of religious knowledge. I will argue that this didactic effect of ritual is usually achieved by "conceptual blends" constructed in the ritual practice. Specifically, I will demonstrate that Paul enacts a conceptual blend in Rom 6:3-4 between the reversal pattern in baptism of being physically immersed into water and raised up, and the similar pattern of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ (cf. 1 Cor 15:3-4). Studies on ritual and cultural backgrounds, such as the ritual use of water in Greco-Roman society and the ancient understanding of the body, will help to illuminate the conditions by which these two reversal patterns can be conceptually blended. By forming this blend, Paul instructs the Romans that a baptizand has died and been buried together with Christ. This blend seems effective since the idea of conjoined burial in baptism later appears in Col 2:12. However, ritual can also generate new and even unintended knowledge through the recurrent pattern and the conceptual blend. In Rom 6:3-4, the idea of a baptizand being resurrected together with Christ is implied in the upward movement of the reversal pattern in baptism and is symmetrical to the downward movement. Thus, based on the blend that I propose, I argue that the “conjoined resurrection” would naturally and conceptually follow the conjoined death in baptism, as explicitly stated in Col 2:12-13 (cf. 3:1) with the same logic of symmetry. However, unlike Colossians, Paul carefully sets up a tension in Romans between the degrees of identification with the death of Christ and the identification with his resurrection. It appears that, by forming a blend in 6:3-4, Paul’s intention was only to validate the idea of dying with Christ and strengthen his argument about the law (cf. 7:1-6) without inventing the idea of being resurrected with Christ in baptism. It was the symmetrical pattern of baptism that would in time, through conceptual blending, lead to the idea of realized and conjoined resurrection in Christian communities.
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Psalm 115 and the Logic of Blessing
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Stephen B. Chapman, Duke University
A programmatic expression of Second Temple piety, Psalm 115 contains a distinctive nexus of theologoumena depicting Israel’s religious life as a drama of gratitude, trust, and praise. The psalm turns on conveying a proper understanding of blessing, which is presented not only as performative speech but an act of divine imitation or mirroring, a means of “replacing” (Andrew Davison) the worshiper and worshiping community in right relation to God and God’s creation.
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Augustine's Hermeneutic of Love and Its Relation to Image
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Ellen Charry, Princeton Theological Seminary
Accepted paper for the 2019 Tyndale House Scripture Collective, Scripture and Doctrine Seminar
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Locating a Woman of Worth: Spaces, Gender Construction, and Ideology in Proverbs 31:10–31
Program Unit: Space, Place, and Lived Experience in Antiquity
Amy J. Chase, Drew University
In its effusive description of the Eshet Chayil, Proverbs 31.10-31 invokes several spaces: the home, fields and vineyards, foreign lands, and city gates. Mention of these is not incidental but fundamental to the work of the passage in promoting its utopian vision. Thus far, attention to the spaces of Proverbs 31 has been limited largely to implications of city gates in characterizing the Eshet Chayil’s husband (e.g., Biwul) and to exploring the extent to which the Eshet Chayil’s occupation of public spaces informs as to the lives of women in antiquity (Lang, Meyers, Yoder). This paper draws upon space theorists Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, and Tim Cresswell to understand more fully the function of spaces mentioned in Proverbs 31. What ideology do these promote? The spaces mentioned contribute to the text’s construction of gender, as male and female figures occupy distinct locations, either acting or constrained from acting with regard to various tasks and in relation to other persons also present in the spaces. In addition, distinctions in the poem between rural and urban spaces reinforce projections of class, with both peasants and elites asserting their own interests. This study clarifies the power dynamics ongoing between all these groups as asserted via mention of spaces.
Understanding the function of spaces in Proverbs 31 also involves noting instances of boundary transgression. What do these accomplish? Liminal spaces produced by such transgressions supply an opportunity to rethink prevailing social structures and systems in light of current conditions. Migration, shifts in leadership, developing urban areas and expanding trade — such challenges or many others could invite conversation within an ancient community regarding how it ought best conduct itself. This paper argues that both reinforcing and renegotiating of social practices is taking place via the mention of spaces in Proverbs 31. The insights produced through analyzing the use of space in Proverbs 31 prompts a new understanding of the poem’s opening question: “An Eshet Chayil, who can find?” She may not be as rare as the rhetorical question would imply. Rather, the struggle to locate this woman represents a community’s effort to discover how best to preserve and exert its own chayil (“strength”).
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Linguistics and Poetic Parallelism: Roman Jakobson, Syntax, and Cognitive Linguistics
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Kevin Chau, University of the Free State
In an effort to gain a richer understanding of how poetic parallelism in Biblical Hebrew (BH) operates fundamentally as linguistic phenomenon, this paper surveys three different linguistic approaches to poetry. The first, serving as the foundation of this presentation, examines how Adele Berlin’s theory for linguistic parallelism (The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism), though almost 35 years old, can continue to be used to gain further insights into BH parallelism. Whereas previous studies often focused on one element of parallelism over the other (e.g., semantics vs. syntax), Berlin’s study offered a comprehensive and unifying understanding of how BH parallelism operates on all the major linguistic levels (morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and phonological). Relying upon Roman Jakobson’s well-known work on linguistics and parallelism, she argues that all these different levels of linguistic parallelisms operate through both paradigmatic (equivalent or contrastive) and syntagmatic (contiguous, sequenced) relationships. The metaphors of the Babylonians as wind (Hab 1:11) and the Babylonian king as a fisherman (Hab 1:15-17) are analyzed via Berlin’s method of paradigmatic and syntagmatic parallelisms to provide fresh insight into these metaphors—specifically how the wind metaphor begins and develops earlier in the passage and how the Babylonian fishing of the nations is also a metaphor for the ḥerem (“the ban”). Second, the topic of word order in BH is a major field of research; however, its study in BH poetry is quite complex because of the poetry’s seemingly variable word order. As a result, this presentation focuses solely on left-dislocation (also called nominative absolute or casus pendens) and offers analyzed examples of how left-dislocation constructions are used in conjunction with parallelism (e.g., Deut. 32:4, Ps. 101:5). Third, while the study of metaphor (especially cognitive/conceptual approaches) is of great interest to poetry scholars, the related cognitive process metonymy has received far less attention, especially in how it is expressed through poetic parallelism. This section analyzes how the conceptual mapping of the metonymy Sodom and Gomorrah in Deut 32:32 relates in parallelism within its immediate context (vv. 31-37) and to the poem’s earlier metaphor of God as the mountain-mother (Deut 32:13).
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The Good Life in Ancient Near Eastern Theodicy
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Adam Chebahtah, Biola University
While many would agree that wisdom can be defined as the skill of living well, few enough have sought to give a comprehensive answer as to the question of what the end result of a life well-lived would look like. If one is to properly understand the Wisdom Literature of the Hebrew Bible, and that of Israel’s neighbors, then it is necessary to examine what these documents present as the picture of the life well-lived. This paper seeks to address this question by examining one particular genre of both Israelite and Egyptian Wisdom Literature in an attempt to discern the necessary elements of the good life as presented in theodicean literature. As theodicy presents vivid images of what is wrong with the world, by working backward from these statements, one can discern a vivid picture of what constitutes a life well-lived. Especially as theodicean literature often portrays the sufferer as beyond reproach, this line of inquiry can yield significant insights by examining what has gone wrong for the sufferer. Moreover, by comparing the various conceptions of the good life in the wisdom traditions of Israel and Egypt, one can see how the major concerns of the two cultures represent their respective worldviews. While the Egyptian presentation of theodicy presents the good life as one lived in accordance with maat (and subsequently the sufferer as one unable to experience maat), the Israelite sages present the good life as one lived in congruence with the creation narrative(s) of Genesis 1-2. This paper helps to build a clearer picture of just what the sages of the ancient Near East attempted to achieve through their work and what kind of life their followers could anticipate with careful attention to their words. While theodicy is inherently concerned with violations of the expected natural order, it is nevertheless a valuable enterprise to see how this genre fits into the conversation.
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The SBL Pseudepigrapha Section at Fifty: The Beginning of the End?
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Randall Chesnutt, Pepperdine University
The SBL Pseudepigrapha Section at Fifty: The Beginning of the End?
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What's in a Name? The Reimagination of Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel
Program Unit: Book of Daniel
Julian C. Chike, University of Notre Dame
In light of the discoveries of 4Q242 Prayer of Nabonidus and Nabonidus’s Harran stele, scholars generally agree that the narrative tradition of Daniel 4 originally pertained to Nabonidus. Such has also been suggested for other narrative traditions underlying Daniel 2–3. During the compositional development of the book of Daniel, however, Nabonidus was eventually replaced by Nebuchadnezzar. While scholars such as Carol Newsom have offered sound arguments concerning why the Jewish community would have composed stories about Nabonidus, less attention has been given to questions concerning the character substitution from Nabonidus to Nebuchadnezzar. Why did a later redactor(s) choose to ascribe narrative traditions originally about Nabonidus to Nebuchadnezzar, especially considering the ongoing presence of Nabonidus traditions at Qumran? What was the rhetorical and ideological intention behind such a transformation? In other words, what could Nebuchadnezzar "do" for the redactors of Daniel that Nabonidus could not do? This paper, thus, seeks to offer a contribution to these key literary questions. Jan Assmann, in his description of mnemohistory, astutely notes: “The present is ‘haunted’ by the past and the past is modeled, invented, reinvented, and reconstructed by the present.” Analysis of these transformations, in turn, evince the (un)conscious logic that shapes the nature of cultural memory. Haunted by the memory of Nebuchadnezzar, indelibly etched into the psyche of the diasporic Jewish community, innovative portrayals of Nebuchadnezzar began to emerge that effectively reshaped and reimagined the king’s role in their history (e.g., MT Jer 27:5–6; OG Bel 28, 41–42; Judith). Although the Nabonidus traditions may not have derived from the various redactors of Daniel, I argue the transference of Nabonidus to Nebuchadnezzar, mutatis mutandis, affects the same reimagination—viz., reconfiguring the image of Nebuchadnezzar cast in the Deuteronomistic History, Chronicles, and Ezra–Nehemiah. This innovative reimagination would not only offer encouragement to the Jews under Greek hegemony; it would also serve as a foreign king template, so to speak, within which any Gentile king could be inserted while the Jewish community remained under foreign dominion.
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Marcel Jousse’s Aramaic Gospel
Program Unit: The Bible in Ancient (and Modern) Media
Bruce Chilton, Bard College
By the end of his life Marcel Jousse seemed to have located himself on the wrong side of history. He did not embrace the hypothesis of Paul Kahle (and the “Kahle School”) in regard to the evolution of Aramaic. For that reason, he also did not accept the finding of a primitive, pre-Christian “Palestinian Targum.” And then, when it came to the Gospels proper, the orthodoxy of Form Criticism did not guide Jousse’s analysis. Instead, he trusted his capacity to uncover the rhythmic structures within oral expression that make tradition possible, and ultimately generate culture. Since his death, Jousse has been regarded as an idiosyncratic figure (when he has been considered at all). Yet in the three respects in which he has been dismissed as unfashionable, his attitudes have been vindicated to some extent. Today, the dialectical evolution of Aramaic has been corrected away from Kahle’s theory, accounts of the development of the Targumim no longer follow the “Palestinian Targum” model, and assessments of Gospel formation often follow a trajectory closer to Jousse’s than to Bultmann’s. This paper is designed, not to re-assess Jousse’s contributions as a whole, but to set out three major contexts in which such a re-assessment is necessary.
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Internal Struggle, Incomplete Frame? Reconsidering Trito-Isaiah’s Message in Isa 66
Program Unit: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible
Naeyoun Cho, Claremont School of Theology
The theory of so-called Trito-Isaiah is challenged because it reveals varieties of dissonance in Isa. 56–66 and intertextual interdependence within the final form of the Book of Isaiah. For example, the incompatible themes and tones between chs. 56-59; 63-66 and 60-62 lead scholars to hypothesize different redactional layers or to reconstruct social circumstances to shape the characteristics of the author’s critique. These kinds of approaches easily overlook the possibility of polyphony within a single text, voice, or character. This idea leads us to focus on how the narrator expresses and delivers his internal and external struggle to the reader. The sensitive reader might catch the narrator’s expectation and frustration. For this process of reading, first, if chs. 56–66 could be considered as a literary unit, contradictory statements could be related to the narrator’s self-identity and experience. Second, I will put the narrator of chs. 56-66 within the circumstances between 520 and 515 BCE. His dual message about the temple is that it is deeply related to the context of temple reconstruction, which was encouraged by Haggai and Zechariah. From this point, it is possible to say that the narrator has a different idea about this building project than two prophets. Third, I will try to show how he reveals his ambivalence by using Isaian languages to debate with the other party. Perhaps the narrator, although he was an immigrant Jew who was had immigrated from Babylon, would be related to nonmainstream Yehud politics. This liminality makes him reveal his dual feelings on his social conditions. Fourth, I will consider that the narrator utilizes his social memory of the temple as a frame of reference to interpret his context. Through utilizing these presuppositions, I will analyze Trito-Isaiah’s rhetoric against the temple-building project in chapter 66.
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A House of Her Own and Willingness to Die in Esther
Program Unit: Women in the Biblical World
Paul K.-K. Cho, Wesley Theological Seminary
Esther is a multilayered and composite character (G. Goering 2015). She occupies, for example, a position of relative power (as queen and an attractive woman) and weakness (as female and ethnic minority) and must navigate the perils of diasporic life to ensure her own survival and that of her people. M. de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) observes that the strategy (of the powerful) "postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets and threats can be managed" and, conversely, that the tactic (of the weak) "must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment" (36, 37). In short, strategies have to do with space and tactics with time. In de Certeau's terms, then, the survival of Esther and the Jews of Persia depend on Esther's strategic use of her control over a house of her own (to host feasts) and her tactical seizure of opportune moments at the risk of her life (to attain audience with the king). As I shall argue in the paper, the book of Esther beautifully interweaves the complexities of Esther's tactical and strategic resistance against the murderous designs of Haman and the foolishness of Ahasuerus into the structure of the book.
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Art of War: Renaissance Paintings of the Massacre of the Innocents as Resistance to Violence
Program Unit: Bible and Visual Art
Sung Cho, Catholic University of America
Matthew 2:16-18 records 1) Herod’s massacre of infants and 2) the fulfillment of Jeremiah 31:15, Rachel weeping for her children. Modern historical-critical and reader-oriented methods, which study the text’s historical origins and its modern readers respectively, fail adequately to address questions about the passage’s meaning and relevance by neglecting its long history of interpretation. In this paper, I focus on three Renaissance painters who have produced visual-exegetical and actualized readings of Matt 2:16-18. I first define visual exegesis and actualization before proceeding to works by Matteo di Giovanni, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and Peter Paul Rubens. These three artists decry violence of European wars in interesting ways, by use of subtle artistic motifs and details. Visual exegesis is a unique requirement for understanding visual representation of Scripture. Contexts, motifs, purpose, artistic limitations, and identities of beholders are all important to understand such works that differ in many ways from textual counterparts. Actualization is the process of reading a passage of Scripture in comparison with present circumstances and application. Three Renaissance artists exegete Matt 2:16-18 visually and actualize the text. Matteo di Giovanni reveals the contemporary fears of the Turks’ invasion of Italy in his depiction of Herod. Not only is the tyrant is depicted massively oversized with a skin tone darker than the victims’, Herod in his second painting is donning a turban. The artwork serves to warn fellow Italians that all is not well in national security.
Pieter Brugel the Elder, faithfully represented by the Younger, pictures the massacre in a snowy village of Netherlands. Brugel expresses in his work the Dutch resentment of the oppressive Spanish occupation administration. The imperial insignia on the herald’s tabard and men with red coats, the uniform of the bandes d’ordonnance, the brutal enforcers, is an important clue. In this manner, Brugel contributes to confrontational art common at that time. Peter Paul Rubens borrows from Raphael’s successful combination of two most often-revisited artistic motifs of his era: 1) Leonardo’s “depiction of the savagery of war” and 2) Michelangelo’s “dynamic mastery of the male nude in action,” a common sight in ancient Greek art. What is distinct in Rubens is the figure of Rachel in the second of his paintings on the subject. She is at the center interceding for the victims with arms raised toward heaven. She again appears in another later work of Rubens entitled, The Horrors of War, which is an artistic protest of the Thirty Years’ War. This reprise proves how fluid is the exchange of roles between Rachel and the Unfortunate Europe. In conclusion, these three Renaissance artists reveal the potential of the actualized and visualized text to express opposing opinions concerning the contemporary problems, not just memorialize the past. Specifically, artists’ paintbrush can be a weapon of protest against violence, just as mighty as the pen, which is mightier than the sword.
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The Shepherd of Hermas: Cultivate Passivity to Be a Proper Vessel of God
Program Unit: Religious Experience in Antiquity
Jung Choi, North Carolina Wesleyan College
This paper engages the Shepherd of Hermas (especially Mandate 11), focusing on the discussions about prophecy in the text. In the Shepherd of Hermas, one finds how prophecy is the prime locus where human and divine agencies are negotiated and constructed.
In the Shepherd of Hermas, two interlocking themes about the performance of prophecy emerge. First, the Shepherd of Hermas presents (true) prophecy as a passive and involuntary experience, incorporating a trope that a prophet functions as a sort of mouthpiece for God. The concept of prophecy as a passive phenomenon is also demonstrated by its use of images of vessels. Second, there is a strong suggestion that certain cultivation is required, in order to be a right vessel for the Spirit to indwell. It is necessary to cultivate and perform self-control to be a proper self to receive the Holy Spirit. Whereas the cultivation of self-control as preparation of prophecy has been emphasized, the tenor has shifted at the moment of prophecy. At the moment of prophecy, a lack of self-control is the hallmark of true prophecy. Thus, in the Shepherd of Hermas, one sees different modes of performances in relation to prophecy.
The Shepherd of Hermas shows how prophecy and prophet are contested categories. In modeling its own view of a true prophet and true prophecy, the text shows the centrality of cultivation in becoming a true prophet. The Shepherd of Hermas is not a manual to be a prophet but rather serves to educate and thus influence the (Christian) audience in a particular way.
This paper draws on feminist historiography that emphasizes that ancient literature should be read not as descriptive but as prescriptive—as engaged in struggling over and contesting practices and ideas. Enacting feminist historiography, I focus on the way in which the authors authorize, valorize, or erase particular practices in their texts. In doing so, my primary methodology for analyzing the text consists of a rhetorical-critical method. The rhetorical-critical method recognizes ancient texts as engaged in persuasive linguistic practices.
This paper also employs Pierre Hadot’s theories to develop a framework to study how literature on prophecy functions to train the reader or hearer toward particular dispositions that are worthy for prophecy. I use Hadot in order to understand not merely how a Christian individual is formed, but even more how ideal Christian communities are inscribed, for I am interested in the formation of the self in the context of social locations of the readers and hearers of the texts that I examine.
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The Language of Hearing and Seeing in 1 Samuel 1–3: Understanding Disability
Program Unit: Healthcare and Disability in the Ancient World
Seonghyun Choi, Yale Divinity School
Increasingly, study of the senses is becoming an element of disability criticism within biblical studies. Hector Avalos in his article “Introducing Sensory Criticism in Biblical Studies” is one of the few to have thoroughly examined the motif of blindness in the Hebrew Bible. According to Avalos, the reader can find in 1 Samuel 3 the stark juxtaposition between Eli, who cannot see what others see, and Samuel, who even hears what others cannot hear; and this juxtaposition represents the Deuteronomistic History’s audio-centric tendency, i.e., the tendency to “valu[e] hearing above sight.” When it comes to understanding God and the world, Avalos contends that sight usually skews reality, whereas hearing leads to correct conclusions. Though the Deuteronomist’s general emphasis on hearing is indeed remarkable, I think that Avalos overstates his case. The narrative of 1 Samuel 1-3 shows that seeing also functions as a channel by which to receive God’s messages. Ironically, this positive representation of sight is most highlighted at the very moment that Eli begins to lose his sight and Samuel sees ‘the vision’ from the deity, a vision, moreover, that shows the demise of Eli’s priesthood. I thus suggest that in this narrative, it is less a matter of either hearing or seeing, but of disability versus the (super)ability to perceive God’s will. “Ability” correlates to an ability to understand the divine will, and disability indicates an inability to do so. Therefore, the loss of senses, though considered a disability in modern society, does not necessarily equate to being a disability for the Deuteronomist.
(For the open session)
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The Lament as an Indictment of Failure
Program Unit: Philology in Hebrew Studies
Cathleen Chopra-McGowan, University of Chicago
How should we understand lament? Is it a definable literary object, one that can be isolated and recognized by formal features? Within the Hebrew Bible, even those texts that reference or self-describe as qinot, do so with markedly varying content and aims. Laments can be elegiac or individual, as in David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan; communal, as in Psalm 44; accusatory as in Lamentations 2; and attempts to provide definitions have similarly run the gamut. I argue that the lament is best understood as an indictment of failure. Using the Book of Lamentations as a case study, I will demonstrate how lament-as-indictment opens up new interpretive possibilities for characterizing this literary form, and further, positions the work of Lamentations as an anti-achievement narrative of royal, male, power.
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The (Not So) Monstrous Qur’an: On Beasts and Monsters and Where to Find Them in the Qur’an and Bible
Program Unit: The Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition (IQSA)
Johanne Louise Christiansen, University of Copenhagen
What is a beast? And what is a being? These questions initiate the book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a Hogwarts text book from the fictitious universe created by J. K. Rowling. The book exemplifies that bestiality, monstrosity, and the fantastic are ongoing, significant, and well-attested phenomena, not only in contemporary culture but also in the history of religions (cf. e.g. Cohen 1996). In this paper, I will therefore pose two additional questions: In what ways and why do holy scriptures such as the Qur’an and the Bible contain renderings of beasts and monsters? What are their function?
One example of a biblical monster is Leviathan, the dragon that God defeated at the beginning of time (Ps 74, 12–17, cf. Ps 104, 24–28; Is 27, 1). Leviathan represents life-threatening chaos, the chaos called “without form and void”, which God made into order through his creation. Whereas monsters, such as Leviathan, have been studied extensively within Biblical Studies (cf. van Bekkum et al. 2017), the monstrous features of the Qur’an have never been duly investigated by qur’anic scholars. This may be due to the fact that, compared to the Bible, the Qur’an only contains few fantastic beasts (e.g. Q al-Naml 27:39; Q al-Saffat 37:64–68). Besides the so-called ‘beast from the earth (dabba min al-ard)’, mentioned in Surat al-Naml (Q 27:82), which is described in vivid terms in the later Islamic tradition, the qur’anic application of monstrosity mostly pertains to its constant ‘othering’. It is the ‘Other’, embodied by the unbeliever, the ‘associator’, or the hypocrite, that is the monster of the Qur’an. For example, in the polemical metaphor used in Q al-Anfal 8:22: “The worst of beasts is in God’s view the deaf and dumb who do not understand (inna sharra ’l-dawabbi ‘inda llahi ’l-ṣummu ’l-bukmu lladhina la ya‘qiluna).” In this verse, the disabled body, deviating from the cultural model of a human body, is used to condemn the unbelievers’ lack of understanding. Another example of deviation from physical integrity and health occurs in qur’anic descriptions of the so-called tree of Zaqqum: “It is a tree that comes out of the root of hell/Its spathes are like the heads of devils (tal‘uha ka-annahu ru’usu ’l-shayatini)” (Q 37:64–65). Here, the normal borders between humans, animals, and natural phenomena become blurred.
This paper will dive into the (lack of) monstrosity in the Qur’an in comparison to the Bible (cf. Brunschvig 1953). Leaving most of the details and typical fantastic features of the beasts to later Islamic traditions, the qur’anic monster is a theoretical one. I will argue that monsters and monstrosity are used in the Qur’an as a didactic and rhetorical tool to explain destabilizing and dangerous bodies and situations where the given qur’anic order is at stake. As is evident in Q 8:22 and Q 37:64–65 cited above, ignorance of the qur’anic religious message or ending up in hell due to wrongdoing constitute such situations. It is also something that should be feared and avoided by the Qur’an’s adherents.
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Ethnic Nationalism and Its Consequences: Korean Racial Homogeneity and Jewish Elitism
Program Unit: Early Jewish Christian Relations
Paul Euihyun Chung, Vanderbilt University
This paper explores how ethnic nationalism of a certain ethnic group is negatively expressed to other groups of people who are ethnically different. Ethnic nationalism many times becomes elitism, and it ends up separating “Us” from “Other” continuously. This is a mechanism of two ethnic groups¬–Koreans and Jews in antiquity–by which they, consciously and unconsciously, discriminate against others who do not have shared ethnic origins.
Korean nationalism consisting of the myth of racial homogeneity and pure-bloodism was constructed in opposition to imperialist encroachments in the 19-20th centuries, especially Japanese colonization. In order to maintain the independence of Korea, early Korean nationalistic elites attempted to build Korean national identity, and this process later resulted in a sense of ethnic homogeneity under the founding ancestor, Dangun, among Koreans. Furthermore, it has become Korean racism disregarding other people of color whose skins are darker than theirs. Christians of Jewish origin, too, in the early Christian society were obsessed with their covenant status as God’s chosen people and a holy nation. Such a sense of ethnic superiority was deeply entrenched in Christians Jews and led them to build an ethnic boundary against non-Jews. Jewish-Gentile relations in Galatians, in particular, depict the tendency of Jewish Christians with their ethnic particularism. There are distinct power dynamics and hierarchical relations between Jewish and Gentile followers in which the latter invariably was subordinate. Therefore, it is evident that the ethnic identities of the two groups generated a sense of elitism and thus led to socio-cultural prejudices against other peoples.
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Did Paul Expect His Ex-pagan Gentiles to Go to Synagogue?
Program Unit: Paul within Judaism
Wally Cirafesi, MF Norwegian School of Theology
Did Paul Expect His Ex-Pagan Gentiles to Go to Synagogue?
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Beyond the Violent/Nonviolent Messiah Debate in Psalm of Solomon 17
Program Unit: Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature
Paul Cizek, Marquette University
Psalm of Solomon 17 is well known for its first century BCE depiction of a Davidic messiah that purifies the land of Israel and its people from sin. Disagreement persists, however, about whether the psalmist depicts the messiah as a violent warrior who purifies the land and people by force (Collins, 1995; Atkinson, 1999, 2001, 2004), or rather as a nonviolent figure who confronts the sinners of Jerusalem verbally (Chae, 2006; Janse, 2009; Zacharias, 2012; Gordley, 2014). At present, the debate has reached a stalemate with neither side able to prove decisively what the psalmist intended. I contend that the debate has stalled because it took shape around categories that are foreign to the psalm (i.e., violent, warrior, nonviolent) and that thereby obscure rather than clarify the psalmist’s depiction of the messiah. Alternatively, I argue that the psalmist characterizes the messiah in Deuteronomic terms as one who hopes in God in the day of war. I support this thesis by demonstrating how the psalmist evokes the Deuteronomic tradition regarding God’s action on behalf of God’s people in war through allusions to Deut 17:17; 20:1 in Ps. Sol. 17:33, and how the theme of hope therein ties to the psalmist’s framing declarations that the Lord is “our king forever and ever” (vv. 1, 46). So conceived in Deuteronomic terms, the messiah’s means of action (i.e., by force or verbally) need not have been resolved in the mind of the psalmist, nor preoccupy scholars today.
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Recounting Resistance: Intersectional Perspectives on Violence and Resistance in Jeremiah 37–38
Program Unit: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible
Juliana Claassens, Universiteit van Stellenbosch - University of Stellenbosch
The story of the Ethiopian eunuch, Ebed-Melech, that intersects with one of the stories that narrates the prophet Jeremiah’s imprisonment amidst an imperial context offers intriguing possibilities for developing an multi-layered understanding of resistance. Jeremiah’s survival in this story of incarceration, which mirrors the suffering the people of Judah are experiencing amidst the Babylonian invasion, and will continue to experience during the Exile, is closely connected to the person of the Ethiopian Eunuch who, both in terms of his ethnic and sexual identity, can be considered to be an outsider to the community. Ebed-Melech, who likely had experienced his own share of exclusion and hardship, is the one to notice the injustice done to Jeremiah, and subsequently goes on to rescue Jeremiah before he dies (Jer 37:8-10). This classic story of seemingly powerless individuals resisting violence speaks a word of hope amidst disaster, and opens up the possibility that the people of Judah might survive after all even when things are looking most dire.
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Leonard Greenspoon: The Bible, Judaism, and Popular Culture
Program Unit:
Dan Clanton, Doane University
Leonard Greenspoon: The Bible, Judaism, and Popular Culture
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Signature Research Objectives at Tall al-'Umayri: From Biblical History to Social Structures... and Beyond
Program Unit: Archaeology of the Biblical World
Douglas R. Clark, La Sierra University
Growing organically out of the excavations at Tall Hisban (1968-1976), the project at Tall al-`Umayri (1984 onward), at this point the Madaba Plains Project, immediately yielded up a treasure trove of archaeological and architectural data demanding multiple approaches in the project’s research design. These ranged among a continued quest for biblical connections (even if distanced from the need to prove biblical history connected with the exodus and “conquest”) and expanded anthropological and ethnographic explorations (ancient and modern), along with continued attention to paleobotanical and paleozoological phenomena as well as aDNA research and residue analysis. These goals for historical and social reconstruction have been coupled with a spate of new technologies: enhanced photographic/photogrammetric and 3D scanning processes, and an explosion of sophisticated technological advances in GPR, GPS, and digital data harvesting, storage, and open-source access. Beyond these more traditional concerns, acute land-ownership issues have curtailed all archaeological research onsite and recent impulses in community archaeology have nudged the project toward more regional efforts to protect and preserve the Madaba District’s cultural heritage.
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The Life-Altering Pneuma in the Heart of the Human Organism
Program Unit: Pauline Theology
Ernest Clark, South Asia Institute of Advanced Christian Studies
At the center of Paul’s pneumatology lies the question not of the materiality or immateriality of the pneuma, but rather how the pneuma of God gives life to and transforms the human person. This paper posits two prior principles about the human organism before then exploring how, in Paul’s thought, pneuma activates human or bodily agency.
First, sarx is the substance of the human body. The normal, almost exclusive, perspective of Israel’s scriptures is that the human body is composed from earth. Early Jewish writings adopt Greek language of elements (stoicheia) to describe that composition (2 Macc 7:22). Philo analyses the body from that perspective as well, and I have argued that it is the composition of the flesh from material elements, and its resulting weakness, that is the concern Paul addresses in Gal 4:1–11.
Second, sarx is neither passive nor undifferentiated. Paul follows the precedent of Israel’s scriptures in distributing the functions of perception, emotion, cognition, and volition among several organs within the human. The body, its flesh, and these organs are acted upon and act themselves; they both experience and cause. While it is important to avoid the anachronism of imposing twenty-first century concepts and distinctions on Paul’s first century paradigm, we must beware the equal danger of denying that Paul’s conceptualization of the human person could have been more complex or nuanced, in some aspects at least, than the simple concepts we often assume in common conversation. Paul’s discussion of the human organism is conversant—that is, mutually intelligible—with much of the Greek medical tradition. The precision of his terms and concepts of the physiology and function of the human organism should be tested sensitively, not ignored or, worse, blurred by conflating one distinct concept with another. Mis-readings of this sort prevail in interpretations of Paul’s analysis of the human organism, especially the interaction of pathēmata of sins, pathēmata of the flesh, epithumiai of the body and the flesh, and erga of the flesh (Rom 6–7; Gal 5).
Within the complexity of his understanding of the human organism, Paul introduces the pneuma. Paul’s letters agree that the pneuma gives life to human persons and their bodies. However, variety is apparent in his descriptions of how the pneuma activates or directs human agency. In the classic perspective of Rom 8 and 12, for example, the pneuma transforms the human person through engagement with an active mind. In contrast, in Gal 5, the pneuma guides human action from its residence in the fleshy organ of the heart; it does so directly, with no reference to any medium within the human person. These differences expose a complexity often overlooked by simple readings of Paul’s pneumatology and anthropology.
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Traumatized with the Prophets: Exploring the Prophets in Healing for Survivors of Intimate Partner and Sexual Assault, Bystanders, and Those of Us Who Care for Them
Program Unit: Homiletics and Biblical Studies
Ron Clark, Portland Seminary
As a Christian minister in Conservative Evangelical circles, I have found that the Biblical Prophetic (and Apocalyptic) Texts have been used to simply “predict the comings of Jesus the Messiah.” This creates a distance between reader and prophet as the texts only “point to” a future fulfilling. However, in my writing, teaching, and ministry I have found connections between IPV, SA, and trauma survivors in reading the prophets as the “venting” of a hurt, and suffering God. Rather than viewing the reader at the end of a “pointed or condemning finger” we place the reader alongside a suffering God who speaks from pain, anger, and emotional trauma. Through this view of the prophets (especially the exilic prophets) readers learn not only empathy for survivors but also feel a sense of trauma and hurt as a bystander or witness to power and violent systems. In this presentation I will discuss our work bridging the prophets (including select prophetic/apocalyptic texts) with congregational members, college students, and survivors who seek to apply the difficult Biblical texts to not only confront oppression, but offer healing to those seeking comfort in faith congregations.
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Maturing through Agape: A Discussion of Agape, Faith Development, and Telos in the Practice of Spiritual Growth of Congregational Mission and Ministry in Portland, OR.
Program Unit: Psychology and Biblical Studies
Ron Clark, Portland Seminary
Since James Fowler’s introduction of faith development in Pastoral Ministry, authors such as Balswick, King, and Reimer along with Dykstra, Cole, and Capps have expressed this development through reciprocation, agape, and emotional/spiritual practice. As Erikson suggested that the psychosocial-self developed along eight stages of growth, faith development and reciprocation offer a spiritual view of this development. Agape, according to Balswick, King, and Reimer, provides the catalyst for this growth, formation, and development.
The Christian Scriptures also suggest that spiritual maturity, or telos, is best developed through Agape love. As a congregation working with IPV, Sexual Assault, and Houselessness we have found that the psychological perspectives of the previous authors and practitioners can enhance Biblical texts suggesting that Agape is the mature (telos) form of spiritual development. The texts such as Matthew 5:48; John 13; 1 Corinthians 13; and Ephesians/Colossians 3:14 when placed alongside the theories of reciprocation, agape, and faith development have offered us support in helping survivors heal, develop, and find acceptance in a faith community. In this paper I will overview the points of Reciprocation, Faith Development, and Development. Then I will discuss Agape, telos, and Biblical themes associated with maturity in spiritual formation. Finally, I would like to apply these points with our ministry to trauma survivors in a congregational or faith community setting.
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The Craftsmanship of God and Σοφία Verses the Evil Craft of Idolaters in the Wisdom of Solomon
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Kevin Clarke, Kenrick-Glennon Seminary-Kenrick School of Theology
In a marvelous passage on artistry in the wisdom literature, the book of Wisdom describes God as a craftsman (ὁ τεχνίτης) who can be discovered analogously (ἀναλόγως) by contemplating (θεωρεῖν) things existing in nature (cf. Wis 13:1–5). Indeed, the lower cosmos is teleologically ordered toward the contemplation of divine things, and the author argues that no one can be excused for failing to discover the Author of beauty as the first cause of the beauty in things. The passage then shifts toward the craft (τεχνή) of idol-making, which stands in contrast to the Creator’s work that fills all things with power and activity. The idol maker engages in an evil craft (κακότεχνος) not recognizing that his life and breath is on loan from the One who fashioned the foolish idol-maker from the clay of the earth (15:4). But human craft itself is not futile, as it is clear that wisdom is the one who crafts (τεχνῖτις δὲ σοφία) the vessel that passes through the sea through divine providence, as in the time of the ark of salvation (Wis 14:1–7; cf. Gen 7:1ff.). Expositors of the book of Wisdom—Bullard and Hatton, Perdue, Holmes, and Bergsma and Pitre—have traditionally described these chapters as a digression or excursus. I argue that such a label misses the point that is fundamentally central to recognizing the logic of the condemnation of idolatry throughout the latter half of the book. It is precisely creation as craftwork that animates the logic of judgment in sacred history.
From this section in Wisdom, this essay exegetes the notion of the craft of creation and how human craft is meant to be a participation in the creative work of God. Because the lower cosmos is meant to be filled with beauty, the essay concludes with an evaluation of the consumptive manipulation of nature. I hope to make a compelling case against the technocratic domination of the lower creation. The most fundamental way the lower creation participates in the common good is by their reflection of the divine wisdom. All beings, inasmuch as they are beings, reflect a manifestation of the divine plan. This, of course, applies preeminently to humans made in imago Dei, but also to other creatures in a lower way. There is something more to the cosmos than mere matter, something there that is something deeper than appropriation and consumption of private goods.
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Rebuilding Jerusalem: A Physical Response to Historical Trauma in Ezra-Nehemiah
Program Unit: Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah
Lisa J. Cleath, George Fox University
This project will analyze the rebuilding of Jerusalem in Ezra-Nehemiah through the lenses of trauma theoreticians, engaging across disciplines to bring psychological and sociological frameworks to the post-monarchic biblical literature. Trauma theory (PTSD) identifies the bodily implications of trauma due to the loss of physical agency, which is visible in the rebuilding of the temple and the city walls in Ezra-Nehemiah. The rhetoric of Ezra-Nehemiah sets up the rebuilding of the temple and the city walls as a physical reclaiming of the city in order to reclaim physical agency for the othered and subjugated returnees. A useful and productive complement to clinical psychology, epigenetics studies the cross-generational genetic effects of trauma, illustrating the ongoing need to deal with the results of trauma through the future generations of a dispossessed and oppressed community. The cross-generational nature of trauma is further confirmed by sociological theories of historical trauma, which suggest the necessity of narrative construction for long-term resilience in the face of multigenerational trauma. In the socio-political context of the Persian province of Yehud, Ezra-Nehemiah’s narrative weaves a hybrid response to the exile, dispossession, and long-term domination of the repatriated Judeans. This hybrid response permits the repatriates to reassert their own particular identity and agency by claiming their connection to Israel’s past while simultaneously enacting their current ability to physically defend it. The ongoing presence of the Persians and the financial interdependence of the returnees with the empire is a constant message in Ezra-Nehemiah that the trauma of exile has not finished, and the need to assert agency and a new differentiated identity is continual, pressing, and subversive.
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Christ as the Serpent and Augustine's Understanding of Manichaean Exegesis
Program Unit: Early Exegesis of Genesis 1–3
Thomas Clemmons, Catholic University of America
In De Genesi contra Manichaeos (Gn. adv. Man.) Augustine provides an extensive response to familiar Manichaean criticisms of Genesis. Toward the end of the second book, Augustine stops to address the Manichaean interpretation of the Serpent in Genesis 3. For the Manichaeans, Augustine says, the Serpent is Christ (2.26.39). This claim, which seems bizarre given the Manichaean rejection of Genesis, might be explained through the elaborate Manichaean cosmogonic narrative, which allows for different iterations in the struggle between the Light and Darkness. However, in this paper I consider how this interpretation reveals Manichaean exegetical principles and how Augustine conceives of and responds to the Manichaean understanding of Christ.
To this end, I will review Manichaean exegesis of the Gospel of John. At several points in his writings, such as in De duabus animabus and Gn. adv. Man, Augustine responds to Manichaean citations of the Gospel of John. Moreover, Manichaeans like Adimantus and Faustus both use John’s Gospel in a positive manner to critique ‘catholic’ interpretation of the Old Testament, particularly Genesis. As the Gospel of John employs some of the same imagery as Genesis, it is this exchange that highlights some aspects of Manichaean exegesis of Genesis and Augustine’s response. Moreover, Manichaean uses of John also reveal how the interpretation of the Serpent reflects contours both of the more extensive Manichaean hermeneutic and Manichaean Christology.
Beyond discussing exegetical dimensions of Manichaeism and Augustine, this presentation seeks to provide a new approach to the scholarly debate concerning Augustine’s knowledge of Manichaeism, particularly Manichaean Christology. Decret argued that Augustine had a minimal understanding of Nicene Christianity and a modest knowledge of Manichaean Christology. In relation to this observation, Coyle and van Oort contended Augustine’s knowledge of Manichaeism to be minimal or maximal respectively. Through a consideration of the exegesis of Genesis and John, I argue that we gain more insight into Augustine’s complex diagnosis of Manichaeism.
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“There Go the Ships” (Psalm 104:26)
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
David J.A. Clines, University of Sheffield
Here I will review an emendation of a well-known verse that is not followed by many modern commentators but that continues to have a place in several standard Hebrew lexica.
The proposal is to emend Psa. 104:26 from “There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it (NRSV) or perhaps “that you formed to sport with (NJPS)” to “There go the monsters, and Leviathan …” It would be a matter of reading ’ymwt “monsters” in place of the Masoretic ’nywt “ships.” It might be thought that “monsters’ is a more suitable parallel to Leviathan than “ships”.
I traced the proposal to Gunkel in his Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (1895). From there it was alluded to by Buhl in the 17th edition of Gesenius (1912), and subsequently picked up by Koehler in his Lexicon in Veteris Testamenti libros (1953). From there it found its way into his third edition (HALAT, 1967) and its English translation (HALOT, 1994). It still appears in the recent abridgment of HALAT by Dietrich and Arnet (KAHAL, 2013). The reporting of the emendation in all these lexica leaves much to be desired.
I will argue against the proposal on four grounds: (1) In the psalm, Leviathan is not remotely scary, having been put in the sea to frolic, or—even less frighteningly—for the deity to play with like a plastic duck in a bathtub. So playful Leviathan and frightful monsters would not constitute a good parallel. (2) The word ’ymh usually refers to a feeling of terror, and never apparently to a terrible object. (3) There is no support for the emendation in the ancient versions, and a corruption of a Mem to a Nun (which the emendation supposes) is not commonly attested. (4) Most significantly, the sequence of thought in vv. 25-26 is better understood as moving, in each verse, from the visible surface of the sea to what is hidden in it. In v. 25 the reader’s attention is drawn first to the sea, great and wide, which can be seen, and then to the numerous swarming things that lie unseen beneath the surface. In v. 26 there is again a movement from the surface of the sea with its ships to the unseen Leviathan that sports in its waters.
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Enlightening the Diversity of Scholarly Opinions on Multimodal Material: Mark 16 as Test-Case
Program Unit: Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies
Claire Clivaz, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
This paper starts from the observation that the online milieu has become a lively place for scholarly debate, but is still not considered as such in scholarship. Nevertheless, parts of the scholarly debate happen nowadays online, in multimodal productions. To illustrate this new situation, we will take Mark 16 as test-case: one can find online videos of Bart Ehrman or Dan Wallace, commenting the famous enigma of the endings of the second Gospel, whereas the Bible Odyssey SBL project has produced a formal interview by Helen Bond on the topic, with the full transcript (https://www.bibleodyssey.org/tools/video-gallery/w/what-is-the-ending-to-marks-gospel).
Can such a material be used in research? Is it quotable in details? Can we consider it as reliable material format from a computing point of view? To these concrete questions, more fundamental questions can be added, since the emergence of multimodal material in research could lead to a deep transformation. Indeed, rhetoric has been progressively withdrawn from academic teaching at the 19th century. Leopold von Ranke’s point of view has won during that century: the historical rhetoric must be cleaned up from all emotional features, considered as subjective intrusions. But this Modern evolution is recent: in Antiquity notably, rhetoric and historical discourse were not separated (see e.g. Lucian of Samosates, How to Write History 49). If multimodal online material invites rhetoric back into exegesis, it means a notable change in our usual way to perceive and produce historical discourse.
What does it change for Mk 16 exegesis to have now videos of researchers, with the presence of ethos, pathos and logos, from a rhetorical point of view? To consider this question, this paper will compare what scholars tell about Mk 16 by written and by oral, and evaluate the impact of a multimodal expression on the state of the art of Mk 16.
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A Voice after Death: Gender, Class, and Sexuality on Ancient Funerary Monuments
Program Unit: LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics
Christy Cobb, Wingate University
One way that people from a broad range of social statuses in the ancient Greco-Roman world memorialized a deceased family member was through the creation and display of a funerary monument, or gravestone. On these monuments, we find depictions of men and women, both enslaved and free, as well as poignant inscriptions about the deceased. Analysis of this type of material culture informs our understanding of gender, class, and sexuality in the ancient world and can help us access perspectives unvoiced in literary texts crafted by male hands. In this paper, I will analyze several gravestones that depict enslaved women, unmarried women, and homoerotic relationships. Using queer historiography as my primary method through the work of Elizabeth Freeman and Madhavi Menon, I will situate these artifacts from the ancient world within an interpretation of biblical and apocryphal texts. Finally, I will consider questions such as: How do these funerary monuments portray relationships between enslaved persons and their enslavers? Do these memorials challenge or align with modern ideas about ancient sexuality and/or familial configurations? What are the ways in which ancient familial configurations, as illustrated on these monuments, anticipate contemporary queer visions of family?
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Textual History of 1 Enoch
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Kelley Coblentz Bautch, St. Edward's University
This presentation concerns the textual history of 1 Enoch and originated in Brill's Textual History of the Bible: Textual History of the Deuterocanonical Scriptures.
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Forests and Deforestation in the Biblical Narrative and Modern Day Jezreel Valley
Program Unit: Animal Studies and the Bible
Margaret Cohen, W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research
Several biblical accounts, e.g. Joshua 17 and 2 Kings 6, discuss the clearing of forest as a method for the acquisition of land or supply for human use. This destruction of a habitat for other-than-human beings, has consequences for both the human actors, as well as for plant and animal populations, though we often lack access to this part of the narrative. While there is good consensus that trees are imbued in the HB with cultic, aesthetic, even didactic significances, here I will look specifically at the role of “the forest.” “Forest” enjoys a wide semantic and thematic scope in the biblical text, and so careful examination of the terminology and language is productive in those pericopes which include actions related to the destruction of this habitat. Heeding the inclusive call of Nilsen and Solevåg (“Expanding Ecological Hermeneutics: The Case for Ecolonialism,” JBL, 2016), I undertake to expand the approaches available within the rubric of ecological hermeneutics, in this case through the use of textual, philological and geographic interpretations. To what extent does the language of biblical narratives which deal with the clearing of forests and destruction of trees reflect the agrarian imagination of the biblical authors? What ecological concerns are preserved and promoted? In what ways do geographic realities inform our interpretations of biblical accounts of human manipulation of the Earth? As a modern case study, and in conjunction with the Joshua 17 narrative, I will examine some areas around the Jezreel Valley in the Manasseh Hills. Paralleling modern deforestation, planting efforts and changing wildlife habitats in this region—often for the convenience of and exploitation by humans--with the ancient versions sheds light on both.
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The Linguistic Milieu in the Southern and Central Territories of Palestine during the Persian Period (538–332 B.C.E)
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Ohad Cohen, Haifa University Israel
The debate on the historical conceptualization of the Hebrew language, as reflected by texts from antiquity, has been ongoing in the last two decades. The specific characteristics of Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH) have been a particularly pivotal topic. The starting point for the current lecture is the gap that exists between the ‘traditional’ description of the linguistic features of LBH, on the one hand, and the famous declaration by Nehemiah (13:23-24), namely: “Also in those days, I saw the Judeans (that) had married women of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab. And their children, half spoke [in the dialect of] Ashdodian, and they do not speak [in the dialect of] Judean...”, on the other. In order to narrow this gap, we take an interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of various syntactic phenomena in LBH. We begin with a brief historical survey of the linguistic milieu in the Southern and Central Territories of Palestine during the Persian Period. As various lines of evidence show, beneath the administrative Aramaic remnants one can uncover dynamic relationships between three Canaanite dialects, which correspond to three main administrative units: Edom – Southern Trans-Jorden Canaanite; Ashdod – Northern Coastal Canaanite; Judah – Central Canaanite. These relationships are then re-interpreted based on a historio-geographic approach (for example, as represented by the work of historian Marc Bloch), that emphasizes the assumed correspondence between the current and the historica states-of-affair in a particular geographic domain. We thus superimpose insights from the modern study of Arabic diglossia in general and the study of the multiglotic milieu of current Palestinian Arabic dialects in particular on the findings from LBH. Our premise is that despite many differences between the ancient and modern periods, there are also aspects of similarity that can be used as a theoretical model for understanding historical processes. Among the central aspects of this comparison are the similarities in the following elements: polyglot communities; language contact between close Semitic languages; a description of the dialects according to geographical, social and ethnic aspects; and the diglottic linguistic continuum (Mesolect) between the canonical language (Acrolect) and colloquial varsities (Basilect). Linguistic evidence for the re-interpretation of the Hebrew data from the Second Temple period is provided from different syntactic structures that function in isoglosses investigated in two written corpora (LBH and Phoenician / Punic). We suggest that these isoglosses are an echo of the language contact that occurred at the level of the colloquial spoken varieties. In accordance with Nehemiah’s declaration about the intense language contact between these varieties, we show that these isoglosses do not occur at the periphery of the linguistic system (as compared to Persian), but rather at the very core of that language – that is, in the morpho-syntactic system.
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“Apostles to the Gentiles”: Paul and Muhammad
Program Unit: The Qur’an and Late Antiquity (IQSA)
Juan Cole, University of Michigan
Unconscious heuristic models often have an enormous impact on scholarship. As Devin Stewart has shown, the Revisionist moment in the academic study of the Qur’an since the 1970s, was premised on an analogy between the Gospels and the Qur’an, and sought to deploy techniques drawn from the Bultmannian approach to the New Testament, imagining an evolving and late Qur’an. In the light of recent finds of early Qur’an manuscripts, however, many scholars have returned to the notion of Muhammad ibn Abdullah (c. 570-632) as the vehicle for a single-authored Qur’an.
This paper argues that a fruitful model for understanding Muhammad and the Qur’an is the scholarship on Paul of Tarsus. The works of both are the earliest witnesses to a purported new revelation. Both corpora are vague and poetic, posing severe difficulties for historical analysis. Both grew up on the fringes of the Roman Empire, in a society with pagans and Jews, and attempted to reach out to the former by universalizing Jewish themes. Paul saw himself as having a special mission to Gentiles who had converted to Judaism or closely associated with Jews. Muhammad, likewise, is called by the Qur’an a nabi ummi, which almost certainly means “Gentile prophet” or “prophet to the Gentiles.” In this analogy, the Qur’an is like the acknowledged Pauline epistles, the synoptic Gospels are like the hadith corpus, and the book of Luke-Acts resembles the early sirah and chronicle literature.
Studying the Pauline epistles requires an understanding of their Second Temple Judaic context and of first-century Greek and Latin language and culture. Studying the Qur’an increasingly is seen to require setting it in the late antique and Greek, Aramaic, and Middle Persian linguistic contexts. Archeology of the cities Paul addressed, such as Corinth and Galatia, has been pressed into service by Laura Nasrallah among others. Glen Bowersock has used archeological findings about the Iranian conquest of Jerusalem in 614 to contextualize Q al-Isra’ 17:1 (the Night Journey).
Academic writers on the historical Paul face the challenge of recuperating his central conceptions from later major sites of Pauline exegesis, such as the imperial Christianity of the 300s and 400s, which depicted him as anti-Jewish, and the Reformation, which depicted him as anti-Law. Academics approaching the Qur’an have since the 1970s attempted to recuperate it from the late Umayyad and Abbasid imperial traditions.
The contrasts are also compelling. The later Muslim tradition represents Muhammad as confined to Mecca and Medina, whereas the Qur’an contains evidence that Muhammad continued to travel both to Yemen and north to the Levant after his mission began in 610. The Qur’an shows Muhammad favoring Rome over the Iranian Empire, but the later tradition attempted anachronistically to set him at odds with Constantinople. Whereas the later Christian tradition displaced Paul from his context in the Hellenistic Judaism of the Levant, the later Muslim tradition cooped Muhammad up in a pagan Arab Hejaz. Paul was universalized whereas Muhammad was parochialized.
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Criteria and Purpose of Inner-Biblical Allusion in Zechariah 6:9–15
Program Unit: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible
Robert Coleman, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Zechariah 6:9–15 is a useful test case for the criteria and purpose of inner-biblical allusion because it appears to contain numerous allusions to other biblical texts. In the end, this may simply be a mirage. Nevertheless, the appearance of numerous allusions invites attention to this text as a fecund test case. Moreover, Zechariah 6:9–15 contains serious exegetical difficulties and the possibility of solving these difficulties through inner-biblical allusion is appealing. In the end, the potential allusions may only complicate the exegetical difficulties but the possibility of exegetical assistance from inner-biblical allusion is alluring. Therefore, this paper analyzes five potential allusions in Zechariah 6:9–15. First, it analyzes potential allusion between Zechariah’s “branch/shoot” imagery (6:12–13) and Jeremiah’s “branch/shoot” imagery (Jer 23:5–6; 33:15–17). Second, it analyzes potential allusion between Zechariah’s temple-builder (6:12–13) and the temple-builder in the Davidic covenant (2 Sam 7:1–16). Third, it analyzes potential allusion between Zechariah’s returned exiles (6:14–15) and Isaiah’s returned exiles (Isa 43:6; 44:26–28; 49:12; 60:4, and 9). Fourth, it analyzes potential allusion between Zechariah 6:9–15 and Psalm 110. Fifth, it analyzes potential allusion between Zechariah 6:13 and Job 40:10 and Psalm 104:1. Each potential instance of inner-biblical allusion is a matter of plausibility. Thus, in this study, I propose a spectrum of plausible allusions. I argue that the allusion to Jeremiah and Isaiah’s branch/shoot language is highly plausible. I argue that the allusion to the Davidic covenant is plausible. I argue that the allusion to Isaiah 43:6; 44:26–28; 49:12; 60:4, and 9 is relatively plausible. I argue that the allusion to Psalm 110 is possible but uncertain. I argue that the allusion to Job 40:10 and Psalm 104:1 is possible but highly tentative. Thus, the graded scale moves from highly plausible on the one end to highly tentative on the other.
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Let Him Romance You: Rape Culture and Gender Violence in Evangelical Christian Self-Help Literature
Program Unit: Bible and Popular Culture
Emily Colgan, Trinity Theological College
Since its publication in 2005, 'Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul' by John and Stasi Eldredge has dominated the Christian literature markets, selling millions of copies worldwide and rating highly on numerous bestseller charts. Revised and updated in 2010, Captivating continues to sell strongly, and is readily available in most evangelical Christian bookstores. Using scriptural analysis and personal anecdotes, the Eldredges explore what it means to live as a fully alive and feminine woman: a woman who is truly captivating. Although they claim that there is no ‘one size fits all’ pattern for God’s women, the Eldredges list a number of desires ‘every woman longs for’, one of which is the desire to be romanced or pursued. Every woman, these authors claim, longs for romance: ‘to be seen and desired, to be sought after and fought for’. Rather than depicting this romance as being between two human individuals, however, it is (a male) God who is imaged as a Lover and the (female) reader is the one pursued. Using the biblical relationship between Hosea and Gomer as an example, the authors depict the ‘romance’ between God and Lover. It is my contention that both the rhetoric employed in this book and the biblical imagery used to support it contributes to a culture of gender violence. Combining a feminist hermeneutic with a rhetorical methodology, I seek to explore the ideologies at play in the production of imagery surrounding God and women in Captivating, and the demands such images make on readers in each new encounter with this text. Throughout this work gender operates to constitute dynamics of power, and the subtext of the book’s rhetoric is control (by God/men) and subordination (of women), where the masculine/feminine designations are important indicators in the experience of violence. It is only by exposing the violence inherent in this rhetoric that it becomes possible to resist the powerful ideological undercurrents of this strongly misogynistic text.
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Reading Women/Reading Land: An Ecological Analysis of Jeremiah 3:1–5
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
Emily Colgan, Trinity Theological College
In this paper I will use an ecological hermeneutic with a rhetorical critical methodology in order to examine the depiction of women and Land in Jer 3:1-5. I draw connections between the female body and the fertile Land, which are both identified as being polluted and must suffer punishment for this defilement. The Land becomes a metaphor for the woman’s body which, in turn, is symbolic of the social body. As the indiscretions of the people are transferred – in terms of sexual deviance – onto the woman, so the contamination that resulted from the woman’s wrongdoing is carried over onto the Land. I will argue that within the context of this metaphor, pollution should be understood as a violation of property. As the woman’s pollution violates the husband’s right to exclusive possession of his wife’s sexuality, so the Land’s pollution has violated God’s position as supreme deity and sole owner of the Land. My paper will problematize the violent and coercive relationship between God, Land/woman, and people, before outlining an alternative ecological interpretation of these verses, which understands the Land as co-equal partner with God by sharing in the creative process.
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Ethnic or Prophetic Religion? Nock's Typology of Religions and the Case of Judaism
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
John J. Collins, Yale University
In his classic study of conversion, published in 1933, A. D. Nock distinguished between two kinds of religion in the ancient Mediterranean world. The first was linked to particular ethnic groups. The second, which he dubbed "prophetic," was a matter of individual choice. Nock included Judaism and Christianity in the latter group, as well as the Greek philosophical schools, and cults such as those of Isis and Mithras. He realized, however, that Judaism remained in practice the religion of a particular people. This paper will revisit Nock's typology in light of the problematic case of Judaism in the Hellenistic world.
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Looking at the Mediterranean from Corinth
Program Unit: Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman Travel in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Early Byzantine Periods (300 BCE–600 CE)
Cavan Concannon, University of Southern California
This paper explores the links that connected Corinth to the broader Mediterranean, paying particular attention to evidence for trade, mobility and connectivity. The paper looks specifically at descriptions of movement to and from Corinth and, in particular, at evidence for networks of early Christians.
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A Woman’s Place is in the Home: The Material, Spatial, and Agential Dimensions of Aronofsky’s Mother!
Program Unit: Bible and Film
Jordan Conley, Boston University
The religious resonances of Darren Aronofsky’s genre-bending film Mother!—including its biblical subjects, liturgical motifs, and eschatological imagery—evoke an exegetical impulse in even the most resistant or critical of viewers. In focusing on the film’s considerable materialist and spatial dimensions, this paper explores how the film engages with a long tradition of gendered modes of domestic emplacement—starting with relationship between the film’s female character and the house itself, including the ways in which the female body is operative both within and as a (the) home. How does the titular “mother” shift, gestate, and unravel in tandem with the house, even as both entities are constituted in relation to the film’s other inhabitants? Moreover, the paper suggests that the film’s “mother” performs and inhabits cultural norms of domesticity to such a degree that the effect is to simultaneously undermine and elevate the domestic space and the female domestic self.
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An Empty Category No More: Votives as Agential Objects at Late Antique Saints’ Shrines
Program Unit: Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Jordan Conley, Boston University
“Votive” has historically served as catchall designation for apparent archaeological excess at ancient and late antique sanctuaries and shrines. The category tends to include terracotta figurines, anatomical body parts, exuvial or personal items, paintings or other images, inscriptions on tablets or stelae, lamps or other such “utilitarian” pieces, “decorative” items such as textiles and mosaics, and any other objects (particularly if small or crude) of unclear or imprecise function. While the breadth of the category presents opportunities for broader comparative analysis, this paper suggests that the under-theorized label reflects a lingering discomfort regarding the precise status, significance, and function of dedications left at religious sites. Such discomfort is perhaps best reflected in the widely-used designation “ex-voto,” favored because it evokes models of exchange and accounts for textual and inscriptional descriptions of individuals offering up items “on account of a vow.” The designation also allows dedications to fit, if somewhat uneasily, within more contemporary, mostly Protestant models of human-divine interactions—wherein the object is rendered secondary, a mere by-product or physical symbol of an elevated, “spiritual” human-divine exchange. This paper offers a new methodological approach to the study of dedications—one that does not simply treat them as external, material expressions of internal states, but more accurately considers the potentiality and efficacy of the objects themselves.
Recently, influenced by the theoretical contributions of “New Materialisms” scholarship, Emma-Jayne Graham and Jessica Hughes (among others) have sought to take seriously the capacity of dedications to act as agents or forces. Nevertheless, questions remain about how to best consider dedications’ material-ritual affordances while still maintaining the capaciousness of the broader category—that is, without returning to or reaffirming inherited classification systems based on form or apparent function. This paper argues that an effective strategy lies in considering dedications as socially, materially, and theoretically related a broader class of efficacious objects. Focusing specifically on the material contexts of late antique saints’ shrines (such as St. Artemios in Constantinople, St. Demetrius in Thessalonike, SS Cyrus and John and St. Menas in Egypt, and St. Simeon Stylites in Syria), it suggests that re-situating dedications within a more expansive network of agential objects at these sites—namely relics, icons, and eulogiae—invites new considerations of their distributed agency, social roles, and transformative and mediatory potential. That is, while it is increasingly common to grant dedications deposited in ritual contexts a certain potentiality, scholars still limit such a potentiality to the individual expression of psychological desires to give thanks or record gratitude. This paper contends instead that dedications, as collaborative agents, might facilitate “presence” across time and space (like relics), act as visual and material mediators of human-divine relationships (like icons), and/or be rendered efficacious through association, contact, and exchange (like eulogiae). Such approaches demonstrate how dedications are both ritually-indexed to individual entities, and yet also constituted in relation to other material and human agents, as well as by their social and spatial environments.
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Yahweh’s Exorcism of Judah: An Assyrian Anti-witchcraft Motif in Jer 7:13
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Cristiana Conti-Easton, York University
Jeremiah’s final judgment of Judah in Jer 7:1-15 condemns the people’s refusal to heed Yahweh’s word. In v. 13b, God regretfully notes, “though I spoke to you persistently, you would not listen; and though I called to you, you would not respond” (NJPS). Except for a few cases of inner-biblical allusion (Jer 7:27; 35:17; Isa 65:12=66:4; 65:24), to my knowledge, there is no instance in biblical literature of the collocation of these four verbs in parallel pairs. Yet the verbal sequence “speak, not listen, call, not answer” in Jer 7:13b finds a viable clause-level parallel in the first tablet of Maqlû—the most important Mesopotamian text concerned with combating witchcraft. Here, the exorcist uses this verbal sequence to ask the goddess Bēlet-ṣēri to ignore the witches’ request to assist them in the ensuing legal battle by confirming their innocence of the charge of transgressing the māmītu-social compact (Maqlû i 56-57). I argue that Jer 7:13b alludes, most likely indirectly, to Maqlû i 56-57 in order to cast Yahweh as a merciful God. By speaking to Israel and calling his people, Yahweh tries to reconcile with them by doing the opposite of what the Maqlû exorcist pleads for the goddess Bēlet-ṣēri not to do. Yet despite his earlier warnings, the Israelites neither listen nor respond.
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Building Eve: The Genesis Myth as Blueprint for Constructing Artificial Women
Program Unit: Bible, Myth, and Myth Theory
Colleen M. Conway, Seton Hall University
The paper explores the shared mythology between ancient and contemporary renderings of the construction of women. While many have recognized the role of the Greek Pygmalion myth in shaping science fiction accounts of men building women, this paper argues that the mythic creation of the biblical Eve also contributes to sci-fi depictions of artificial women. The paper focuses first on what is arguably the first science fiction novel, L’Eve Future by Auguste Villiers d’Ilse-Adam (1886), before turning to more recent science fiction narratives that feature the construction of artificial women. In tracing the common motifs between the biblical account of Eve’s construction and later depictions of artificial women, I argue that past and present instantiations of this cultural myth of women-building reveal the coalescing of male fascination with and fears of women and technology.
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Masculinities 2020: New Paths for Masculinities Studies and the Bible
Program Unit: Reading, Theory, and the Bible
Colleen M. Conway, Seton Hall University
The study of masculinities in the Bible as proliferated in recent years, growing from an early, almost singular focus on hegemonic masculinity to the search for alternative (often subordinate and/or counter-hegemonic) forms of biblical masculinity. Meanwhile, outside of biblical studies, studies of men and masculinities have embraced theories that take into account shifting subjectivities and agency within social systems. For example, concepts such as mosaic masculinities (Coles, 2008) and “sticky” masculinity (Berggren, 2014) explore masculinity as a complex and always negotiated social practice. Others have urged for the incorporation of feminist theorizing in the study of masculinity, especially with respect to human agency (Waling, 2018). This paper argues that the study of the masculinities in relation to the Bible would benefit from the methodological update that such recent work offers. The paper concludes with several textual examples of the difference such an update would produce.
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Gospel Books in a Quadriform Cosmos
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Jeremiah Coogan, University of Notre Dame
From the second century onward, early Christians engaged the pluriformity of textualized Gospels in various ways. This paper explores one dynamic of the early Christian bibliographic imaginary: the metaphoric alignment of a fourfold Gospel with the structure of the physical cosmos. Numerous thinkers employ metaphors drawn from meteorology, geography, music, mathematics, and astronomy in order to theorize a library of Gospel literature consisting of precisely four texts. Famously, Irenaeus of Lyon imagines a fourfold Gospel reflected in the physiognomy of the heavenly beings described by Ezekiel and the Apocalypse of John (A.H. 3.11.8). The enormous reception of evangelist symbols, however, obscures the diverse metaphoric spaces in which a fourfold Gospel is negotiated. Irenaeus himself spends considerable time comparing the fourfold Gospel with the meteorological and geographical quadriformity of a cosmos which is governed by four winds and divided into four zones. Ephrem, Hippolytus, and Cyprian, among others, imagine the Gospels in the figure, at once geographic and biblical, of the four Edenic rivers. Eusebius of Caesarea draws on physical, musical, and mathematical idiom to envision a fourfold Gospel as a “holy τετρακτύς” (H.E. 3.25.1). The Gospels are embedded in the structure of the cosmos just like the four elements, a musical fourth, or the first four positive integers which form the basis for Pythagorean numerical theory. The Eusebian canons (which coordinate Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as a unity) continue this imaginative practice by echoing the visual idiom of Ptolemy’s Handy Tables; the structure of the fourfold Gospel corresponds to the order of the heavenly bodies. As these variegated examples illustrate, an early Christian bibliographic imaginary wove a fourfold Gospel into the fabric of a quadriform cosmos. The bibliographic and the cosmic merge: the fourfold Gospel corresponds to the structure of the universe itself.
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The Eusebian Apparatus in New Testament Textual Criticism
Program Unit: New Testament Textual Criticism
Jeremiah Coogan, University of Notre Dame
The Eusebian system of sections and canons is a milestone of late ancient book technology, with enormous impact on the subsequent reading and exegesis of the fourfold Gospel. The Eusebian apparatus also occasionally offers evidence for textual cruces. Nonetheless, appeals to the Eusebian apparatus in commentaries and apparatus critici frequently reflect an inadequate understanding of the Eusebian system and its history of transmission. Despite the valuable work of Gregory, von Soden, and Nestle, there is still no comprehensive survey of the significance of the Eusebian apparatus for the textual criticism of the Greek New Testament. This paper addresses the text-critical use of the Eusebian apparatus in three stages. First, text-critical appeals to the Eusebian apparatus must take into account Eusebius’ exegetical project and his approach to textual segmentation and juxtaposition. The paper thus describes how the Eusebian apparatus works and what kinds of information it can provide to textual critics. Second, text-critical appeals to the Eusebian apparatus typically depend on the apparatus printed in the Nestle-Aland editions, which depends fundamentally on Erasmus’ 1519 Novum instrumentum omne. This edition is serviceable, but occasionally problematic; text-critical appeals to the Eusebian apparatus must take into account the ways that the system was transmitted and adapted by users. I thus describe the current state of research on the textual history of the Eusebian apparatus and a handful of problematic loci. Third, I discuss the textual cruces for which the Eusebian apparatus is adduced as evidence (e.g. Matthew 5:4–5; Mark 16:9–20; Luke 22:43–44; John 7:53–8:11, etc.). In some cases, I argue, the Eusebian apparatus provides reliable evidence for a fourth-century text of the Gospels. In other cases, the evidence provided by the apparatus is ambiguous or does not answer the questions which textual critics seek to address.
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The Textual History of the Biblical Odes
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Jeremiah Coogan, University of Notre Dame
Collections of biblical songs and prayers extracted from their contexts in other biblical books and compiled into anthologies are known as biblical odes. The phenomenon is attested in almost every language with Christian literary remains from antiquity and the Middle Ages (Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, and Slavonic). Despite a family resemblance and some relatively stable component texts, collections of biblical odes differ significantly in contents, sequence, and textual form. The various collections might best be characterized as related instances of an anthological phenomenon rather than a single “work.” This paper surveys the textual history of collections of biblical odes, focusing on the relationship between macroform (the selection and sequence of component texts) and microform (specific linguistic content) across languages and textual traditions.
This paper is proposed as part of the session on The Textual History of the Bible, vol. 2, and summarizes the author’s research on collections of biblical odes for that volume.
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The Relevance of Later Dialects for Biblical Aramaic Lexicography
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Edward M. Cook, Catholic University of America
The appearance of Volume XVI of TDOT, devoted to Aramaic, is a testimony to the extraordinary skill and devotion of its editors and authors. At the same time, the relative neglect of later
Aramaic dialects in the discussion of individual words is noteworthy. Since Biblical Aramaic and its predecessors are documented in relatively small corpora, it is arguably useful
to draw on material from the later dialects for the elucidation of early Aramaic texts. Some examples are given.
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Word Order in Biblical Aramaic
Program Unit: Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy
John A. Cook, Asbury Theological Seminary
All six possible orders for subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) are attested in Biblical Aramaic, prompting the description of its word order as “free” (Rosenthal 2006: §183). Various proposals have been made as to either the basic (underlying) or dominant (statistically most frequent) order in BA, including SVO (Bauer and Leander 1927; Hayes 1990), VSO (Buth 1987), VSO derived from an underlying SVO (Lambrecht 2001), and both SVO and SOV (Yakubovich 2011). Complicating the analysis of BA word order is the likelihood of interference with Aramaic syntax through contact with other languages, including verb-final Akkadian and Persian (Kutscher 1970; Folmer 1995) as well as Hebrew. In this paper I adopt the scalar classification between subject-prominent and topic-prominent languages suggested by Li and Thompson (1976) to argue that BA has a basic SVO word order that historically developed from VSO (as BH; see Holmstedt 2013), but that it has been influenced towards topic-prominent ordering through the interference of Akkadian and Persian, the latter of which has been identified as a topic-prominent language (Hale 1988). Adopting the theory of pragmatic word order movement from Holmstedt 2014, I illustrate the explanatory sufficiency of my theory through an analysis of part of Daniel 2.
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Missing Objects in Biblical Hebrew
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
John A. Cook, Asbury Theological Seminary
The case of missing object complements is significant for both the syntax and lexicon of Biblical Hebrew, because it raises the question of which missing objects are motivated by the lexicon and which represent syntactic content but are merely phonologically unrealized. The former represent transitivity alternations that must be captured in the lexicon, whereas the latter are a type of ellipsis that must be analyzed in terms of constraints and guidelines for recoverability of the missing element. In this paper I classify the types of missing objects that appear in Biblical Hebrew in terms of how they might be accounted by in terms of the lexicon and syntax.
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When Texts Dwell Together: Redaction as Textual Re-framing
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Sarah Cook, University of Georgia
If texts are living only so long as they interact with readers, how can we reconstruct the lives of texts in the ancient near East? The ancient readers of texts can be very difficult to locate because it is difficult to asses the nature of ancient media. If we detect a reference to another text in the Hebrew Bible, for example, should we envision the author as making this reference to a physical text in his capacity as reader or as making a reference to an oral tradition? To combat this difficulty and harness the many source layers that we can perceive in ancient texts, I suggest that we consider ancient redactors as readers who offer evidence of texts as living and who, in their work, dictate the afterlife of a text by fusing it with other sources. This fusion of sources is a textual re-framing that differs between redactional parties and is especially distinct in the Pentateuch. By understanding redactors as readers, we can come to a better understanding of the lives of ancient texts and a better understanding of redactors s individual agents who carry out their work with individual agendas and purposes.
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Exegeting Enoch: Rewriting a Mesopotamian Figure in the Yahwist Narrative
Program Unit: Genesis
Jeffrey L. Cooley, Boston College
Enoch, introduced in the book of Genesis and extensively characterized in Jewish texts of the Second Temple Period, has long been a focus of scholarship on the Judean reception of Mesopotamian traditions. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Zimmern (1903) first proposed that the character could be traced back to Enmeduranki from the Babylonian the seven sages tradition. This perspective was largely assumed thereafter, and was most thoroughly sustained in VanderKam’s (1995) important monograph. Most recently, however, Sanders (2017) has called this identification into question. In his masterful study, Sanders notes that the figure of Enmeduranki was hardly noteworthy among Mesopotamian scribes of the first millennium and offers in his place the figure of Adapa (best known to modern readers from the story Adapa and the South Wind) as the primary source of Enoch’s inspiration. Like Enoch, Adapa went up into the sky and was closely associated with revealed knowledge via his relationship to the god Enki. Most importantly for Sanders, unlike Enmeduranki, Adapa was a figure that was featured in scribes’ self-understanding and self-presentation and was actually well-known and admired amongst the intellectual elite of the mid-to-late first millennium Babylonia.
Beginning with Sanders’ scribal reorientation of the question, in this paper I will address the roots of the biblical figure as well. Focusing primarily on the Yahwist’s presentation in Gen 4:17-18, I will argue that Enoch’s most proximate Mesopotamian forerunner is neither Enmeduranki, Adapa, nor any famous human sage/scribe, but is the god Enki himself. While this suggestion is admittedly not novel (already finding brief expression in Greenberg 2002, not to mention the quasi-historical fringes of the internet), I make its case based on demonstrable scribal praxis, specifically the Yahwist’s use of scholarly onomastic hermeneutics (e.g., Nimrod in Gen 10:8-12, and Babel in Gen 11:1-9) by which he reconfigures Babylonian history for his own people’s self-understanding.
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Chasing the Ba'als, Then and Now: A Response
Program Unit: Poverty in the Biblical World
Matthew J.M. Coomber, Saint Ambrose University
This paper will both some of the connections between the ways in which economic culture has altered religious-practice in both the ancient and modern worlds. These insights will be used as the basis for a response to the sessions papers.
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Should We Ground the Image in the Incarnation? The Old Testament and Christological Anthropology
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Marc Cortez, Wheaton College
Accepted paper for the 2019 Tyndale House Scripture Collective, Scripture and Doctrine Seminar
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Why Did Jesus “Take the Cup”? Wine Service in the Greco-Roman World and Its Bearing on a Gesture in the Last Supper Accounts of Mark and Matthew
Program Unit: Ritual in the Biblical World
Charles H. Cosgrove, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
Scholars who study Christian origins now take for granted that when the earliest Christ-followers assembled, particularly at their community suppers, they adopted and adapted the format and customs of the Greco-Roman social meal. This perspective has led to fresh interpretations of both Christian table rituals and depictions of those rituals in Christian texts. With respect to the eucharistic cup, it has been argued, for example, that the cup is a Christian variation of post-supper libation ceremony (e.g., Christian version of a libation in Luke’s version of the Last Supper), even a protest against the custom of libations to the emperor. This paper re-examines the history of Greek wine ceremonies and suggests that the Synoptic language about Jesus taking a cup and sharing it with the disciples closely resembles a toast (πρόποσις). A methodological principle of the paper is to pay close attention to the dating of evidence for meal customs and their evolution through time.
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The Poetry of War in the Biblical Prophets
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
J. Blake Couey, Gustavus Adolphus College
According to Jeremiah 28:8, a true prophet is one who proclaims “war, famine, and plague.” It is not surprising, then, that the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible contain several poetic descriptions of invading armies (e.g., Isa 5:25-29, 22:5-7; Jer 5:15-17; Hab 1:6-11; Nah 2:3-5 [Eng. 2:2-4], 3:2-3). These texts vividly evoke the sights, sounds, and emotions of military conflict. They share a number of common stylistic features, such as the ascription of agency to weapons via metonymy or personification, the rhythmic evocation of marching through repetition and line length, and the depiction of army’s ferocity through metaphors involving predatory animals. Such features contribute to the representative power of these texts, but it is not always clear whether the result is glorification or critique of military violence. On the one hand, the descriptions create a tone of awed admiration for the overwhelming prowess of the advancing army, which at times becomes a quasi-divine force. On the other hand, they are unflinching in their representation of the horrific violence of battle.
This paper offers close readings of these poetic descriptions of battle from the prophetic books, in conversation with war poems from other languages and cultures, including other ancient texts like the Iliad and Aeneid along with some more recent English poems. Literary critic James Anderson Winn argues that war poetry “can offer thoughtful readers precious insights into war--moral, political, and aesthetic ways of understanding war that are valuable precisely because they are not simple, flat, or formulaic” (The Poetry of War [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008], 7). The poems of the biblical prophets offer such complicated understandings of war through their ambiguous portrayal of military conflict and their complex presentation of divine involvement in it. In this way, these texts make an important contribution to this body of world literature.
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The Double Seduction of Eve
Program Unit: Christian Theology and the Bible
Robert (J.R.C.) Cousland, University of British Columbia
The single most important deficiency in contemporary understandings of the role of Eve in early Jewish and Christian theology is (arguably) a failure to address adequately the traditions that recount Satan’s seduction of Eve. In spite of the widespread presence of these narratives, in Jewish, Christian, and Gnostic writings, they have been very largely overlooked by much contemporary scholarship. This oversight is problematic because these narratives impute to Eve a far worse crime than merely eating the forbidden fruit. She is implicated in a second seduction where her criminality extends to cuckolding Adam with Satan himself, and then bearing Cain, the evil child of her malfeasance. In this ‘seduction narrative’, Adam is not in any way complicit; he is the innocent victim, and Eve comes increasingly to bear responsibility for two primal crimes.
While this narrative is certainly present in later Christian sources (cf. the Protevangelium of James 13, ca. 150 CE; Tertullian, Modesty in Apparel Becoming to Women: De cultu feminarum 1.2; cp. 4 Maccabees 18:7-8), it is arguable that it even underlies parts of the New Testament in passages such as 2 Corinthians 11:2-3, 1 Timothy 2:14, and 1 John 3:12. This paper will present some examples of this ‘seduction narrative’ and then argue that this narrative was indeed known to some of the New Testament authors.
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Arrival and Annihilation: Cinematic Re-imaginations of the Eschatological Transformation of the Body
Program Unit: Bible and Film
Jon Coutts, Trinity College Bristol
This paper interprets the films Arrival and Annihilation alongside 1 Corinthians 15 in order to re-imagine the continuity and physicality entailed in the theology of final resurrection. The apostle’s statement that 'we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed' suggests that, whatever takes place at the end of history, it does not necessarily require natural death, but does entail bodily transformation. In Annihilation, when we see a body being doubled and intensified after its absorption into a twinkling eye of blooming light, we are invited to imagine the change wrought upon living bodies at the visitation of the already-resurrected Christ. In Arrival, when we see the twelve corners of the world trying to communicate with the occupants of unidentified flying objects, we are beckoned to imagine whether and how the frightful encounter might actually benefit the social body. Such films may helpfully reinvigorate the contemporary eschatological imagination.
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“My People Will Know My Name”: Jewish Identity and the Name of God in John’s Gospel
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Joshua Coutts, Providence Theological Seminary
Accepted paper for the 2019 IBR meeting, The Relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament research group
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Karl Ernst Richter’s Schwickert Edition: The Art (and Science) of Introducing Philo; Or, How Not to Analyze a Philonic Treatise
Program Unit: Philo of Alexandria
Michael Cover, Marquette University
Karl Ernst Richter’s Philonis Judaei opera omnia (Leipzig, 1828–1830) represents something of a minor stepping stone between the monumental achievement of Thomas Mangey’s 1742 edition and the modern critical edition of Cohn and Wendland (1896–1915). It makes a number of advances on the Pfeiffer edition (1785–1792), given Richter’s ability to draw on the recent editorial work of Angelo Mai (1818) and Johannes B. Aucher (1826). Chief among these is the inclusion of two new subtreatises from the second book of De specialibus legibus: De coiphini festo, or On the Feast of the Basket (Spec. 2.215–223), an appendix to Philo’s treatment of the fourth commandment; and De parentibus colendis (Spec. 2.224–262), the treatment of the fifth commandment and a codicil on the death penalty. Richter set an important precedent for Philonic scholarship by including Aucher’s Latin translations from the Paralipomena Armena, insinuating that Philo’s Greek and Armenian works belonged together—a pattern followed in subsequent Philonic editions (PAPM, PLCL). Richter also included a Greek index and a Sachindex. But perhaps the most important—and also the most problematic—contribution of Richter’s edition is his analysis of Philo’s treatises into paragraphs (“textum in paragraphos distinximus”), labeled with Roman numbers. Each paragraph is keyed to a (ca.) one-sentence summary, which are cumulatively presented at the beginning of each treatise as argumenta. (“summaria singulis libris praeposuimus”). Richter’s work in this regard is noteworthy, as his summaria represent the first “analytic introductions” to individual Philonic treatises—a practice imitated to very good effect by Colson in the PLCL. Yet Richter’s analysis of the text into divisions—maintained by both the Loeb and Cohn Wendland editions as roman numerals—while groundbreaking for their time, are seriously wanting by modern standards, as they fail to comprehend the essentially lemmatic and exegetical character of Philo’s major commentary series. After surveying in more detail some of the contributions listed above, this paper will primarily chart and unearth Richter’s analytic principals and consider what, if anything, of enduring value remain in the Richter paragraph divisions.
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The Conversion and Return of Simon Peter (Luke 22:31–32)
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
Michael Cover, Marquette University
This paper takes up the question of Peter’s “conversion”—or “return”—in Luke-Acts. The event is tersely gestured to by the phrase ποτε ἐπιστρέψας in Luke 22:32, but the adverb ποτε leaves open its timing and nature. To complicate matters, Luke maintains a curious silence about Peter’s conversion in the remainder of his double work. In an important study of Luke 22:31–32, Markus Bockmuehl suggests that the timing of this conversion can be pinpointed: it does not occur in Acts 10—Peter’s rooftop vision of the sheet—nor in his subsequent visit to the house of Cornelius. Rather, on analogy with John 21, Peter is converted after the resurrection in the silent report of Luke 24:34 (ὤφθη Σίμωνι). While Bockmuehl’s argument makes an ingenious intervention, his analysis of the Lukan pericope does not fully satisfy in i) its seemingly punctiliar definition of conversion; ii) its narrative analysis of the relationship of Luke 22:31-33 to John 21:20 and Acts 11:10; and iii) its unpacking of the narratological function of Lukan silences.
In the first section of this paper, I will argue that Luke’s silence about the timing of Peter’s conversion suggests that the third evangelist has a more expansive process in mind for Peter’s “conversion.” Rather than referring to a single moment of recognition in Luke 24, Luke is thinking of a variety of turns or conversions—not the least of which is Acts 10–11, where Peter is newly enabled to strengthen “the brothers” (Luke 22:32; Acts 10:23; 11:1). To support this view, I will first construct a picture of gradual, philosophical conversion, using the writings of William James, Arthur Darby Nock, and Philo of Alexandria. I will then supplement this picture with the model of conversion proposed by Bernard Lonergan, SJ, in Method in Theology—one in which both “religious” and “intellectual” conversions are subjectively integrated through a process of “psychological conversion,” which unites the other elements. Something akin to this is conveyed in Luke’s account of the conversion of Peter.
In a second section of this paper, I will situate Luke’s silence about the “conversion” of Peter within the framework of the larger Lukan silence about Peter’s martyrdom. Presuming that the story was widely known, I will suggest that the participle ἐπιστρέψας (Luke 22:32) might have signaled to Luke’s readers not only Peter’s conversion, but also his “returning” (cf. Luke 2:39) on a number of levels. Here, I consider potential links between Peter’s “return” and i) the martyrological account of Peter’s return to Rome (Acts of Peter 35, ὑπέστρεψεν εἰς Ῥώμην) from the Quo vadis legend, as well as ii) the tradition of the martyred Peter returning spiritually to exhort early Christian communities pseudepigraphically as a living voice in both Acts and 1 Peter 5:1. Just as Luke views Peter’s conversion as a process rather than a point, so Luke negotiates various ways of construing Peter’s return to strengthen the church—not least through his own composition of Petrine speeches.
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The Armenian Version and the Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Claude Cox, McMaster Divinity College
The Armenian version is a generation removed from the text of the
Hebrew Bible: it is a secondary or sub-version. While it is a significant
witness for the textual criticism of the Septuagint, beyond that, the fact
that it is often a hexaplaric witness means it also preserves readings from
Theodotion, a conservative witness to the Hebrew text. In addition, the
Armenian version—uniquely sometimes—preserves readings from “the
Three,” as marginal readings, that may offer leverage in textual criticism.
Finally, in some parts of the corpus of the Hebrew Bible the Armenian
may preserve a residual Syriac element (e.g., in Psalms) that is of great
interest.
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Let Sleeping Gods Lie? Revisiting Divine Sleep in Jer 31:26 in the Light of Hittite Prayers to the Storm-God
Program Unit: Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature
Noah W. D. Crabtree, Johns Hopkins University
The abrupt announcement in Jeremiah 31:26 of one who suddenly awakes from a "pleasant sleep" (ûšǝnātî ‘ārǝbâ lî) is a well-known crux in biblical interpretation. It has been subject to numerous emendations over the years, and among scholars who refrain from emending the text, no consensus exists as to its interpretation. So much so, that after reviewing the various exegetical proposals, John Bright concluded simply: "I confess that I am baffled." The central difficulty concerns the identification of the speaker, for which an array of possibilities have been put forward, ranging from the prophet to a redactor to a casual reader scribbling notes in the margins. Notably absent from recent scholarship, however, is perhaps the most straightforward interpretation—namely, that the speaker is the same as the speaker throughout the rest of chapter 31: Yahweh. The eradication of the divine speaker interpretation can be traced back to Heinrich Graf, who in his influential 1862 commentary argued forcefully against an allusion to divine sleep in Jer 31:26. Evidence from Mesopotamian balag-laments and Hittite prayers to the Storm-god, both of which portray divine sleep as an act of divine anger, allow for a rejoinder to the arguments levied by Graf and others. Particularly noteworthy is the characterization of divine sleep in the Hittite text KUB 36.89 as "pleasant, sweet" (šanezzi-) even as it appears as a manifestation of divine anger, which elucidates the long-held problem of characterizing Yahweh's sleep in the context of the exile as ‛ārǝbâ "pleasant, sweet."
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The Case of Religious Experiences: What the Cognitive Science of Religion Can (Not) Do
Program Unit: Cognitive Science Approaches to the Biblical World
Pieter F Craffert, University of South Africa
Religious experiences, especially the unusual kind like dreams, visions, voices and appearances, Taves and Asprem pointed out (and I would add, possessions and dissociations of the self, such as out-of-body experiences), have received considerable less attention in recent times. Despite the fact that “experience” is often added to the general descriptions of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) which examines patterns of religious thought and behaviour, the reality is that also CSR paid considerably less attention to experiences.
It partly comes with the territory in that CSR which has revolutionized the study of religious beliefs in some respects, focuses on the cognitive processes that constrain how religious representations are shaped, remembered, and spread. But Taves and argue that this lack of attention is also the result of the absence of a consistent basic-concept vocabulary that facilitates the integration of experience into other lines of research. Their solution is to treat experiences as events which are more easily turned into representations. But all of this is to treat experiences as ways of thinking. This does not treat experiences as ways of being or states of consciousness. The suggestion of this paper is that CSR can analyse experiences, like beliefs, in terms of the cognitive processes by means of which they are shaped, remembered and spread but not generated and maintained as bodily experiences of consciousness. CSR cannot explain why experiences deemed religious are so common and how they emerge in the first place. For that it is necessary to turn towards the neuroscience of consciousness which is more likely to re-situate the study of religious experiences as a central focus of research in neurobiological processes.
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The Creed and the Qur’an: Christological Controversies and the Qur’anic Crucifixion
Program Unit: The Qur’an and Late Antiquity (IQSA)
Ryann Elizabeth Craig, Catholic University of America
Examining the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed raises some interesting questions regarding what elements of their sources Syriac- and Arabic-speaking Christians heard in the Qur’an. In particular, the passage on Jesus’ crucifixion (Q al-Nisa’ 4:157–158) reverberated with Christian articulations of his crucifixion, death, burial, raising, and appearing, though the particular terms employed are unique to Christians and Muslims. Divisions between miaphysites, dyophysites, and Chalcedonian Melkites meant each community worked out their statements of faith to reflect their particular christology, beginning in Greek and Syriac and moving later into Arabic. As these communities were continuing to dispute confessional differences, the circulation of the Qur’an provided not only a new religious framework but a new religious language. The Creed became a topic of discussion in and of itself in polemical engagements, as Muslims critiqued disagreement about the Creed as evidence of Christianity’s defectiveness. Moreover, the Eastern Christian traditions frequently defended their positions through appeals to creedal phrases, yet the particular terms and word order they employed often differed when they wrote against one another in comparison with their writings against Muslims.
This study is a preliminary examination of biblical and conciliar creedal formulations of Jesus’ Passion in Syriac and Arabic before and after the dissemination of the Qur’an, in order to better understand how Christians heard the qur’anic crucifixion account in light of their internal disputes over how to express the person of Christ. Before Islam, Christians debated how to phrase who or what nature died on the cross, boiling down to the question of whether or not one could say “God died.” Muslims home in on this intra-Christian controversy as it related to the crucifixion: divine beings do not die; therefore Jesus cannot be divine. However, some Eastern Christians had already come to speak of Jesus dying in his humanity and not dying in his divinity, or dying in his body but not his spirit. Some began to include “he died” in their articulation of the Creed.
In this paper, I first outline the terms and formulaic expressions of Jesus’ death, crucifixion, and resurrection in biblical statements (i.e., not narratives) found in the earliest extant Arabic witnesses of 1 Corinthians 15 and the Acts of the Apostles. Next, I examine how Christians formulated the Creed in Syriac and Arabic before the enculturation of the Qur’an in Narsai, Isho‘yahb III, and a contemporary anonymous Syriac text. The remainder of the study focuses on how three Christian authors—Theodore Abu Qurrah, Severus Ibn Muqaffa‘, and Yahya ibn ‘Adi—presented creedal formulae, comparing and contrasting their expressions when speaking with Christians and Muslims. My initial results indicate shifts in terminology and word order reflecting the clear influence of qur’anic Arabic, as well as the reformulation of intra-Christian christological controversies in light of the Qur’an’s account of Jesus’ crucifixion. That some Christians saw it possible to make these changes and arguments calls for a reconsideration of the divide over the crucifixion itself, as Theodore Abu Qurrah exclaimed about the Muslim and Christian position: “We are right both ways!”
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Royal Illness and Historiography: Jeroboam’s Son and Hezekiah in the Book of Kings
Program Unit: Deuteronomistic History
Isabel Cranz, University of Pennsylvania
This paper explores how oracular responses to the ailing health of kings and members of the court work to structure the presentation of Judah’s and Israel’s monarchic past. The correlation between king, land, and people appears as a common motif in ancient Near Eastern kingship ideology. It appears, for example, in the lament for the founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, King Ur-Namma or in the Ugaritic Kirta epic. When it comes to the Deuteronomistic History, we encounter an interesting variation on this theme. Royal illness provokes a series of prophetic oracles which evaluate the cultic conduct of the Israelite and Judahite dynasties respectively while simultaneously assessing the future of the people and nation. As such, the first oracle concerning Jeroboam’s ailing son reverses God’s promise to provide Jeroboam with an enduring dynasty (1 Kgs 11:29–39). The second oracle anticipates the destruction of the newly established kingdom of Israel and the exile of the Israelites (vv. 15–16). Isaiah’s oracle for the ailing Hezekiah is somewhat more hopeful. Although Isaiah first announces Hezekiah’s impending death, the prophet quickly returns to reverse his previous oracle to state that the king will escape death and that Jerusalem will be saved from destruction for the sake of David (2 Kgs 20:1-6). Unfortunately, the illness of Hezekiah ends on a somber note because his recovery has attracted the attention of the Babylonians who will soon return to destroy Jerusalem and will put an end to the Davidic Dynasty (2 Kgs 20:16-18). By being placed at the beginning of the divided monarchy and toward the end of Judah’s existence, the oracles concerning royal illness frame a large part of Israelite and Judahite history by anticipating the destruction of both the northern and the southern kingdoms. Consequently, my analysis of the oracular responses to royal illness demonstrates how the Deuteronomistic History correlates the well-being of the king with the fate of his dynasty, city and nation.
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A Caption in Search of an Image: Figuring Bible and Archaeology in the “Pictorial Turn”
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible, History, and Archaeology
Cory Crawford, Ohio University
In this paper I survey different manifestations of the notion that archaeology, and the images it produces, serve as sources for “illuminat[ing] the Bible” (Thompson 1987). I begin with the major attempts to think about the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and images in the ancient Near East, especially coming from the Fribourg school and its intellectual descendants. I then move to discuss particular instances of objects (recovered archaeologically) that pose challenges to modern conceptualizations of the word-image nexus and to similar conceptions that inform biblical interpretation. These include the Kuntillet Ajrud pithoi, the Kattumuwa Stele, and the statue of Idrimi. I argue from these and other examples that the theoretical attention given to the question of archaeology and biblical history has been slow in coming to the question of biblical word and ancient image. I lay out some possibilities for greater theoretical and methodological rigor in approaching the question, drawing especially on the work of cultural theorists and art historians (e.g., Mitchell 2015, Squire 2009). I conclude with an exploration of the possibility that the relationship between bible and archaeology be figured as a particular case of the set of text-and-image relationships investigated broadly in the academy. In doing so, I point to other attempts to see these relationships at the level of disciplinary discourse, for example, in Art History (e.g., Elsner 2010). Finally, I attempt to lay out some of the ideological and political ramifications that emerge in so viewing this relationship, and how it is implicated in competing epistemologies in biblical studies.
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The Samaritans and Their Pentateuch: The Work of Gary Knoppers
Program Unit: Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah
Sidnie White Crawford, University of Nebraska - Lincoln
One major topic in Knoppers' prolific body of work is the Samaritans and the Samaritan Pentateuch in the Second Temple period, summarized in his magisterial work "Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of their Early Relations." My paper will focus particularly on the Samaritan Pentateuch and the contribution to its study made by Knoppers.
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Qumran from Where I Stand: The Past and Future of the Field
Program Unit: Qumran
Sidnie White Crawford, University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Having worked in the field of Dead Sea Scrolls for over 30 years, I have witnessed many changes in the field. Two of the most profound have been our understanding of the nature and history of the "biblical" text, and challenges to the "Qumran-Essene Hypothesis," first proposed by scholars such as Frank Moore Cross, Roland de Vaux, and J. T. Milik. My paper will survey both of these questions from the earliest days of Scrolls scholarship to our present understanding. Finally, I will discuss future directions for the field, proposing in particular the final elimination of a separate subfield of "Dead Sea Scrolls" and the integration of the Scrolls into all aspects of the history ancient Israel and early Judaism.
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For Whose Sake Heaven and Earth Came into Being: Anti-cosmicism and the Rejection of Alms in the Coptic Gospel of Thomas
Program Unit: Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy
David A. Creech, Concordia College - Moorhead
Gospel of Thomas saying 12 is often understood as an early affirmation of James the Just as the leader of the nascent Christian movement. Read in the context of sayings 10-14, we see rather a rejection of James and his attention to concrete human needs. Read alongside other texts found at Nag Hammadi we also find a debate in early Christianities about the place of embodied expressions of piety in general and a rejection of charity in particular. Whatever the original intent of the saying in the Gospel of Thomas, its final form critiques acts of mercy and the Christian leaders who advocate for them.
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Editorial Fatigue in the Apocryphon of John
Program Unit: Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism
David A. Creech, Concordia College - Moorhead
The Apocryphon of John is a sustained rewriting and interpretation of Genesis 1-9. Although Moses is explicitly corrected at five points in the text, Genesis’ account of creation is nonetheless the basis for the Apocryphon’s cosmogony and anthropogony. The ambivalent treatment of the biblical text is especially curious in that Moses is only “corrected” at points where there appears to be little disagreement. The problem is further compounded by the fact that the four extant versions of Ap. John (five if you include Irenaeus’ summary of the first third of the text) reveal that the text is evolving over time and in spite of the critiques of Moses, the redactors appear to return to the biblical text. But is the citation of the biblical text and return to the language in Genesis intentional?
The 1998 article by Mark Goodacre, “Fatigue in the Synoptics,” in New Testament Studies 44 (1998): 45-58, may offer helpful insights into the question. In the article, Goodacre explores the impact of editorial fatigue when copying texts. He suggests that as copyists worked deeper into texts they would out of familiarity with the original text return to the wording in the source they were copying, even if it created interpretive problems in the resulting text. This paper will examine the possibility of editorial fatigue in the Apocryphon of John’s retelling of the aftermath of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (NHC II 23,32-37). Both the recognition of nakedness in NHC II 23,32–33 and the cursing of the earth in NHC II 23,37 return to the language found in Gen 3:7-10 and Gen 3:17, respectively. If editorial fatigue explains this return, what does this mean for our understanding of the authorship and audience of the Apocryphon?
Note to chair: I think that this paper will work for the session on ancient exegesis of Gen 1-3 or for the session devoted to Karen King. My work with the Apocryphon of John was initially inspired by Professor King’s article, “Approaching the Variants of the Apocryphon of John,” in The Nag Hammadi Library after Fifty Years (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 105-37. Many of her books and articles informed the conclusions in my book, The Use of Scripture in the Apocryphon of John: A Diachronic Analysis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017). This paper is an extension of that research.
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The Last Page of the Askew Codex: A Witness of the Long Ending of the “Gospel of Mark” or a New Christian Apocrypha Hidden under Our Nose?
Program Unit: Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism
Eric Crégheur, Université Laval
Neglected by modern research, the Gnostic treatise of the Askew Codex known as the “Pistis Sophia” is as much characterized by its length as by a convoluted and obscure system, still misunderstood today. The treatise is divided into four parts and ends with a decoration. However, after this decoration, on the front of a new folio, a scribe copied 22 lines of a short text that has apparently no connection with what precedes it. Considered a witness of the long ending of the “Gospel of Mark” as early as 1869, this brief excerpt still poses several problems. In this paper, we propose to look at this text anew, in order to clarify the nature of its relationship with the rest of what was preserved in the Askew Codex, with the long ending of Mark, and with what can be found in patristic literature, as to determine whether or not we could have before us a witness of a still unknown Christian apocrypha.
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Painters of Miracles: Sacred Networks, Narratives, and Devotional Art in Gargano; The Votive Tablets of Saint Matthew’s Sanctuary
Program Unit: Lived Religiousness in Antiquity
Chiara Cremonesi, University of Padua
Painters of miracles: sacred networks, narratives and devotional art in Gargano. The Votive Tablets of Saint Matthew’s Sanctuary
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Elusive Eleusis: Evidence of Editing in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter
Program Unit: Greco-Roman Religions
Caroline Crews, University of Texas at Austin
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter has guided modern understandings of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and even of the Thesmophoria – a different festival in honor of Demeter and her daughter, Kore. Previous conversations have hypothesized about the intentions of “the poet,” as if a single person composed the Hymn, but I think the extant versions of the Hymn show the work of multiple editors. In this paper, I use literary analysis to argue that the Hymn contains layers of redaction. Further buttressed by the limited manuscript evidence, I demonstrate that the Hymn cannot serve as a reliable source for elucidating these ancient festivals.
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Pain and Emotion in Early Christianity
Program Unit: Healthcare and Disability in the Ancient World
Andrew Crislip, Virginia Commonwealth University
This paper approaches the problem of pain in biblical and later Christian sources in light of current neuroscience of pain and emotion. Modern conceptual categories of “pain” and “emotion” are difficult to differentiate on a biological level. Pain, like emotion, does not “exist” in the body, and does not flow through fixed or discrete circuits or pathways. Rather, pain, like emotion, is a “concept” applied by the mind/brain through prediction and cognition, making meaning of bodily affect, sensed and predicted through the interrelated processes of interoception and nociception, alongside exteroception through bodily senses (e.g., Barrett 2017). To feel pain is a conceptual act, terminology I draw from neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, and is constructed by neurological, psychological, and social forces, including language.
This approach to pain and emotion is important for the study of early Christianity and for biblical studies more generally, especially in assessing the past three decades’ attention to pain in the biblical world and the application of more recent conceptual formulations of pain, such as trauma. For example, take the discourse of pain in 2 Corinthians, which has been described as the “painful epistle” or the “therapeutic epistle.” Here, Paul’s lupē looms large, and commentators vary considerably in their interpretation of it, whether it is best rendered as pain, grief, or sorrow. That the Greek word lupē itself incorporates all these meanings, from “bodily” pain to “emotional” sadness, is not a problem for interpretation (Is the pain bodily or emotional? Is lupē better translated as distress or sadness?), but an important window into the conceptual worldview and, thus, lived experience of ancient Christians. It is also not unlike other concepts related to pain and emotion in Greek and Latin (e.g., pathos, passio, dolor), and other ancient languages. The peculiarity lies not in ancient conceptual imprecision, but in modern medicalized concepts of pain. Attention to the overlapping conceptual constructedness of pain and emotion, not to mention related concepts of “thoughts” and “memories,” is relevant to recent historical accounts of martyrology, and to the widely observed changes in pain as a feature of ancient subjectivity or of negotiating imperial power’s encroachment over elite bodies.
Scholars of the ancient world may thus be wary of talk of “the body in pain” since the “body” as such does not feel pain; it is the brain (or the mind, or the “person,” as Ariel Glucklich puts it). It should be no surprise that much as emotion forms a matrix for world construction and communication, pain is extraordinarily communicable through language, as Glucklich demonstrates (against assertions of pain’s unique incommunicability). Much as Barrett demonstrates that “[e]motions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world,” pain has incontrovertible power to “make and unmake worlds” (cf. Elaine Scarry). Attention to the neurological, psychological, and conceptual natures of pain and emotion clarifies the way that this construction of worlds played out among ancient Christians.
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Windows without Women: Men at the Window in the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Israelite Religion in Its Ancient Context
Lacy K. Crocker Papadakis, Baylor University
The woman at the window motif is well known from ivory furniture inlays found in Arslan Tash, Samaria, Nimrud, and Khorsabad as well as in Hebrew, Babylonian, and Greek literature. In these traditions, the woman takes on various characters, including a cult prostitute/goddess, an elusive lover, and a heroine. The man in the window motif, however, gets less press than the woman in the window, and the type of attention differs. A male corollary to the woman in the window motif regarding male deities, prostitutes, or voyeurs in the window does not exist. Don Seeman (“The Watcher in Window,” 2004) identifies the overlooked man in the window motif, or male watcher, and compares it to the woman in the window motif and episodes of men and women passing through windows. Seeman’s article focuses on the act of gazing out of the window or looking down from the window through the use of the verb שקף. While I build from Seeman’s analysis, I also extend beyond his focus of the male “watcher” to include all examples of a man at a window in the Hebrew Bible. The man in the window motif occurs across genre, appearing in narrative, poetry, apocalyptic and prophetic literature. I approach these examples from two broad categories: “seeing a tryst” (Gen 26:8; Prov 7:6 MT) and “accessibility/passability” (Gen 8:6; 2 Kgs 9:32; 2 Kgs 13:17; Dan 6:11; Joel 2:9). These examples illustrate that window motifs are not exclusively feminine in nature. Additionally, I argue that the most sexual window scenes in the Hebrew Bible are not those with women at the window but with men. This paper serves as a corrective to the overlooked man at the window and the oversexualization of window scenes with a woman.
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The Joseph Story: An Interpretive Lens and Story of Hope for Victims of Mass Incarceration
Program Unit: Bible and Practical Theology
Sonya S. Cronin, Florida State University
The Joseph “novella” (as it is often termed by biblical scholars), occupies the last fourteen chapters of Genesis, chapters 37–50. It is a story that punctuates two generations of family disfunction, and follows Jacob’s beloved son Joseph through years of tragedy as narrowly he escapes becoming a victim fratricide only to be sold by his brothers into slavery in a strange land. As if that was not enough, he then finds himself incarcerated for many years for a crime he did not commit. The story of Joseph though does not end with tragedy, but redemption. At the end, the reader finds that Joseph’s life and dreams have purpose, and that not only was the God of his family with him throughout his suffering, but positioned Joseph in such a way that he, his family, and the entire world would be saved by his dreams and talents. It is no wonder that this story is one with which many incarcerated men identify. This paper will discuss the way the Joseph story has become an interpretive lens by which many incarcerated men view their own tragic lives, but also how the story offers hope, allowing them to imagine reconciliation with their families and communities, as well as purpose for post-prison lives.
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Mark's Use of Jonah, Noah, and Isaiah to Undergird a Mission to the Gentiles
Program Unit: Gospel of Mark
Sonya S. Cronin, Florida State University
Despite the fact that many consider Mark to be a Gospel with a particular concern over the Gentiles, most commentators would hesitate in going so far as to say Mark’s Jesus has undertaken a Gentile mission. In fact, some of the more cautious go as far as to state that when Jesus ministers to the Gentiles in Mark, these instances are exceptions rather than “the norm.” Curiously though, many of the echoes of Hebrew Bible that Mark embeds in his Gospel suggest that he is undergirding it with the God of Israel’s care, concern, and arguably even mission to the Gentiles. This paper will evaluate the Gospel of Mark’s use of Jonah and the story of Noah and the flood (Gen 6-9) in Mark 4 and 11, as well as his utilization of the “song of the vineyard” from Isaiah 5 in Mark 12, to argue that Mark’s attention to the Gentiles is more than just instances and exceptions, but that it is perhaps the major point of his entire Gospel.
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Class, Galilee, and the Pre-political Jesus
Program Unit: Economics in the Biblical World
James Crossley, St Mary's University, London
Recent challenges to ideas of “class” as an analytical category for understanding Galilee at the time of Jesus repeat the similar liberal objections (and interests) that have been made since the nineteenth century: social status was performed in different ways in different contexts and class is, at best, too “reductionist”. While it is clear that people did (and do) self-identify and were (and are) identified according to context, using this approach to define “class” as reductionist and as another identity effectively (and conveniently) avoids the basic materialist sense of the category. If we restore class to its materialist roots in notions of means of production and the socioeconomic relations involved in property, exploitation and struggle, we can instead revitalise its use in the study of Galilee. What this also helps us do is to critique and qualify the discussions (for and against) of class conflict in Galilee beyond speculations of “standard of living” to how urbanisation and significant changes in land use throw up a range of potential reactions. I will highlight this point with particular reference to materialist understandings of so-called “pre-political” millenarianism and its relevance for understanding the historical Jesus.
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The End of Apocalypticism: Burton Mack, Norman Cohn, and Liberal Order
Program Unit: Redescribing Christian Origins
James Crossley, St Mary's University, London
Through a comparison of the work of Burton Mack and Norman Cohn, this paper will provide a metacritical analysis of the ways in which interrelated notions of ‘apocalypticism’ and ‘innocence’ (among others) function in twentieth and twenty-first century discourses about liberalism, capitalism, fascism, and Marxism. The choice of Cohn as a point of comparison is particularly helpful because, like Mack, he hit a scholarly nerve through a wide-ranging historical analysis which had an important influence through a similar argument partly because of (I will argue) a similar ideological perspective. In his most celebrated book, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957, 1970), Cohn also argued that a certain kind of millenarianism, which included ideals of innocence, has had a corrosive influence on the history of European and Western thought, culminating in Nazism. Both Cohn and Mack, to differing degrees, further used their analyses to critique Marxism and, implicitly and explicitly, to embolden (a certain kind of) liberalism against its opponents on all sides. Both were functioning in contexts, or their aftermaths, where such apocalpytic or millenarian thought was understood as being especially or potentially catastrophic (Cohn after WW2, Mack in Culture Wars America), but both, I will argue, are examples of a longer liberal tradition of categorizing ideological others together as irrational threats to liberal democracy and liberal capitalism (e.g., Communism, far right, religious fundamentalism). This is part of a wider intellectual discourse has been picked up in and reapplied (quite possibly against what either Cohn or especially Mack would have personally wanted) to attack post-2008 critiques of the neoliberal settlement as ‘fanatical’, ‘apocalpytic’, ‘irrational’, etc. While this paper is emphatically a social or ideological history of scholarship, some comments will be made on how metacritical analysis might be used in future redescriptions of Christian origins.
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Young, Poor, and Pregnant: Mary’s Response to Being Unexpectedly Expectant
Program Unit: Women in the Biblical World
N. Clayton Croy, Independent Scholar
Mary, the mother of Jesus, enters the biblical narrative burdened by social and economic disadvantages. She is young, poor, and pregnant. The last of these circumstances was severely complicated by the fact that, according to the gospel narrative, she had not yet married Joseph, her betrothed. As Judith S. Musick observes (Young, Poor, and Pregnant: The Psychology of Teenage Motherhood), this combination of hardships creates a certain psychology that engulfs a young woman, leading to the interplay of risk and resilience. The study of these circumstances in the lives of modern teenagers sheds light on the social and psychological burdens that Mary bore. Bearing a child in antiquity was, in itself, perilous. The addition of youth, poverty, and social stigma exacerbated an already dangerous situation.
This paper will examine the circumstances that Mary faced, moving from more general to more particular. (1) Female: The ancient world, even more than the modern one, was male-dominated. Women faced disadvantages as a biological accident of birth. (2) Young: In accord with Jewish norms at the time, Mary was almost certainly a teenager, possibly even a pre-teen. This would entail fewer resources and less life experience, although a first century Jewish girl might have a greater communal network than many “young, poor, and pregnant” girls in the modern world. (3) Poor: Even apart from the hardships attending pregnancy, Mary seems to have belonged to a lower echelon of society. While perhaps not a “peasant,” as was sometimes assumed by an earlier generation of scholarship, Mary’s family belonged to the modest economic level of artisans and laborers. (4) Pregnant: In the modern world, pregnancy has attendant risks of illness or death, much more so in the ancient world. It complicated economic and social independence or made them impossible. (5) Engulfed in Scandal: The final circumstance was probably the most challenging in terms of Mary’s psychology and social network. Regardless of the nature of her pregnancy – the Gospel account obviously differing from the social perception – Mary had to deal with the stigma of an irregular and seemingly illicit pregnancy. How was this circumstance like and unlike the dilemma faced by modern women who are “young, poor, and pregnant”? Is this situation ever welcome or empowering? Is Mary’s response one of resistance? reluctance? resignation? resolution?
Finally, the psychological categories of guilt and shame will be compared with the anthropological categories of honor and shame. Definitions of and distinctions between these terms will be offered, especially vis-à-vis sexuality and pregnancy. Here I will draw upon the resources of June Price Tangney and Ronda L. Dearing (Shame and Guilt) and the abundant bibliography on honor and shame in biblical interpretation. Which of these social and psychological states did Mary experience, and what was her strategy for dealing with them?
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Searching the Bible Using NLP: Google for the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Global Education and Research Technology
James D. Cuénod, Wheaton College (Illinois)
Modern Bible software is aimed at magicians. Skilled users craft complex searches like a magician produces a card. When they turn and ask you to repeat the process, you realise that something unnatural—or supernatural—has taken place. It may indeed be “possible” but not “possible for the rest of us.” Every day, though, Google makes it possible for us to find things simply by describing them using natural language: no wizardry required. What if the same technology that Google uses could help Bible language nerds magically find the things they're looking for using ordinary, natural language?
In this paper, I will explore the use of natural language processing to craft non-trivial searches of tagged Hebrew text. The underlying data is provided by ETCBC (http://dx.doi.org/10.17026/dans-z6y-skyh) and the search backend is powered by https://parabible.com. In addition, I will use the wit.ai NLP API (https://wit.ai/) to parse natural language search requests.
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The Contribution of Gail R. O'Day to Johannine Studies
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
R. Alan Culpepper, Mercer University
This presentation will review Gail O'Day's contributions to the interpretation of the Gospel of John with special attention to her Commentary on the Gospel of John in the New Interpreter's Bible (1996).
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The Mythomoteur and the Construction of Diaspora Identity: The Case of Judeans in Egypt in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries BCE
Program Unit: Bible, Myth, and Myth Theory
Marshall A Cunningham, University of Chicago
While we lack a full account of the founding of the Judean garrison at Elephantine, the community’s famous request to officials in the Levant for a letter of recommendation concerning the reconstruction of their temple (TAD A4.7–8) contains an apocopated Judeo-Egyptian founding myth, a mythomoteur. A brief reference to the temple’s pre-Persian founding provides insight into how the community understood its own settlement on the island and the role that its “history” played in construction of Judeanness for the authors of the letter and their contemporaries. In order to get a better sense of the salient elements of Judean identity emphasized or actualized in the letter’s tantalizingly brief reference, this paper puts it into conversation with other narratives that record the arrival of Judeans in Egypt during the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods, including Jer 40–44, the Hellenistic Letter of Aristeas, and a pericope from col. xviii of Papyrus Amherst 63. Finally, I will return to Yedaniah’s claim to pre-Persian roots in the RLR with insights from the other narratives to make some claims about contours of Judeanness that the short mythomoteur constructs and reinforces.
Although there is no definitive set of criteria, no particular clustering of traits that is inherent to an ethnic group, scholars frequently highlight the important role of the mythomoteur in the construction and maintenance of group identity. Theorists of nationalism and ethnicity have stressed the importance of the mythomoteur as a constitutive element of pre- and proto-national groups, and foundational works in the study of diaspora have similarly focused on the role of myth in maintaining links between the the ancestral center and the dispersed periphery. Even theorists who eschew the geographic “rootedness” of diaspora identity in favor of more dynamic hybrid constructions still recognize the value of the shared stories that support and reinforce the boundaries of the group. As narrativized ideology, myths evince the values of the group who shares them and support its institutions (social, religious, political, etc.). As a sub-genre of myth, the mythomoteur reinforces group boundaries by “stressing individuals’ solidarity against an alien force” (Armstrong, 1982), narratively establishing the community’s “us” by outlining that salient values that define it over against a perceived “them,” while rooting those values in a purportedly shared past. The historical reality of that past—whether set in the mythic past or just a few years prior—and the actual or perceivable difference with the “other” are far less important than the ability of their narrativization to evoke and establish bonds between would-be co-ethnics, co-religionists, or co-nationals.
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Statuettes of Roman Gods from the Synagogue at Ancient Ostia
Program Unit: Greco-Roman Religions
Mary Jane Cuyler, University of Sydney
During the 1962 excavations at the synagogue at Ostia, two mold-made terracotta votive statuettes came to light (Ost. Inv. 12540, 12541). Although they were known from archival photographs, they have never been published. Two type-written inventory cards provide the precise context of their discovery in a trench by the door of the passage between the corridor and the meeting hall, beneath the packed-earth level designated as the “fourth surface.” The card of each statuette indicates that it was found together with the other. This paper first presents an iconographical and functional interpretation of the figurines before assessing the significance of their findspot in the synagogue.
The first statuette is a representation of a nude, veiled Venus flanked by her sons Eros and Priapus. For this figurine we have identified precise comparanda from contexts dating to the first century C.E. The second statuette is more enigmatic; it is a representation of a barefoot, bareheaded young man wearing a belted tunic. In his left hand he holds a patera and in his right he holds a bucket of fruit (grapes?). He carries a wicker, half-ovoid rucksack on his back. The youthful countenance, the short curly hair, and the belted tunic suggest that this young man represents a Lar. Lares are often depicted carrying a patera and a cornucopia; in this case, a simple bucket of fruit replaces the more elaborate cornucopia.
The proximity of these statuettes, discovered in the same context, suggest that they represented part of a group from a lararium. Statuettes of gods and goddesses are frequently in the shrines along with the twin Lares, but Venus is by far the most common. The presence of lararium figurines in an ancient synagogue requires careful examination, because Jewish law prohibited the use of idols. The final portion of the presentation turns to an analysis of the precise find-spot of the statuettes based on a comparison of the stratigraphy we identified in 2011 when the Ostia Synagogue Project excavated in the area adjacent to the trench in which the objects were found. The context in which the statuettes were discovered appears to be a floor that was in use in a very early phase of the building.
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The Towers of Jerusalem and Ontological Presuppositions of Creation: Exegesis and Philosophy in Maximus the Confessor’ Quaestiones ad Thalassium
Program Unit: Biblical Exegesis from Eastern Orthodox Perspectives
Vladimir Cvetkovic, University of Belgrade
This paper examines Maximus the Confessor’s Quaestiones ad Thallasium 48, where an analogical exegesis of 2. Chronicles 26 is presented with the aim to provide an interpretation for the towers, gates and corners of Jerusalem. This paper argues that Maximus employs this biblical narrative in order to display the cosmological, epistemological and onto-logical presuppositions of creation. The paper will first focus on how Maximus interprets the biblical narrative in the context of the five cosmological divisions embedded in creation identifying them with corners or extremes. The corners are reconciled with Christ as the gate and are incorporated in the towers of divine meanings that correspond to the cosmos free from all divisions. In doing so, Maximus finds a scriptural basis for his views on the five divisions famously articulated in Ambiguum, 41. Second, the paper will turn to how Maximus identifies the towers with the knowledge of divine principles acquired through contemplation and the gates and corners with the combination of knowledge and virtue, highlighting the links of the biblical text with Maximus’ epistemological doctrine fully elaborated in Mystagogia 5. Third, it will be demonstrated that Maximus develops his interpretation of this biblical narrative along the lines of Neoplatonic logic. However, in contrast to modern Maximian scholarship, who considers that Maximus elucidates the onto-logical connection between individuals and universals by using the Porphyrian tree model, this paper will claim that he does so by applying the biblical terms ‘towers’, ‘gates’ and ‘corners’ to particulars, universals and middle terms. Finally, based on this analysis, it will be possible to demonstrate that Maximus’ exegesis deeply reflects his idea that the logoi of cosmos correspond to the logoi of scripture and that the key for understanding both is the incarnation of Christ.
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Countering Consensus: New Approaches to the Redescribing Christian Origins Seminar
Program Unit: Redescribing Christian Origins
Anna Cwikla, University of Toronto
The Redescribing Christian Origins seminar has prided itself in “problematizing current consensus views” and “unexamined assumptions” in the field of Christian Origins. But what happens when a consensus or canon begins to form within the seminar itself? One cannot think of Redescribing Christian Origins without the names Burton Mack, J. Z. Smith, Ron Cameron, etc. coming to mind. Not only have these scholars figured prominently as contributors to the sessions and publications themselves, but their work is continually cited throughout in recent years’ sessions. While the impact of these influential scholars should not be understated, emphasizing the contributions or methodologies of the same set of scholars runs the risk of isolating the work of the unit from other contemporary approaches. In other words, if we are always looking back, how can we look forward? While prevalent in other sections of the SBL and the field of Christian Origins in general, gender critical approaches have not been seriously considered in this seminar. This paper reconsiders the original ending of the Gospel of Mark through the lens of gender analysis to demonstrate how effective these types of approaches can be for the overall redescription project of the seminar.
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Ruth, Women’s Experience of Migration, and the Negotiation of Gender Ideologies within the Family
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Kelly D. Dagley, Hope International University
Accepted paper for the 2019 IBR Annual Meeting in the Emerging OT Scholars session
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Further on John 7:37–39: Natal, Chthonic, and Surrealist Pneumatology
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Michael A. Daise, College of William and Mary
The myriad exegetical issues attending Jesus’ logion at John 7:37-39 cannot be resolved beyond question. They do, however, allow several options for the referent and imagery in this saying that have not been (fully) explored; and in the interests of evoking further discussion this papers suggests three. First, that, when seen in its broader biblical and Johannine contexts, the phrase conventionally rendered ‘from his belly’ (ek tes koilias autou) denotes something proceeding from the loins/womb and refers, not to Christ or the believer, but to the Spirit—that is, ‘from the Spirit’s womb’. Second, that the motif ‘rivers of living water’ derives from what J. van Dijk identified as the ‘chthonic’ (over against Chaoskampf) creation myth and, thereby, thematically coincides with the motif of ‘new birth’ in the phrase ek tes koilias autou. And last, that the juxtaposition of two such disparate motifs (the natal and the chthonic) reflects a dynamic that would later serve as the hallmark of surrealism and is, in fact, not foreign to the Fourth Gospel’s repertoire of images: at John 1:51 Jesus similarly speaks of angels ‘ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’.
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Interpreting (in) Pain: Mark’s Passion Narrative and Masochistic Form
Program Unit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible
David M. Dalwood, Yale Divinity School
What distinguishes the masochist’s dungeon from the torture chamber, and under what conditions is either a “queer” space? These questions, I contend, are ultimately ones of form: of what it is for spaces – natural and designed – to exist in one manner rather than in other; of which properties “matter” for their materialization as such; and of how it is that scholars identify, describe, critique, and possibly revise them.
This essay takes up those questions by considering the narrative of Jesus’ crucifixion and death in the Gospel of Mark. That text, I suggest, is at once a theorizing subject in its own right as well as an object of interpretation, with the task of formalist argumentation being to navigate the hendiadic relationship between these two modalities. As a subject, the text is an agentive archive that speaks to my motivating research questions, but one whose agency has as its condition of possibility the intervention of human critics. Those interventions occur in acts of close reading, through which the text as a literary and conceptual space is itself theorized. For the purposes of my argument here, that theorization entails querying whether the text – qua a literary space that is for that reason a designed and artificial one – is a dungeon, a torture chamber, some hybrid of the two, or something else entirely. Further, it involves asking what becomes of the interpreter who dwells therein.
By interrogating the construction of masochistic space apropos of the Markan passion narrative, my study performs an assertive interdisciplinarity between biblical studies and queer theory, demonstrating one way in which the close reading of a biblical passage might contribute positive insights with import for contemporary queer theorists. In short, it models a kind of biblical scholarship that, rather than remaining content with merely applying the theories developed in other disciplines to the biblical corpus, instead actively theorizes in its own right.
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Satirizing the Apostle: A Rereading of Gender and Desire in the Acts of Paul and Thecla
Program Unit: Inventing Christianity: Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, and Martyrs
Carly Daniel-Hughes, Concordia University - Université Concordia
Scholars once read the Acts of Paul and Theclas as a “gynocentric” text circulated by female ascetics. In recent decades, they have explored how gender figures in it rhetorically to promote sexual asceticism. Thecla’s gender transformation marks, it has been argued, her social transition moving from a feminized virgin to a masculinized sexual ascetic by the text’s end. What such readings regularly notice, but less regularly account for, are the curious gaps and contradictions around gender and desire that redound in this colorful tale, such as: Thecla’s seeming erotic attachment to Paul; Paul’s initial support for and then sudden and repeated abandonment of Thecla when danger looms; Thecla’s threat that she will “cut her hair” so that Paul might baptize her (a threat that she does not pursue; she is able to baptize herself in a pool of ferocious seals); the text’s repeated (prurient?) attention to Thecla’s nakedness; and the text’s privileging of mother-daughter networks, Thecla and Queen Tryphaena and Thecla and her own mother. The Acts of Paul and Thecla, ultimately, provides a complex commentary on gender and desire.
This paper asks: are these narrative tensions a reading of Paul’s own confounding statements on gender and sexuality in 1 Corinthians? Scholars have presumed that Paul’s appearance in this text to be positive, a source of authorization for a gospel of chastity. Thus, Dale Martin argues that Paul appears “to promote a woman-centered, though admittedly androgynous, form of ascetic Christianity set up in direct opposition to the male-dominated, traditional household as promoted…by the Pastoral Epistles” (Sex and the Single Savior, 116). On this account, the Acts of Paul and Thecla cuts through the tensions in Paul’s discourse by emphasizing his pro-ascetic statements, where texts like 1 Timothy amplify Paul’s concessions to marriage.
This paper considers the Acts of Paul and Thecla as participating in a more complicated hermeneutic, which can be traced in other contemporaneous early Christian texts. Benjamin Dunning’s Specters of Paul reveals how a series of early Christian readers of Paul’s letters grappled with the apostle’s tensive constructions of sexual difference, ultimately leaving their own accounts of difference unresolved. Taking a somewhat different approach to Dunning, I suggest that the Acts of Paul and Thecla reads Paul, but perhaps not in a complementary way. Considering whether satirizing the apostle was its initial design, I show that certainly some early readers of the text understood it as engaging with and exposing Paul’s discourse on eroticism and gender as ambiguous, so as to undermine it. The paper offers initial conclusions about what sustained this satirical reading (one that can account for this narrative’s circulation independent of the larger Acts of Paul). Tertullian’s use of Paul’s letters in his inter-communal debates about gender and sexuality provides historical clues as to what motivated the drive to present Paul not as an authority, as scholars have often assumed, but rather as a caricature.
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Yahweh's Residence in the South and the End of His "Origins"
Program Unit: Israelite Religion in Its Ancient Context
Quinn Daniels, New York University
Yahweh’s southern dwelling place is usually discussed in relation to his original place of worship in the Late Bronze and early Iron ages, often with an eye toward explaining how outside worshippers handed off Yahweh to the Israelites. Yet the entire investigation too quickly presupposes that the southern itineraries in Judges 5 and Deuteronomy 33 can adequately identify the southern populations who worshipped Yahweh prior to his integration into the highlands. In a simpler reading, the poetic texts merely imagine the back-country as the dwelling place of Yahweh, which is similar to the role Mount Ṣapānu plays as the dwelling place of Baˁlu in the Ugaritic texts. No one would suggest that “Ṣapānu peoples” were the pre-Ugaritian worshippers of Baˁlu and the same principle should be true for Yahweh in his own mythic representations. In light of this challenge, this paper freshly addresses the reasons why Israel would conceive of Yahweh as having a southern, back-country residence without recourse to old assumptions. The answer lies in the intriguing notion that Israelite writers claimed to be the descendants of mobile, tent-based, herders who traversed the southern landscape (e.g. Gen 26; Hos 9:10a; 12:10; 13:4-5; Deut 2:1-4; Exod 5:3; 10:8-11, etc). The idea of an old, mobile life in the back-country signals that this space was ripe for potential as Yahweh’s domain before the time of the monarchy. But more importantly, the space could have been structured as such by the very people who came to comprise Israel – not outsiders. As time elapsed, the Israelite monarchy formed and developed a weightier economic and territorial interest in the south, which is evidenced both in the texts at Kuntillet Ajrud and the notices of Israel’s southern presence in 2 Kgs 14:25 and Amos 6:13-14. The kingdom of Israel’s southern occupation affirmed unbroken links to the old back-country, permitting the southern landscape to resurface as a domain where Yahweh was “known” to be. This geo-political environment was probably what provoked scribes to start incorporating the southern residence into texts about Yahweh’s military activities in the north, and therefore, offers an explanation for the appearance of southern itineraries in theophanic texts (e.g. Jdg 5:4-5) – one of which is conspicuously located at the southern site of Kuntillet Ajrud.
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Can the Subaltern’s Artifacts Speak? Excavating Gender in the Material Culture of Ancient Israel
Program Unit: Historiography and the Hebrew Bible
Erin Darby, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
The field of gender and ancient Israel has come a long way in the last forty years, incorporating many different methodological twists and literary turns. Perspectives vary as to the rightful focus of investigations, questioning whether the “objects” of study should be actual ancient women and their material culture or the ideologies of gender inscribed in the textual record. In the last several years, artifacts have resumed an important role in these inquiries but in a new way. Instead of using artifacts merely to reconstruct the lives of ancient women, studies have increasingly adopted theories from the fields of visual studies and material religion to approach artifacts as structuring agents that create and influence human identities. Borrowing theoretical positions from Bourdieu and other modern theorists, these approaches purportedly bypass the tricky task of reconstructing ancient women’s intentions and interiors, using, instead, the formal characteristics of objects to establish how individuals would be structured by them. While these methods are producing creative research, now is the moment to investigate their theoretical underpinnings more thoroughly, lest we inadvertently cloak an overly positivistic historiographic enterprise in an aura of theoretical mystery. To that end, this paper will briefly review the main approaches to material culture in the study of history and gender, summarizing some of the primary historiographic problems. The paper will then discuss the influence of material religion in the field and the necessary baseline of data needed to do this analysis well. Finally, the paper will use the case of figurines to illustrate some of the pitfalls that could emerge when either the data are too weak or the methods too undertheorized to accomplish the goals of analysis.
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The Ambivalence of Shame in Ben Sira in Its Hellenistic Context
Program Unit: Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature
Guy Darshan, Tel Aviv University
In two cases, Ben Sira deals with the ambivalence of shame – in 4:21-24 and in 41:14–42:8. There are cases in which shame is negative and brings about bad things, and there are cases in which shame is desirable and good. While the negative sense of shame is the common meaning in biblical Hebrew, the positive sense may belong to the Hellenistic period. In addition, the meaning of the expression נשא פנים, which parallels the verb בוש in these two pericopes (Sira 4:22; 42:1), seems also to have undergone a semantic shift, but its exact meaning is disputed. This paper suggests a solution to the dispute regarding the expression נשא פנים by tracing its translational tradition in the Septuagint, and by examining the related expression הכיר פנים. In these cases, which have not previously been considered in addressing this question, the Septuagint is used as a dictionary for the Hebrew of the Hellenistic period. In order to understand the semantic development of both this expression and the concept of shame in general during the Hellenistic period, the second part of the paper draws attention to the ambivalence of the concept of shame in Greek literature. This data may shed new light on the reason for the semantic shift of these terms in the time of Ben Sira. Furthermore, this may also contribute to the expanding discussion of Jewish wisdom literature from the Hellenistic period against the background of its time and place.
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The Significance of BM 40474 to the Biblical Psalms
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Ryan Conrad Davis, Brigham Young University
BM 40474 was published by Irving Finkel (1999), translated again by Foster (2005), and re-edited by Oshima (2011). The tablet contains the prayer of Nabû-šuma-ukīn the son of Nebuchadnezzar II. This text promises to be an informative parallel to the biblical psalms. Past research in comparing Mesopotamian prayers with the biblical psalms of lament has often focused on the incantation-prayers, a group of prayers that were used in a variety of rituals by ritual specialists, like the āšipu. There are some important differences between the incantation-prayer corpus and the biblical psalms that make BM 40474 such an interesting parallel. Although both incantation-prayers and the biblical psalms are often put in the first-person voice of the supplicant, they understand their origins in very different ways. The incantation-prayers are considered to be part of āšipūtu, revealed to humankind by the gods; whereas many of the biblical psalms are assumed to have their genesis in specific situations in the life of King David. BM 40474 claims, like the psalms, to be used by a royal figure at a specific biographical moment. BM 40474 indicates the existence of a genre of prayer that was composed for and tied to specific life situations that was different than the mere personalization of incantation-prayers. Additionally, the biblical psalms often mention human enemies, unlike incantation-prayers which, if they talk about other human beings, refer to them as witches and warlocks, users of black magic. In BM 40474, however, human adversaries are front and center, not for their use of illicit magic, but for their deceit and slander. Even though this was ostensibly used for a specific situation in Nabû-šuma-ukīn’s life, the description and language are vague enough to be applicable elsewhere. This paper will explore the points of contrast and comparison between BM 40474 and the biblical psalms of laments. In particular, this cuneiform parallel may offer a closer glimpse at the genre that the editors of the Book of Psalms had in mind as they attached so many prayers to King David.
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Christian Arabic Biblical Commentaries in the Manuscript Library at the Monastery of the Syrians (Wādī al-Naṭrūn, Egypt)
Program Unit: Biblical Exegesis from Eastern Orthodox Perspectives
Stephen J. Davis, Yale University
Since 2013, I have directed a project to catalogue the Coptic and Arabic manuscripts in the library at the Monastery of the Syrians in Wadi al-Natrun, Egypt. At current count, these manuscripts number over 1000, but they have never been catalogued publicly before. In this paper, I will be reporting on the 48 Arabic manuscripts containing biblical commentaries and what the contents of this corpus tell us about archival practice and biblical exegesis in this Coptic Orthodox monastic setting. Based on this textual record, I will make observations about which biblical books drew the most attention for interpreters of the Arabic text, and I will also address patterns of authorial attribution for the surviving commentaries in the collection. While most are transmitted without attribution or in the form of florilegia drawn from multiple authors, eleven contain freestanding works attributed to named commentators. Most prominent among them are two well-known figures: the late ancient Greek theologian John Chrysostom and the medieval Christian Arabic writer and polymath Ibn al-Ṭayyib. Accordingly, I will conclude my paper with a case study of three particular manuscripts containing Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s Gospel commentaries, focusing on their importance not only for the study of Christian Arabic literature, but also for local and translocal material histories of manuscript production, transmission, and reception.
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Body Danger: 1QGenAp and Bodily Agency in Historical and Literary Movement
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Cindy Dawson, Rice University
Sarai and Abram’s ill-fated journey into Egypt in Genesis 12 and 20, and the possibility of scandal swirling around Sarai’s body as a result of that journey, is deeply problematic. What, exactly, happened to Sarai in Pharaoh’s house? If such silence is difficult for the modern commentator, it was deafening for the ancient mindset that guarded the female body and its would-be progeny with a jealous gaze.
My purpose is to examine 1QapGen’s embellishments of the biblical accounts, especially the new poem dedicated to a description of the minutiae of Sarai’s body. From the perspective of body theory and new materialism, this expanded description of Sarai’s body is most telling. Scholars such as Elizabeth Grosz and Samantha Frost have destabilized the entrenched mind/body dualism—a dualism that strips from the body any superior value—by demonstrating each body’s agency in its specific environment. And indeed, in the Genesis Apocryphon, the human body generally and the female body especially function as the central plot point at every turn. It is the needs of the body—survival—that necessitate the journey to Egypt and Abram’s deception. It is the possible danger posed to Sarai’s body that triggers exegetical maneuvering. And it is a description of Sarai’s body that assists in assuaging androcentric angst. Theorizing the body as an agent in its historical and literary contexts clarifies not only the characters’ movement within the story but also their movement across multi-generational retellings.
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Dogs as the Evil Other
Program Unit: Animal Studies and the Bible
Kathy Barrett Dawson, East Carolina University
The majority of references to “dogs” in the Bible are pejorative. Numerous references make dogs synonymous with evil doers, people who worship idols, and the lowest segment of society in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Dogs are classed with “sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood” (Rev. 22:15). The Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 is likened to a little dog that does not deserve the food offered to Israel. Dogs eat vomit, blood, and dead bodies. Dogs are natural enemies who possess power and are to be feared (Ps 21:21). Dogs do not apparently discriminate between the innocent who are dead (Naboth) and the wicked who are dead (Jezebel and descendants of Ahab). However, a few references to dogs in the LXX do not present an evil connotation at all. For example, Sirach 13:18 depicts a dog in a favorable light, as does Tobit (5:17, 11:4). I propose that the radical difference between the depiction of the dog as evil and the dog as good, even as a household pet in Tobit, depends on whether the references are rhetorical against perceived enemies or are merely descriptions of daily life. By comparing references to dogs in ancient persuasive rhetoric, as depicted in the extant accounts of ancient Greek and Roman orators, with the pejorative references to dogs in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, I will demonstrate the animalization of marginalized groups within the Bible via canine references.
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Phoebe, Paul's Guardian: A Lexical Analysis of προστάτις in Rom 16:2 with an Argument for a New Interpretation
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Zachary K. Dawson, McMaster Divinity College
A marginal, though nevertheless lively, debate has ensued over the last three decades concerning the meaning of the term προστάτις in Rom 16:2. The debate is found explicitly in articles and commentaries on Romans and has factored into the wider controversy of the roles of women in churches established by Paul and, by extension, women’s roles in churches today. But one can also observe a more implicit debate, or perhaps trajectory, that has taken place in the understanding of this term in the major Greek New Testament lexicons and Bible translations, where various meanings and renderings betray its ambiguity. In this paper, I will trace and evaluate the history of the treatment of προστάτις in several major Greek lexicons to demonstrate how they have contributed to the present scholarly consensus on this term—that is, how they have over time narrowed the possible senses this word can have through separation from its masculine counterpart and through elimination of potential senses. Then, based on my own lexicographical analysis of the term, I will demonstrate that the various senses that προστάτις could take on in Hellenistic Greek have not all been fairly considered. To accomplish this, I first show how scholarship on the patron-client relationship in antiquity has come to dominate the discussion of προστάτις and that this in some ways has obscured the possible senses of this term. Then, I will argue that one rendering of the term is just as viable as the other renderings that have enjoyed popularity—namely, “protectress” or “guardian,” which bears significant implications on the interpretation of Rom 16:2 and the particularities of Phoebe’s relationship to Paul. These matters, too, will be briefly explored. As methodological parameters for this study, I will assume a lexical monosemic bias—that is, the notion that words, rather than being polysemous (i.e., having multiple inherent meanings), have a single, highly abstract meaning, but where this meaning can be modulated to assume different senses according to how words are contextualized and routinely used by language communities. Further, the concepts of text semantics and thematic formations as developed by systemic-functional linguist Jay Lemke will be employed as interpretive tools to socially locate the potential meaning of προστάτις in the context of Paul’s recommendation of Phoebe to the church in Rome.
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Hannah as a Cultic Agent Challenging an Exclusive Priesthood
Program Unit: Cultic Personnel in the Biblical World
Nidhani De Andrado, Curry College
1 Samuel 1-2 contains the only narrative in the Hebrew Bible where a woman is directly located within a sanctuary and engages in cult-related activities. Hannah prays, converses with the priest Eli, derives a divine blessing, dedicates her son and participates in sacrificial ritual. While feminist scholars (such as Carol Meyers, Susan Ackerman) have astutely observed Hannah’s cultic role, they have focused less on the impact of her activities.
My paper will investigate the implications of Hannah’s agency within a religious domain controlled by a privileged male priesthood that buttresses its own power and status by exclusion, and becomes corrupt. Adapting some theoretical insights from Saul Olyan’s work Rites and Rank, my paper will explore how Hannah’s actions challenge the boundaries that marginalize women and preclude their cultic participation. Consequently, not only does Hannah's personal situation of patriarchal oppression improve, but she has an impact on reconfiguring the exclusive cultic system of her time as the corrupt Elide priesthood is displaced by her son Samuel. While Samuel is described as changing “the course of the nation’s path,” my paper would give that credit to Hannah.
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“As for the Serpent, Dust Will Be Its Bread”: Isa 65:25 in Conversation with Isa 11:6–9 and Gen 3:14
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Wilson de Angelo Cunha, LeTourneau University
This paper will argue that Isa 65:25 is a passage that dialogues with the earlier Isa 11:6-9 and Gen 3:14. Although the intertextual links with Isa 11:6-9 are clear, scholars do not agree on an intertextual link of Isa 65:25 with Gen 3:14. The paper will argue that there is indeed a link between these two passages, not only because the combination of “serpent + dust” appears only in Gen 3:14/Isa 65:25 – Micah 7:17 does not apply here because the parallel line “like the crawling things” suggests that “the snake” should be taken as a collective plural, thus speaking of “snakes” in general – but also because of a shared view of the “snake” as a symbol of evil. The author of Isa 65:25, therefore, while dialoguing with Isa 11:6-9, has an eye on Gen 3:14. The paper will argue (following Childs) that Isa 65 is an “… eschatological return to the primordial age.” This return is made explicit in the insertion of “as for the serpent, dust will be its food,” which is lacking in Isa 11:6-9. The paper will then finish with diachronic considerations, advancing that Isa 65:25 post-dates Isa 11:6-9 and that its scribe comes from the same circles as the one who composed Gen 3:14. The main difference between the two circles is that in Gen 3:14 the snake “eats dust” as the result of a curse imposition, while Isa 65:25 envisions a new creation in which the snake appears subjugated from the start, certainly as a symbol of the defeat of evil.
Bibliography
Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah (OTL; Louisville: John Knox Press, 2001).
Odil Hannes Steck, “: '... ein kleiner Knabe kann sie leiten': Beobachtungen zum Tierfrieden in Jesaja 11,6-8 und 65,25” in Alttestamentlicher Glaube und biblische Theologie: Festschrift für Horst Dietrich Preuss zum 65 Geburtstag (1992): 104-113.
Robert Martin-Achard, “L' espérance des croyants d'Israël face a là mort selon Esaïe 65,16c-25 et selon Daniel 12,1-2,” Revue d'histoire et de philosophie religieuses 59:3/4 (1979): 439-451.
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Semantic Domains in Biblical Hebrew Lexicography
Program Unit: Global Education and Research Technology
Reinier de Blois, United Bible Societies
This paper focuses on the concept of semantic domains as it is used in the Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, a lexicographical project that was first launched in 2000 and is still ongoing. This project makes use of the cognitive linguistic principle that meaning is structured and that this structure should be made visible in the lexicon. Even though Biblical Hebrew is no longer a living language with native speakers that can be interviewed, we can still deduct the structure of meaning with the help of a semantic analysis of the available text corpus. We will discuss the criteria undergirding the postulation of different lexical and contextual senses and the role that semantic domains play in this process.
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The “Personification” of Vices and Virtues in Early Christianity
Program Unit: Religious Experience in Antiquity
Tom de Bruin, Newbold College
This paper analyses how forms of embodied experiences (i.e., vices and virtues) are personified as demons or other spiritual beings in second- and early third-century Christian texts. This interpretative step was a new development in the ontological understanding of demonic and angelic beings in Judaism and Christianity. The Shepherd of Hermas, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and Origen’s Homilies on Joshua all reify specific psychological processes as spiritual beings. These three works build in various ways on Second Temple Jewish conceptualizations of evil and demonic beings, creating a collection of non-human forces that influence the individual. These authors are arguably theorising and theologising similar situations to those that led to the Rabbinic idea of two yetzerim, yet postulate a fundamentally different ontological solution. They focus on the imagery of a human mind that should remain neutral, yet is constantly under the influence of non-human, demonified vices, and as such these three texts represent an important step in the conceptualisation of evil in ancient Christianity. In this paper, I explore the link between texts and experience by examining the way evil spirits are presented as the personification of vices in early Christian texts. I also contrast and compare the ways these three specific authors uniquely undertake this ontological task. For instance, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs locates demons in specific parts of the human body, the Shepherd of Hermas creates a dualistic system of mutually incompatible, reified spiritual beings, and Origen creates a hierarchy of vice-demons. An exploration of these texts will give us deeper insight into the diverse ways ancient Christians conceived of the nature and characteristics of demonic beings, offering a nuanced understanding of their demonology that has not previously been considered.
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Religious Transformation: Materials and Models
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
Theodore de Bruyn, Université d'Ottawa - University of Ottawa
Two recent books prompt us to think about processes of religious transformation in more holistic and integrated ways. Christopher Faraone’s The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times surveys extensive continuity alongside notable changes in the production of powerful images in the Graeco-Roman world from the classical Greek to the imperial Roman periods. David Frankfurter’s Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity, narrower in focus but more comprehensive in analysis, investigates how elements of local cultural ecosystems interact in the Christianization of devotional habits. In my paper I will reflect on questions arising from the arguments and materials of these books. How does an innovation become customary? What motivated the combination of image and text? Are changes in the formulation of amulets a function more of the culture of the producer than the culture of the user?
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Studying Conceptualization through the Text-Image-Artefact Connection: Applied to the Perception and Symbolism of Natural Phenomena
Program Unit: Nature Imagery and Conceptions of Nature in the Bible
Izaak J. de Hulster, Helsingin Yliopisto - Helsingfors Universitet
Studying possible conceptions of nature in literature and iconography requires methodological considerations; it is an interdisciplinary, hermeneutical endeavour. Besides the question of whether one can speak about a concept of nature while respecting the ‘Eigenbegrifflichkeit’, there is the epistemological task of outlining the requirements for approaching the perception of our ancient fellow human beings. This paper considers feasibility of studying the ancients’ perception of natural phenomena and possibly their sense of symbolism paired with it by taking the perspective of the text—image—artefact connection, as interdisciplinary studied in cognitive science, art history, archaeology and their applications in biblical studies.
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Zephaniah Reads Jeremiah
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
John de Jong, Laidlaw College
Zephaniah reads Jeremiah, shown by the allusion in Zeph 3:17 to Jer 14:9 with the statement, “YHWH your God is in your midst, the mighty one who saves.” Jeremiah 14:9 belongs to the larger complex of 14:1-15:9, which has been identified as an “imitation liturgy” (Craigie) or a “counter-liturgy” (Holladay) because they are laments that are answered not with salvation oracles but with judgment oracles. In this way Jeremiah presents God’s rejection of Judah and predicts inescapable judgment about to come upon them. By considering the effect of allusion, according to theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Ziva Ben-Porat and John Hollander, Zephaniah evokes or activates the broader text of Jer 14:1-15:9 with the allusion to Jer 14:9. It is this larger complex that gains a signifying presence in the last major section of Zephaniah. This section of Zephaniah addresses the community after the judgment, and in the manner of Deutero/Trito-Isaiah, declares that the judgment Jeremiah prophesied is finished, and that God is once again in the midst of God’s people, to restore and to champion them. Zephaniah brings closure to the judgment speech of Jeremiah.
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New Corpus-Based Linguistic Indicators for the Identification and Description of Hebrew Poetry
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Johan de Joode, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
This paper presents two novel linguistic indicators for the identification of literary text types in the Hebrew Bible: clause length and part of speech distribution. It uses corpus-based linguistic methods to study the distinctiveness of Biblical Hebrew poetry. Since the twelfth century it is argued that the “shortness of the verses […] is the marked characteristic of the greater part of [Psalms, Proverbs, and Job]” (Wickes 1881, 8–9). In a first experiment, I describe how clause length and clause length consistency predict how poetic texts are with far more explanatory power and more intuitive results than verse length or line length. Although verse length sets books such as Job, Proverbs, and Psalms apart from the remainder of the corpus, it only captures poeticity to a very limited extent. Clause length and clause length consistency are more fine-grained, linguistic measures: clause length is an inherent linguistic property of the text and not the transmission process. Clause length reflects both syntactic and semantic complexity and it varies with the informative or imaginative goals of a text. This experiment distinguishes predominantly poetic literary text types from non-poetic texts. In a second experiment, I present the results of a promising method that uses parts of speech to identify literary text types. This model extracts meaningful correlations between specific parts of speech and specific text types. These correlations are visualised into higher-dimensional spaces that allow the researcher to visibly distinguish text types from each other whilst also obtaining crucial data about the linguistic features that make up the core elements of the Bible’s genres. This innovative approach has multiple advantages over and against often used linguistic features in Biblical genre theory. The linguistic features of both experiments have significant exploratory and explanatory power.
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Hart’s Challenges to Traditional Translation Choices
Program Unit: Nida Institute
Marijke de Lang, United Bible Societies
David Bentley Hart’s, The New Testament: A Translation, challenges the traditional translation choices of several important “key terms.” In this paper I will reflect on some of these “key terms” and their new renderings in Hart’s translation, and see if and how his solutions can be helpful for NT translation in general.
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Angels and Visions in Acts
Program Unit: Book of Acts
Kindalee De Long, Pepperdine University
An apocalyptic scene or discourse may be defined as the direct unveiling or disclosure of divine secrets to a human being. The word “direct” in this definition refers to visions, dreams, or pronouncements by a heavenly intermediary. The secrets revealed may be purely heavenly in nature, such as a glimpse of God’s glory, or they may be heavenly realities with correlative components or effects on earth. Apocalypticism then is not extra-historical or a-historical but seeks to understand history in light of the divine plan. From this perspective, Acts includes many apocalyptic moments of direct revelation. This paper investigates appearances by angels and the visionary experiences of characters in Acts, considering the political dimensions of these apocalyptic elements in the narrative.
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God as Architect in Rome: From Cicero to Philo of Alexandria (Opif. 17–20)
Program Unit: Hellenistic Judaism
Ludovica De Luca, Università degli Studi Roma Tre
In De opificio mundi 17-20 Philo of Alexandria (I Cent. BC-I Cent. AD) compares God to “a man skilled in architecture” who, on the basis of a blueprint which he has designed before, constructs the world such as a Great City. Many allegorical elements revoke the landscape of Alexandria, which, according to Philo, represents the μεγαλόπολις par excellence (Flacc. 163). If De opificio is part of Philo’s works on the Exposition of the Law and if it has been written after the embassy at Rome, it will not be to exclude that the architectonical eminence of Rome is flowed into the allegory of Opif. 17-20: Rome as “political ideal city” in which Philo saw a chance for stopping the frequent persecutions against the Alexandrian Jewish community. Philo could have been influenced from the Roman contemporary debate on architecture, of which Vitruvius’ De architectura is a source. Vitruvius is influenced by Cicero, who in De natura deorum alludes to deity as an architectus (even if often polemically). Furthermore, Vitruvius ends up divinizing the figure of architect who is considered as an imitator of god because he, with his technical skills, reproduces the generating power of nature in his inventions.
The main aim of this paper will be to understand if on the background of Opif. 17-20 is possible to recognize, in addition to Alexandria, the presence of Rome. In this way, we will try to quantify which kind of impact Philo’s stay at Rome could have had on the allegorical images of De opificio. Our goal will be to put in evidence, in addition to ancient Greek sources (above-all Plato’s Timaeus and Stoic tradition), other sources: Cicero’s De natura deorum and Vitruvius’ De architectura will be cases of study. We will attempt to comprehend the weight of Roman culture on De opificio in order to understand if Rome has been determinant for this Philo’s work which has had a so controversial publishing destiny.
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Robert Alter’s New Translation of the Hebrew Bible: An Assessment for Translators
Program Unit: Nida Institute
Lénart de Regt, United Bible Societies
In the introduction to his new translation of the Hebrew Bible, Robert Alter is quite explicit about the task he set himself: “The present translation is an experiment in re-presenting the Bible in a language that conveys with some precision the semantic nuances and the lively orchestration of literary effects of the Hebrew and at the same time has stylistic and rhythmic integrity as literary English.” Alter explains this in more detail in the introduction and in his book The Art of Bible Translation, with explicit criticisms of other English translations. This paper will explore Alter’s own norms for translation and how he has applied them, with special attention to Hebrew and English word order, as well as what Bible translators can learn from Alter’s translation.
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Biblical Hebrew Gender on a Diachronic Scale: Some Translational Implications
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Lénart de Regt, United Bible Societies
In what ways does the gender opposition between masculine and feminine still function semantically in Biblical Hebrew and what are some of the implications of this opposition for translation?
In languages in general, noun classifying morphology (including gender morphology) starts off as a coherent system based on semantic classification. This can be regarded as diachronically early. Over time, however, the morphology may be restructured to such an extent that its classification (including gender) is no longer based on semantic coherence but is becoming semantically more arbitrary. Such a situation can be regarded as diachronically late (Givón 2001). In Semitic languages, including Biblical Hebrew, noun classification is diachronically much restructured, although it still shows a number of traces of the earlier semantic coherence.
Diachronic development continues through the texts of the Hebrew Bible. This is also illustrated by a gradual change in patterns of agreement of nouns in gender with other sentence parts: feminine suffix pronouns are replaced by masculine suffix pronouns more frequently in later books, which points to a gradual reduction of the semantic relevance of the gender opposition in morpho-syntax.
By and large, however, the opposition between masculine and feminine in Biblical Hebrew still has semantic relevance in that this classification indicates the parallel contrasts between basic and derived, concrete and abstract, literal and metaphorical/personified (a city for example), and unmarked and marked (the masculine, unmarked member of the opposition may still refer to women), respectively.
Based on this, the feminine endings in qohelet (Eccl 1:1) and moda`at (Ruth 3:2) make these words have a more narrowed down, marked reference: not just any member of the assembly but its key leader; not just any relative but a close relative. Such nuances ought to be expressed and reformulated in translation, especially in a target language without gender classification.
The paper also pays attention to masculine/unmarked references to women. Such references have to be made identifiable in translation as well. Finally, attention is paid to the rendering of feminine gender-based personification in target languages in which the gender would be different or non-existant.
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Emotions and Leadership in the MT, OG, and AT of the Book of Esther
Program Unit: Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature
Kristin De Troyer, Universität Salzburg
Whereas the topic of emotions in the Book of Esther has been thoroughly studied, the correlation between emotions and leadership needs some further scrutiny. Moreover, the paper will analyse how the MT portrayed the promotion procedure as applied to Haman and Mordecai and how respectively the Old Greek rendered and the AT reworked these promotion procedures.
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Semantic Links and Conceptual Similarities between Joshua 1 and Deuteronomy
Program Unit: Joshua-Judges
Kristin De Troyer, Universität Salzburg
In this paper, semantic links and conceptual similarities between the first chapter of the Book of Joshua and the Book of Deuteronomy will be studied, such as: “this land,” “do not fear,” and “may God be with you.” These concepts will also be studied in their Greek version, as well as in the Greek further textual development. The goal of the paper is to see whether or not the linkages between the two books are more explicit on the Hebrew Masoretic level than on the Old Greek.
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Leonard Greenspoon and Septuagint Studies
Program Unit:
Kristin De Troyer, Universität Salzburg
Leonard Greenspoon and Septuagint Studies
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The Role of Greek Rhetorical Education in the Pseudo-Clementine Novel: Judeo-Christianity versus Paganism for the “True” Paideia
Program Unit: Religious World of Late Antiquity
Benjamin M. De Vos, Universiteit Gent
The Pseudo-Clementines is the traditional title of a unique, Jewish-Christian novel (3rd-4th century), transmitted in several versions of which the Greek, Latin and Syriac ones are the most extensive. This contribution focuses on the Greek version, called the Homilies. This novel in which the main characters, the Apostle Peter and his follower Clement of Rome, enter into discussion with the opponents Simon Magus and the Egyptian grammaticus Appion, shows us how those characters claim truth and argue about the true culture and education, and the role philosophy, rhetoric, mythology and revelation were thought to play in cultural identities.
This contribution focuses on the role Greek rhetorical education, in particular progymnasmata, played in the Clementines, and this in two ways. On the one hand, Greek paideia in all its aspects is refuted in an epistemological and moral way, among which Greek rhetorical education and the accompanying progymnasmata. On the other hand, Greek paideia, among which those rhetorical principles, is just very important in the construction of this novel. It is interesting to note how the Jewish-Christian Homilist shows himself as a good student of Greek rhetoric, while refuting it, he is using it. For example, he is the one who is able to refer to works of classical philosophy and literature – such as Homer, Hesiod, and Plato –, which resulted in an interesting, paradoxical opposition between pagan “paideia” (in the double meaning of Greek culture and education) and the Jewish-Christian identity in the Pseudo-Clementines. This contribution will elaborate on this paradoxical opposition by showing that the Homilist is a master of dissimulation, irony and intellectual wrestling with the world of the non-Jewish-Christian ‘opponents’, which has more in common with the Homilist and his background than he wants to show at first glance. What does this mean for the socio-historical context of this unique, Jewish-Christian novel? How does the author deal with this seemingly paradoxical stance concerning Greek paideia? And what does that teach us about the role Greek paideia played in the late ancient, Jewish-Christian context?
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Which Land and on Which Side of the Jordan? Land Descriptions as a Clue to the Redaction-History of Joshua 1
Program Unit: Joshua-Judges
J. Cornelis de Vos, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Joshua 1:4 describes the so-called Euphratic Israel, an idealistic territory that we encounter in Gen 15:18 for the first time. It is repeated in Deut 1:7 but does not occur very often in the Hebrew Bible. In the book of Joshua, it is the only occurrence. All other descriptions of the land differ from it.
There is another peculiarity in Joshua 1. Within this chapter, we encounter two perspectives. “The other side of the Jordan” can refer to the territory to the west of the Jordan but also to that to the east of this river.
Can territorial depictions and perspectives betray anything about the redaction-history of Joshua 1 within its smaller and wider context?
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John Chrysostom on Manichaeism
Program Unit: Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism
Chris de Wet, University of South Africa
The purpose of this paper is to examine John Chrysostom’s (349-407 CE) claims on the nature of Manichaeism and the practices of Manichaeans, as well as the classification of Manichaeism in his broader scheme of heresiology. Chrysostom does not have one treatise devoted to the refutation of Manichaeism, but there are numerous references spread throughout his corpus. Chrysostom’s refutation of Manichaeism is based on three main points: first, he criticizes what he perceives as Manichaean cosmic pessimism. This is especially evident in his homilies on Genesis and other references to the creation narrative, in which Chrysostom needs to prove that the material cosmos is not inherently evil. Secondly, and related to the first point, is his criticism of Manichaean views of the body. Especially curious in this regard is the numerous references to Manichaean “mutilation” of the body, and even accusations of castration. Finally, Chrysostom attacks Manichaean theology, especially their views of God and Christ. What is important to note is that Chrysostom’s classification of Manichaeism often coincides with other “heretical” groups, like Arians; he is also fond of grouping Manichaeans alongside Jews. Chrysostom therefore constructs his version of Manichaeism in conjunction with other opposing religious groups. This observation relates to the recent work of Todd Berzon and some others on the practice of religious classification in late antiquity. Chrysostom seems to construct a heresiology in which Manichaeism functions as a keystone in the classification of other opposing “heretical” groups.
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Tiberian Hebrew Pause and the Past Tense: A Lexico-semantic Contrast Revealed
Program Unit: Masoretic Studies
Vincent DeCaen, University of Toronto
It is a remarkable though rarely remarked fact that the verbal paradigms supplied in grammars are not Tiberian Hebrew. As Gesenius notes, to take on example, the hithpael should properly be renamed the hithpaal based on the Tiberian data. How to resolve such confusion is the burden of this paper.
Among the big facts of Tiberian Hebrew phonology, those facts that a theory worthy of consideration must address directly, the biggest is the characteristic pausal alternations. It is not simply that an actual Tiberian paradigm would consist of pausal forms only, since a native speaker would assuredly produce a pausal form in isolation. It is not simply that the pausal forms are necessarily both derivationally and historically primary. Crucially, it is the pausal phonology that maintains phonemic contrasts that are subsequently lost when pause is lost.
Thus, another big fact is that there is necessarily at least a fourfold phonemic contrast among Tiberian Hebrew vowels: /i, e, o, u/. On this view, there is no Canaanite Shift, rather there is the loss of the contrastive low front vowel *e in pause.
The second part of the paper examines specifically the pausal alternations in the third person of the past tense. On the basis of the facts outlined, the seemingly arbitrary vowel reflexes in the qal stative, piel and hithpa'al are shown to be perfectly regular. Arising from the confusion is instead a robust lexico-semantic contrast. In addition to the regular alternations of a binyan and its characteristic vowel, there is revealed a class of verbal roots that cuts across the binyanim, characterized by an invariant [e] = /i/. Here the Tiberian Hebrew piel provides extensive and systematic evidence for the lexical contrast, which naturally extends to the hithpaal.
In conclusion, the interaction of the phonological and lexical classes identified in the Tiberian Hebrew piel past tense is briefly considered in light of Ernst Jenni's study of the lexical classification in the Hebrew piel.
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Interpreting Ethical Narratives: Rereading Samuel through Its Proverbs
Program Unit: Book of Samuel: Narrative, Theology, and Interpretation
Hans Decker, University of Oxford
In his book, Ethics in Ancient Israel, John Barton draws a contrast between stark moral absolutism of the wisdom tradition and the complexity and capacity for moral transformation of characters that populate the stories of Samuel (158–161). I believe this contrast to be unwarranted; instead, the book of Samuel provides a unique opportunity to explore the use of proverbs to engage ethical complexity through narratives as part of an interpretive process.
In this paper, I reexamine the rhetorical function of proverbs as they appear in the narrative dialogues of Samuel. Traditionally, proverbs have been defined as pithy formulations of commonly held and simplistic ethical principles, which has meant that their role in discourse has often been understood merely as a premise in an argument. Rather than take this approach, I argue instead that proverbs are narratives in miniature, which means that they may be used to reconstitute events around literary patterns as a way of giving meaning to situations. In order to lay the methodological foundations for my approach, I appeal to the work of Roland Barthes on the structure of narrative, using the concepts of nuclei and catalysers to explain the way that the performance of proverbs can leverage their literary structure to reconstitute events around intelligible patterns.
I then apply this paradigm to several passages where proverbs are generated or performed, including 1 Samuel 10, 19, and 24, showing the complex interplay between the expanded account of the events in the text and their narrative summary in the proverb. The etiological doublet explaining the origins of the saying, “Is even Saul among the prophets?” provides a helpful illustration of the dialectic process of interpretation through proverb performance, while David’s use of the saying, “From the wicked comes forth wickedness” demonstrates the way that the absolute claims of proverbs can be used to alter events, with ambiguous results. The performance of a proverb injects new meaning into a situation, serving as a catalyst for further reflection and transformation, both on the part of the characters, but also for the reader.
This approach asks us to rethink our approach to proverbial literature, which has too often been sidelined due to the apparent simplicity of its ethical formulations that seem to stand in marked contrast to the complex narratives of the Deuteronomic History. Using the methods developed in this paper, we can understand proverbs themselves as interpretations of these ambiguous scenes and characters, but interpretations that have been woven back into the rich fabric of the narratives they address. As nested narratives, these proverbs serve both as model interpretations of their broader narrative context, but the discrepancies between the story and the account of the story raise their own questions. One interpretation begets another, and the reader is drawn into the same process of making sense of the story in which the characters themselves are engaged.
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The Role of Psalms 135–137 in the Shape and Shaping of Book Five of the Hebrew Psalter
Program Unit: Book of Psalms
Nancy deClaissé-Walford, Mercer University
Book Five of the Psalter is an interesting collection of psalms. After the opening Psalm 107, celebrating God’s rescue of humanity from various dangerous situations, psalms attributed to David appear again after a virtual absence since Book Two. These Davidic psalms (Pss 108-110 and 138-145) “frame” a grouping of festival psalms that are introduced by two brief alphabetic acrostics (Pss 111 and 112). Seemingly tucked away just after the Songs of Ascents (Pss 120-134), and before the resumption of psalms of David, lie Psalms 135-137, two magnificent community hymns followed by a heartfelt community lament. This essay will explore the role of these psalms in the “shape” and “shaping” of the story of the Psalter. It will conclude that the psalms offer a highly stylized recitation of Israel’s history that made a world for the postexilic community, recounting Yahweh’s work in creation, summarizing the Pentateuchal stories of the ancestors (Pss 135-136) and providing a snapshot of exilic life in Babylon (Ps 137). Their assurance of Yahweh’s presence and provisions allow David, in Psalms 138-145, to lead the people in blessing, praise, and thanks to the sovereign God.
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Artifact Migration and the Transfer of Ancient Knowledge into Modernity
Program Unit: Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity
April D. DeConick, Rice University
This paper is a small part of a larger book project on the sociology of Gnostic spirituality that I am working on called The Gnostic Awakening: How an Ancient Countercultural Spirituality Migrated to America. Within this context, the process of what I call artifact migration is central. Artifact migration occurs when artifacts like texts or art objects that have been produced in another time and place and are unknown in a particular culture are transported into that culture. Two examples of artifact migration in modernity include the rediscovery of ancient religious texts that were lost and dropped from everyday use and erased from social memory, and the encounter of global religious texts by a culture unfamiliar with them. The question then is how the artifact’s new knowledge is transported into a foreign context and impacts religion in that cultural location. This paper theorizes the dynamics of artifact migration and the transfer of knowledge from antiquity.
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Transcending Monotheism: Problems in Scholarly Classifications of Yahweh and Assur
Program Unit: Israelite Religion in Its Ancient Context
Jessie DeGrado, Brandeis University
This paper investigates how modern scholars characterize Yahweh and Aššur in order to explore a network of unstated assumptions that implicitly informs comparative studies. Already in the late 19th century scholars adduced similarities in ancient portraits of the two gods, including: (1) an association with a centralized cult city (Jerusalem and Aššur, respectively); (2) social distancing from other deities and supernatural beings (apparent in, e.g., their respective bachelorhood); (3) the use of martial imagery to figure each god. More recently, scholars have explored how texts from Deuteronomy, Psalms, and Isaiah directly engage Assyrian imperial ideology in their characterization of Yahweh. Despite a general consensus on these points of similarity and even direct dependence, scholars evaluate the personalities of the two gods very differently. Aššur’s elevation over other deities is seen as a simple reflection of the Assyrian empire, making him, in essence, a hypostasis of the human Assyrian king. By contrast, Yahweh’s similar elevation is seen as a form of abstract transcendence over the political realm. This characterization of a terrestrial Aššur and transcendent Yahweh provides a concrete example of how our comparative method remains implicitly indebted to an Orientalist paradigm in which Assyrians were viewed as incapable of abstract or creative thought. In addition, the continued characterization of Yahweh as transcendent reveals an aesthetic preference even among secular scholars for monotheistic religions. I conclude that responsible comparative work requires critically engaging our own social and historical context to avoid prejudicing our selection and analysis of data.
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The Textual History of the Miracle of Mary Called "The Cannibal of Qemer:" Chronological and Geographic Developments in the Ethiopic Manuscript Tradition
Program Unit: Ethiopic Bible and Literature
Steve Delamarter, George Fox University
Dr. Wendy Belcher (Princeton) is conducting a major project on the Ethiopian Miracles of Mary manuscript tradition. Members of Delamarter's Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament (THEOT) Project and The Social Lives of the Ethiopian Psalter Project--Jarod Jacobs, Jeremy Brown, Jonah Sandford, Ashlee Benson, and Garry Jost--have been engaged to perform an extensive pilot project on the textual history of one of the Miracles of Mary, the story of the Cannibal of Qemer. Delamarter and Belcher have identified nearly 300 manuscripts with significant collections of the Miracles of Mary. Perhaps 200 contain the Cannibal of Qemer story. This puts us in a position to create a remarkable data set for statistical analysis. Ninety manuscripts are being selected which, together, will provide a precise picture of both chronological and geographic developments in the past six centuries (i.e., the extant manuscript tradition). The sample will provide an even number of fifteen manuscripts from each of the six centuries comprised of five manuscripts in each century from each of the three historic regions of Christian book culture in Ethiopia (the North, the West, and the SouthEast). Each of the ninety manuscripts are being transcribed in a double-blind process that guarantees very accurate transcriptions. After formatting for computer analysis, we will run Garry Jost's THEOT computer scripts on the data set to generate a dendrogram, identify clusters, distinctive readings, best representative manuscripts, and secondary and tertiary relationships among the manuscripts. Jarod Jacobs will apply a further set of algorithms (ANOVA significance test, chi-squared hypothesis testing, etc.) to the data in order to detect and define the chronological and geographic developments and to visualize the data for analysis. In this session, Jacobs and Delamarter will report on the execution of the workflow described above and on the initial findings of the project.
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The Masorah of the Cairo Codex of the Prophets in Perez-Castro's Edition
Program Unit: Masoretic Studies
David DeLauro, Jewish Theological Seminary of America
The main characteristics of the Masorah of the Cairo Codex of the Prophets in Perez-Castro's edition will be explained. Moreover, it will be shown in a practical way how to use it.
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Aquila and Apollos: Acts 18 in Light of Ancient Ethnic Stereotypes
Program Unit: Book of Acts
Matthijs den Dulk, Radboud University Nijmegen
Scholars frequently note Alexandria’s reputation as a center of learning when commenting on Acts 18:24, where Apollos is introduced as “a native of Alexandria.” By contrast, the very similar formulation in Acts 18:2, where Aquila is identified as “a native of Pontus” is routinely ignored or dismissed as inconsequential. Against this scholarly consensus, this paper suggests that Aquila’s Pontic identity is important to the story of Acts 18, because the gentilic “Pontic” would have invited associations entirely opposite to those of “Alexandrian.” While the stereotype concerning the latter was one of learning and cultural sophistication, the common prejudice about people from Pontus was that they were uneducated and dim-witted barbarians. When Acts tells the story of how a man from Pontus and his wife “took aside” the learned Alexandrian “and explained the Way [of God] to him more accurately” (18:26), this likely would have seemed very surprising to an ancient audience familiar with these common stereotypes. The plausibility of this interpretation is strengthened by the observation that it fits the way ethnic identifiers function elsewhere in Luke-Acts.
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The Archaeology of Ritual at Bir Ftouha: Mosaic Pavements and Processional Movement in a Sixth-Century Pilgrimage Church
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Nathan Dennis, University of San Francisco
The sixth-century pilgrimage church of Bir Ftouha at Carthage was excavated systematically from 1994–1999, which is when the majority of extant mosaic pavements within the nave and auxiliary liturgical spaces, such as the baptistery, were discovered. However, several of the finest figural examples from the eastern end of the church, most likely from the peristyle adjacent to the baptistery, had already been removed after they were discovered by accident in 1895 and subsequently excavated by Paul Gauckler in 1897. Those fragments—now distributed between French and Tunisian collections—show scenes of confronted deer (one stag, one doe) either kneeling or standing before the mountain of paradise, drinking from the four rivers of paradise that flow outward across the implied landscape of Eden. The fragments, though small, suggest a recurring theme of the Garden of Eden in or around the baptismal space at Bir Ftouha. And with the more systematic excavations of the late-1990s, a far more comprehensive picture of early Christian theological and iconographical tropes in the eastern end of the church can be reconstructed. The deer and rivers of paradise motifs were integrated strategically into a patchwork of other singular motifs of flowers, birds and other animals, and kantharos or krater fountains on the floor that functioned as synecdoches of paradise. The eastern mosaics within the church, therefore, offered to pilgrims receiving baptism at the church a processional roadmap that connected the space of the baptistery—where baptismal initiates were cast as new Adams and Eves in a prelapsarian Garden of Eden—to the adjacent nave and likely also the location of the high altar, where they would have received their first eucharist after the ritual initiation. Using Gauckler’s archival reports, the archaeological investigations of the 1990s, and comparative studies of paradisiacal motifs in other contemporaneous Tunisian baptisteries, this paper seeks to elucidate a comprehensive ritual program within the visual repertoire of Bir Ftouha.
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Rome as a Memory Palace: Constructing a Sacred City
Program Unit: Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World
Nicola Denzey Lewis, Claremont Graduate University
How did Rome come to be considered a “sacred city’ in late antiquity? After all – it was far from the birthplace of Jesus, his disciples, or most of the events in the New Testament. It was no Jerusalem, and indeed – it was known for an obdurate allegiance to a troubling pagan past and the seat of a persecuting Empire. Yet, in late antiquity, the writers Jerome and Prudentius as well as a prominent bishop, Damasus, began deliberately re-crafting secular or pagan Rome into the newly sacred Roma Christiana.
The creation of a new memory landscape could be successfully bolted on top of an essentially pagan city, but not without a concerted effort to re-value, negate, or sanitize local memories of the city and its past. In this endeavor – notably, often performed most rigorously by those outside Rome – rhetoricians turned to stories of the martyrs. The invention of countless martyr stories and their subsequent linking with place (including the built environment) might function, as Michael Roberts mused in his book on Prudentius, to create of the entire city of Rome a “memory palace,” in which the recollection of the city’s geographical features might trigger, for the properly trained rhetor, specific “memories” of a martyrology or martyr. In this way, Rome was slowly transformed from a profane city to a “sacred” one.
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The Philosophical-Religious Hybridity in John 6
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Athanasios Despotis, Universität Bonn; Universität Bern
This paper analyses how ancient readers with a Hellenistic education could understand Jesus’s words and deeds in John 6. Jesus is described not only as a new Moses but as an ideal sage in the early Roman Imperial period. Many of Johannine Jesus’s characteristics point this out. He is the one who renounces the glorification of men and rulers (6:15; Plutarch, Virt. prof. 77e), while his opponents, like the sophists, seek human recognition (Dio Chrysostom, Or. 55.7). For this reason, Jesus resignates as the people want to make him king (6:15) and later he appears again to offer men the “true bread”, thus to bring them to the knowledge of the truth. Like Platonic Socrates, Johannine Jesus compares physical hunger and thirst with the mental states of ignorance and folly (Resp. 9.587; Plutarch, Virt. prof. 77a-c.) and reveals the truth by engaging his interlocutors in cooperative argumentative dialogue. Similarly, Jesus appears as a physician in a literal (6:2) and metaphorical sense (12:40) for he offers his body and flesh as a medicine that prevents its partakers from dying (6:54) in a time when philosophy is described as medicine leading to immortality (Philo, Opif. 77) and the philosopher becomes as a doctor according to the Socratic model (Plato, Resp. 4.444c–d; Plutarch, Tu. san. 122c-e.; Musonius, Diatr. 3.61–65) This profile fits the author’s (or authors’) intention to transcend boundaries between ritual-material and abstract-spiritual reality in the Bread of Life Speech. The author offers an amalgam of biblical, ritual and philosophical elements similar to the Logos-sophical speculations of Philo. The divine Logos is understood by Philo as Manna (Her 79.191; Leg. 3:175) or as a metaphorical drink of the soul (Leg. 2:86; Somn. 2:249) for the soul needs heavenly foods and contemplation (Leg. 3:162). However, Philo did not exclude rituals from contemplative life but interpreted them philosophically. This is due to the fact that mixed forms of philosophical religion emerged in the Roman Imperial era (Luipold 2009) where the combination of philosophical life with participation in the rituals can be observed and material reality is understood in more positive way (Plutarch, Septem sap. conv. 146b-164d; Philodemus, De pietate (pars i), 26–27). Against this backdrop, it is not necessary to omit parts of chapter 6 as later additions or to prefer only one interpretation of John 6:51–58, either in relation to the practice of the communal meal or with regard to the role of the Spirit or faith in Christ. The author of John 6 delivers an amalgam that combines diverse biblical, ritual and theosophical aspects and simultaneously creates new ideas. The reflections in Jn 6 combine revelatory-historical and metaphorical concepts in a more radical way than the one that can be attested in the works of Plutarch or Philo. The Johannine amalgam can be conventionally described as a form of „cultural hybridity” as it transcends the dichotomy between philosophy and religion or the trichotomy between Hellenism, Early Christianity and Judaism and provides new concepts with a solid Christological foundation.
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The Figure of Echo in the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
J. Columcille Dever, University of Notre Dame
One of the many noteworthy features of early Christian theology in Roman North Africa is the sustained attention to conceptualizing gender and to developing an ethics sensitive to questions of sexuality. In addition to the theological treatises and sermons of theologians like Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine, martyr texts circulated in North Africa also bear the marks of this unique concern. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, in which classical and Christian texts interact with one another in ways that produce new patterns of meaning that can be brought to bear on our interpretation of questions of gender and sexuality in North Africa.
This essay begins with a theoretical account of the figure of “echo” and its relation to the more general phenomena of intertextuality. I will then show how echo functions in the Passio by offering a reading of Perpetua’s fourth dream vision (PP §10). As J. Hollander notes, oneiric discourse is a paradigm case for testing echo insofar as dream visions are closest to the unconscious workings of the human mind. This is one of the most unique features of the completed text and the one that has generated the most scholarly commentary, ranging from von Franz’s psychoanalytic/Jungian interpretation to the positivist reading of L. Robert. I prefer to take it, following T.J. Heffernan, as a complex literary allegory in which the Christian and classical elements that redound within it provide the ultimate frame for understanding Perpetua’s martyrdom. Thus, I will show how echo functions in Perpetua’s fourth vision and how it can inform interpretations of her “expoliation” and subsequent transformation of her sex (et expoliata sum, et facta sum masculus, PP §10.7) when intertexts from both classical mythology and drama, as well as the Christian Scriptures are taken into account.
I will then address Perpetua’s experience in the arena and focus on the echo frequently noted by editors of the text, namely, the myth of Polyxena (at PP §20.4). Here, I will show how editors have frequently missed the distinctively Roman inflections of this popular myth, which shed additional light on the Redactor’s account of Perpetua’s death as both a witness to culturally intelligible forms of women’s tragic death from classical drama and to Perpetua’s configuration to the the crucified Christ (see PP §20.4; cf. PP §21.9-10). I will conclude with an account of how the literary sensitivity of the Redactor’s account of the martyrs’ final moments returns the reader to the preface, in which the Redactor claims that God has provided in the events of this Passio both a “testimony to unbelievers” and “a kindness to believers” (PP §1.5) This “testimony,” I argue, derives primarily from the evocation of the classical intertexts, which reveal these women’s deaths to be recognizably tragic, even heroic. The “kindness” on the other hand, derives from the biblical intertexts, which elevate (or, transfigure) classical heroism after the pattern of Christ’s redemptive suffering and death.
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Depicting Gender (...or Is It Status?) in a North African Martyr Narrative
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Megan DeVore, Colorado Christian University
The portrayal of gender in the many fascinating texts of ancient Christian North Africa may seem to have an exemplar ad nauseam in the narrative Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis. After all, with an enthusiasm received by modern scholars as nearly voyeuristic, this early third-century account depicts the suffering of two female martyrs in multiple graphic scenes. Such portrayals initially could appear to participate in the generic suffering-as-subversion motif so often ascribed to early Christian martyr accounts. Within such an interpretation, the female martyrs’ bodies go on exhibition as insubordinate displays of ‘manly’ endurance. The Passio as a whole, however, may complicate the matter: the construction of gender throughout its narrative is far from a dichromatic activity. Instead, as was the case within the account’s wider social contexts, gender inherently and inextricably occupied another paradigm: that of socio-economic status. That is, for example, the body and experiences of the female slave are simply not perceived or portrayed in the same way as the body and experiences of the female matron. When the Passio narrative is examined within these wider frameworks, several different constructions of gender, particularly that of the female, can be observed. There are no straightforward presentations of ‘the suffering of the female body’, but distinct portrayals of distinct females. There is no one interpretation of the victory of the suffering woman in this text, but divergent interpretive explanations of the endurance of different women. This paper will present such a reading by addressing various scenes in the Passio that reveal intriguing contrasts between the narrator’s depictions of the suffering of two women, Perpetua and Felicitas. This exploration draws from and can contribute to various interrelated conversations among scholars, not only regarding early Christian identities within the constellations of their cultural settings, particularly socio-economic norms, but also (more broadly) gender studies in antiquity.
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Jousse’s Understanding of Orality and the Gospel of Mark
Program Unit: The Bible in Ancient (and Modern) Media
Joanna Dewey, Episcopal Divinity School
I am delighted to have this opportunity to immerse myself in the work of Marcel Jousse, the twentieth century French anthropologist of orality. I will reflect on how Jousse’s emphasis on sound and rhythm might impact gospel studies, including my early work on the chiastic and concentric structure of Mark. And I will explore how his understanding of fluid texts and the gospel’s oral development compares with my own understanding of Mark’s gradual and varied oral growth
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The Syro-Ephraimite War, Judah’s Alleged Northern Campaign, and the Use of Biblical Prophecy as Historical Data
Program Unit: Historiography and the Hebrew Bible
Heath D. Dewrell, Princeton Theological Seminary
One hundred years ago, Albrecht Alt reconstructed a Judahite counteroffensive during the Syro-Ephraimite War on the basis of Hos 5:8–10, which begins “Blow the horn in Gibeah, the trumpet in Ramah.” By dividing the verses into short separate oracles and with the help of some textual emendations, Alt was able to reconstruct a series of events during this alleged campaign that took place over the course of several months. Alt also traced Hosea’s reaction to these events, as Judah (rightly) retook its former Benjaminite territory from Israel, but then shortly thereafter (wrongly) pressed on into historically Ephraimite territory. While no scholar follows Alt in all of the particulars of his reconstruction, his work has served as the starting point for almost any examination of the passage since then and his general conclusion that these verses represent a Judahite campaign into the Northern Kingdom during the Syro-Ephraimite War remains the majority position. This paper explores three issues regarding this alleged campaign and the biblical texts used to support its existence: First, it lays out the evidence that any such counteroffensive ever existed and concludes that the campaign is spun entirely out of these three verses in Hosea, circumstantial evidence, and scholarly speculation. Second, the paper proposes an alternative date for the oracle, during the reign of King Hezekiah of Judah, which better aligns with the general picture of the historical relationship between Judah and Israel over the course of the second half of the eighth century. Finally, it explores methodological issues at play in using prophetic oracles as historical data, especially how the originally oral nature of prophecy and the scribal activity that transformed oral performance into written text impacts how we are to conceive of the phenomenon of written prophecy and in what ways we can and cannot (or at least should not) use it for historical purposes.
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Contextualizing White Womanhood: Rethinking Method in Feminist Theology and Ethics
Program Unit: Contextual Biblical Interpretation
Amanda DiMiele, Yale University
Challenged by black feminists and feminists of color to account for their racialization and its effects on their work, white feminists developed a set of strategies with a common methodological commitment: mark whiteness in order to dismantle it. This paper, however, contends that as long as white feminists remain trapped in strategies that promise to fix the problem of white womanhood—the problem of how to mark whiteness without white supremacy—we not only hit intellectual dead ends, but we actually reproduce white supremacy. I argue for a new methodological orientation: what I call, following Sara Ahmed, unpromising methods. Unpromising methods focus on what whiteness does, not on what we do to whiteness. By promising no solutions, they help us better understand how white womanhood actually functions as a category. This line of inquiry opens up generative questions foreclosed by the methodology now predominant in theological reflections on white womanhood.
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The Fictive Aristeas and the Reality of Religious Self-Identifications in the Early Christ Movement
Program Unit: Lived Religiousness in Antiquity
Laura Dingeldein, University of Illinois at Chicago
For the past two years, Aristeas has marked the end of his week with a communal meal, surrounded by fellow textile workers in the city of Ephesus. The meal itself is nothing special—bread, olives, and wine constitute the spread—but the conviviality that Aristeas enjoys in these weekly association meetings has begun to make him feel like he has a support network again. Of course he has always had his partner, Cornelia, at his side: they met as teens and were manumitted ten years ago when their master died. This was around the time that the Emperor Nero assumed the throne. Those first few years after the passing of their pater were rough, but they managed to scrape by using the skills they had acquired as slaves. They quickly found employment in the textile industry, with Aristeas working as a wool weaver and Cornelia as a seamstress. Three years ago, Aristeas and Cornelia moved to Ephesus with their son in tow. Aristeas, chatty and outgoing, became well acquainted with the other weavers in town, and he soon joined the local association of textile workers, finding great collegiality in this fold. The pater of the association is a generous and well respected man, and he reminds Aristeas of his former master. Aristeas is hopeful that being a member of this association will enable him to steadily increase his earnings and provide support for his son’s education. Meanwhile, Aristeas’ partner, Cornelia, has found a new support network as well. In seeking treatment for chronic abdominal pain, Cornelia has met Phoebe, a local healer. Phoebe has largely alleviated Cornelia’s pain by calling upon the power of a god known as Jesus Christ. Cornelia, thankful for this respite from her physical infirmity, has begun giving thanks to this deity, along with other gods, at the start of every morning. Aristeas typically joins her, happy to be “in Christ,” given what this god has done for Cornelia’s chronic pain.
In this paper I elaborate further on Aristeas’ daily life and religious behaviors, drawing upon first century sources such as Paul’s letters and inscriptions produced by voluntary associations in Asia Minor to construct the historically plausible but fictitious character of Aristeas. Then I use the character of Aristeas to analyze 1) the impact of religious self-identifications on the behaviors of everyday people living in the early Roman imperial period, and 2) the variability of the norms that everyday people associated with their religious self-identifications. In particular, I argue that while certainly there were everyday people in the first century CE who identified themselves as brothers in Christ, these people’s religious practices and behaviors were often barely distinguishable from people who did not identify as Christ followers. Moreover, I argue that the norms and behaviors that everyday people associated with their religious self-identifications as Christ followers varied in comparison to one another, and in comparison with the experts and specialists who sought to prescribe, maintain, and clarify the boundaries of their respective religious groups.
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Masculinity in Daniel 7–12
Program Unit: Book of Daniel
Brian Charles DiPalma, Independent Scholar
While scholars have noted differences between Daniel 1-6 and 7-12 (e.g., genre, narration style, and language), few analyses of masculinity in the book exist either with respect to comparisons across the two halves or in relation to the entire book. Building on my earlier work on masculinities in the court tales of Daniel, this paper will focus on masculinity in Daniel 7-12. I will begin with a brief summary of my arguments about the court tales: Daniel and his colleagues appear differently masculine through their powerful displays of knowledge, an image that aligns with the phenomena of scribal masculinity attested elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible and its ancient Near Eastern context. Daniel appears to diverge conspicuously from such norms associated with a scribal masculinity in the apocalyptic material despite the persistent focus on related topics (e.g., dreams, interpretation, and knowledge). For instance, Daniel often lacks knowledge or understanding in chs. 7-12, even after receiving explicit instruction and interpretations (e.g., 8:27; 12:8). Likewise, in contrast to the bold Daniel of the court tales, Daniel often appears fearful, trembling, or without strength in the apocalyptic material (e.g., 7:28; 8:27; 10:8). The apocalyptic sections portray Daniel as often falling short of the very practices that were integral to constructing a scribal masculinity in the court tales. This paper will assess the significance of these shifts both for understanding masculinity in Daniel 7-12 as well as the composite book as a whole.
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Apocalyptic Violence, Religious Expression, and the Contemporary “Apocalyptic Shift”
Program Unit: Apocalypse Now: Apocalyptic Reception and Impact throughout History
Lorenzo DiTommaso, Concordia University - Université Concordia
The past forty years have witnessed an upsurge in the formation of apocalyptic new religious movements (NRMs) as well as the resurgence of robust apocalypticism in mainstream religions worldwide. Many of these NRMs have engaged in ultra-violent behaviour or else have been involved in violent public situations. Likewise, many resurgent apocalyptic streams have bonded with nativist political movements that comprehend the world in apocalyptic categories, which can translate to violent action. In both cases, this kind of violence is apocalyptic violence, i.e., harmful actions and responses in consequence of an apocalyptic worldview. Although the overlap of violence and apocalyptic religious groups has been the subject of much good scholarship (especially historical case-studies), the epistemological roots of apocalyptic violence remains poorly understood. This paper, the first of two parts, explores apocalyptically motivated violence in NRMs, with special reference to i) its basis in the underlying worldview and ii) its social contexts as part of a contemporary global “apocalyptic shift,” which since 2001 has been progressively increasing in scope and degree (DiTommaso 2019).
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Mediaeval Manuscripts in the Digital Age
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Lorenzo DiTommaso, Concordia University - Université Concordia
Mediaeval Manuscripts in the Digital Age
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Reading Faces in Phoenicia: Masks, Sarcophagi, and Other Powerful Material Visages
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible, History, and Archaeology
Helen Dixon, Wofford College
This paper explores the visual semantics of carved and molded faces from 8th – 4th century BCE Levantine and Mediterranean Phoenician sites, drawing on extant terracotta masks, anthropoid sarcophagi, carved stelae, and other image-material. In particular, Simeon Chavel’s 2012 study on “The Face of God and the Etiquette of Eye-Contact: Visitation, Pilgrimage, and Prophetic Vision in Ancient Israelite and Early Jewish Imagination” serves as a jumping-off point for this analysis. Chavel’s work explores, as he puts it, “the trouble with God’s face” through textual witnesses from biblical and rabbinic corpora. Though Chavel explicitly works to imagine the range of Israelite artifacts that may have been the source of encounters between worshipper and deity, he ultimately concludes that social etiquette and court encounters likely served as the rich source of referents at play in references to looking (or not looking) at the face of Yahweh. To the Phoenicianist, however, the Iron Age Levant seems to offer a material landscape rife with powerful disembodied or emphasized faces—the faces of gods, an array of transformative masks, and the idealized faces of the elite dead, to name a few. This study goes beyond a typology of iconographic features to think more broadly about the religious aesthetic of the face, offering a tangible glimpse into how Levantine worshippers imagined and interacted with unseen beings in the Iron Age II-III periods.
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“The Teaching of Christ” in 2 John 9–10: Reconsidering the Ground for Hospitality in the Johannine Church
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Toan Do, Australian Catholic University
Johannine scholars often seize on the conditional sentence (10a and 10b) in 2 John 10 and construe it as the author’s endorsement of exclusion of travelers. They argue that one should exercise inhospitality to those who violate Jesus’ teaching. However, a close investigation of the author’s overall argument and syntax seems to indicate otherwise. It is true that 2 John 10 signals some measure of inhospitality, but the passage also warrants specific criteria of personal discretion that may be taken into consideration before excluding hospitality. The interplay between inhospitality and personal discretion is key to reading 2 John 10. Furthermore, the uses of the two personal pronouns are more particular than generic; they refer to a specific group of people who deny the teaching about Jesus.
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The Joban Animal Menagerie: Parents, Killers, Negligence, and Thriving
Program Unit: Animal Studies and the Bible
Brian R. Doak, George Fox University
Title: The Joban Animal Menagerie: Parents, Killers, Negligence, and Thriving
In this paper I examine the role of animals in the book of Job, focusing on the wild and contradictory creatures in the divine speech (chs. 38–40; with special attention to the ostrich in 39:13–18, the hawk in 39:26–30, and other images of animals as parents with children). Few books in the Hebrew Bible focus on animals the way that Job does, and close analysis of the book reveals an animal narrative that tracks closely with Job’s own life and the fate of Israel in the post-exilic period of Job’s composition. Though many analyses of the divine speech are simply content to notice God’s obvious mastery over nature, most have stopped short of naming the profound literary and ideological indeterminacy created in these chapters, which, through its strange cocktail of beauty and cruelty, asserts a vision of animal nature that compares humans and animals in surprising ways. Because the Divine Speech is so directly concerned with providing resounding statements on animal behavior, I conclude that it is most appropriate to read the speech not as an avoidance of the key moral questions at stake (as many readers assert) but rather as the most direct engagement with the book’s central metaphors, i.e., the ecological world that serves as a cipher for the human body as well as the broader Israelite community. In addition to literary analysis, I frame my argument within a discussion of animal iconography relevant to Job chs. 38–40, as well as a historical argument about the composition and early reception of the book of Job as an ecological text in the early post-exilic period of resettlement in the land.
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Ezekiel’s Subordinate Masculinity: An Embodiment of Trauma
Program Unit: Biblical Literature and the Hermeneutics of Trauma
Sébastien Doane, Université Laval
This paper explores the intersection of masculinity studies and trauma hermeneutic by investigating the ways in which Ezekiel’s body is described as an embodiment of trauma in his role as YHWH’s prophet in the context of the Babylonian Exile.
In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in masculinity studies to interpret biblical texts (Creanga 2010; Creanga and Smit 2014; Haddox 2016; Stewart 2016). This interpretative approach investigates the relation between power and masculinity with the concept of hegemonic masculinity.
In contrast to God’s hegemonic masculinity, most biblical male characters perform a subordinate masculinity. “Men are required to take the feminine, subordinate role with respect to the deity.” Haddox (2014, 517) This is certainly the case with Ezekiel. Graybill (2016) accurately observes that Ezekiel’s passive and suffering body features prominently in the text in contrast to the gloriousness of God’s body.
Many scholars have applied trauma theories to interpret the book of Ezekiel (Smit-Christopher 2002; Garber 2014; Stulman 2015; Poser 2016). The description of Ezechiel’s submissive masculinity can be understood in light of these studies.
Ezekiel 2-5 presents the prophet’s masculinity as an embodiment of trauma. The description of his calling and of the sign acts he performs show how his body and masculinity are shaped by his encounter with God and by the prophetic performance he must enact. This “son of man” is penetrated by a scroll barring words of lamentation and mourning and woe (2:8-3:4). Ezekiel’s isolation and silence, shut inside a house and bound by cords (3:24-27), constrains him to a private space without the possibility to act and speak in opposition to masculine norms. The prophet also relinquishes the control of his body by taking uncomfortable positions for long periods and eating small portions of repulsive food (4:1-17). Shaving his hair and beard makes his body an unmasculine sign of exilic trauma. His bodily hair, symbol of masculinity, is cut, burned and dispersed (5:1-4). In these signs, God causes pain to Ezekiel’s body as an image of the pain that will be inflicted to his people.
In comparison, God clearly exhibits typical hegemonic masculinity such as violence, public discourse, and control over other men. Ezekiel’s submission to divine control is a prophetic embodiment of the traumatic Babylonian exile. “Yahweh forces Ezekiel to undergo the fall of the southern kingdom in his own body” (Tarlin 1997, 182). The devastating, crushing experience of exile is represented by Ezekiel’s broken body and submissive masculinity.
Traumatic events generate a wide variety of responses. Ezekiel’s submissive masculinity is not negatively portrayed. He is not characterised as an emasculated victim. His alternative masculinity is presented as an appropriate response to God’s hegemonic masculinity. His peculiar masculinity is a resilient reaction that contrasts with the failed hegemonic masculinity of the Israelites. Unlike Ezekiel, their bodies are qualified as hard (3:7-9) to illustrate their direct opposition to God. What might look like Ezekiel’s weakness is in fact an openness that presents a way of resilience.
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Israel’s Scriptures in Hebrews
Program Unit: Intertextuality in the New Testament
Susan Docherty, Newman University Birmingham
The deep engagement with Israel’s scriptures evident throughout Hebrews has ensured that this aspect of the epistle has been thoroughly treated by commentators in every age. The subject has been explored from all angles, with substantial and valuable studies available on everything from the nature of the author’s textual sources to his characteristic exegetical techniques, and from his overall understanding of scripture to the theological and rhetorical functions of specific citations. This paper aims to navigate a way through this almost bewildering wealth of material by drawing out from it the key areas of current debate and highlighting any potentially significant new approaches. It will set the scene, therefore, for the wider discussion in this session of Hebrews’ intertextual connections with the OT and Jewish Literature, by asking what scholars are saying now about how Hebrews uses scripture, and what they might be saying about this in the future.
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The Convict’s Gibbet and the Victor’s Car: The Triumphal Death of Marcus Atilius Regulus and the Background of Colossians 2:15
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Joseph R. Dodson, Ouachita Baptist University
Scholars have overlooked the famous crucifixion of Regulus as a possible parallel to the triumphal death of Christ depicted in Colossians 2:15. Marcus AtiliusRegulus was a Roman general who achieved a near-mythic status during the First Punic War. His crucifixion was considered a sacrificial death, and “his perseverance on the gibbet even greater than his riding in the victor’s car.” Tertullian credited Regulus as having set the precedent for nobly enduring the torments of the cross, while others declared him as having overcome not only his human foes through his death but also the capricious power of Lady Fortune. Regulus’ story enjoyed so much widespread popularity it was admitted in the curriculum of Roman schools by the middle of the first century CE. Because the legend contains low hanging fruit, ripe for comparison with the Lord’s crucifixion, Christians drew upon the story from at least as early as Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Arnobius, and Augustine. Scholars, however, have neglected the resonances of the Regulus’ legend with Christ’s victorious death. In this paper, then, I will first provide a composite depiction of Regulus’ military life and valiant death along with its reported ramifications in order to tease out similarities and differences with Col 2:15 and finally conclude with comments concerning the significance of including the legend as additional background for the verse. In short, I will propose that reading Regulus’ story in comparison with Col 2:15 supports an anti-imperial and/or a supra-imperial reading of the letter.
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Psalmic Ascent and Neoplatonic Resonances in Gregory of Nyssa
Program Unit: Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism
Zachary Matthew Domach, Columbia University in the City of New York
In his commentary On the Titles of the Psalms, Gregory of Nyssa weaves together the musicality of the psalms, the human body, and the universe to adumbrate the notions of ascent which are more fully developed in his mature mystical writings. This paper argues that the Nyssen reappropriates elements of Pythagorean, Platonic, and Neoplatonic thought into a theological framework wherein music is intrinsic to God’s creation, ordering both the macrocosm and the microcosm. As Gregory sees it, the praise of God is both the beginning and end of humanity’s journey; even in its fallen state, humanity still possesses an affinity for music at the individual level: the body manifests it, the mind perceives it, and the soul pursues it. The Psalter guides this pursuit into l’expérience mystique: its order directs the soul’s ascent, its text instructs the reader in virtue, and its music reveals the psalms’ loftier signification.
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Audience Engagement with the Little Slave Girl in 2 Kgs 5
Program Unit: Biblical Literature and the Hermeneutics of Trauma
Denise Dombkowski Hopkins, Wesley Theological Seminary
Daniel Smith-Christopher reminds us that we cannot “evade the fact that reading about trauma – ancient trauma and the models from modern trauma – has made us all ‘secondary witnesses’ to the suffering of others in both the ancient and modern world.” Unfortunately, interpreters romanticize the little slave girl in 2 Kgs 5 and gloss over her trauma, focusing on her wish in v 3: “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.” Verse 3 presents “the public transcript” (that is, the Deuteronomistic view) of the little girl’s situation: accept your punishment and “pray for the welfare of the city where I have sent you” (Jer 29:7). The text does not tell us why she suggests a cure for Naaman. This gap in the text invites us, the audience)to speculate as to the reason. It is in this gap and in the space between verse 2 (describing her status as captive) and verse 3 (her wish for Namaan’s healing) that we find “the hidden transcript” of the text and a glimpse of the trauma of war. The little girl in most interpretations seems to tell the exiles what they yearn to hear – that God works across national boundaries for restoration.The hidden transcript here suggests that her voice has been co-opted to make a theological point about God’s sovereignty over all political power. I contend that the point is made at the little girl’s expense; her trauma is glossed over in subservience to a larger purpose: survival. Throughout history, women and children as spoils of war have understood the brutality of war that drowns out hope (cp. Jael and Sisera’s mother in Judg 5 and Daughter Zion in Lam). In our recent global history, children have been recruited to serve in rebel armies and young girls have been sexually abused by soldiers. Modern examples of children caught in the cross hairs of political strife abound - in Mali, the Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, and most recently, at the Mexican border with the United States. Perhaps these interpretations of the little girl are our wishes for our own steadfastness and faith in the face of adversity. So often we desire to see in biblical characters what we want to see in ourselves. My fear is that the little girl’s tiny shoulders cannot bear the weight of the expectations we have placed upon them, and that our unrealistic demands for resiliency from those like her who struggle with trauma today can make developing resiliency more difficult. What remains for us as readers after stepping into the gap of this text is the necessity of examining our own role as individuals and nations in contributing to or overlooking the trauma of others and then to imagine a different way of being and acting as we work toward a more wholistic future for all.
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The Little Slave Girl (Again) in 2 Kgs 5: A Midrash through the Lens of Trauma Studies
Program Unit: Children in the Biblical World
Denise Dombkowski Hopkins, Wesley Theological Seminary
Interpreters consistently romanticize the little slave girl in 2 Kgs 5,focusing on her wish in v 3: “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.” Verse 3 presents “the public transcript” (that is, the Deuteronomistic view) of the little girl’s situation: accept your punishment and “pray for the welfare of the city where I have sent you” (Jer 29:7). The text does not tell us why she suggests a cure for Naaman. This gap in the text invites us to speculate as to the reason. It is in this gap and in the space between verse 2 (describing her status as captive) and verse 3 (her wish for Namaan’s healing) that we find “the hidden transcript” of the text and a glimpse of the trauma of war.
However, because she believes in Elisha’s power to heal her master, the little slave girl is put on a pedestal by most commentators and the hidden transcript is obscured. The little girl in these interpretations seems to tell the exiles what they yearn to hear – that God works across national boundaries for restoration. The hidden transcript here suggests that her voice has been co-opted to make a theological point about God’s sovereignty over all political power. I contend that the point is made at the little girl’s expense; her trauma is glossed over in subservience to a larger purpose: survival.
I want to read 2 Kings 5 with “interruption” (Fewell) through the lens of trauma studies for the sake of children at the Mexican border. Perhaps the little girl’s wish for Namaan expresses her adaptation to an abusive environment. So often we desire to see in biblical characters what we want to see in ourselves. My fear is that the little girl’s tiny shoulders cannot bear the weight of the expectations we have placed upon them, and that our unrealistic demands for resiliency from those like her who struggle with trauma today can make developing resiliency more difficult.
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How to Understand What Passes Understanding: Using the Documentary Papyri to Understand "eirene" in Paul
Program Unit: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Michael Dormandy, University of Cambridge
I attempt to deepen our understanding of eirene, peace, in two Pauline texts, Rom 5:1 and Phil 4:7, by exploring how the word is used in documentary papyri. Rather than referring to a personal sense of calm and serenity, I argue that in the papyri the word has a more objective and socio-political sense, implying an orderly and well-governed society. I then argue that it can have a similar meaning in Paul.
“Documentary papyri” is a broad category, which is best defined negatively: I include all text-bearing artefacts that are not coins, inscriptions or manuscripts of literary texts. The category includes everyday documents like private letters, wills, administrative and legal documents, reports of events and lists of all kinds. These artefacts afford us a fascinating window onto language use by everyday people in everyday contexts. In trying to understand what a word means in the New Testament, many scholars consider its usage elsewhere in the New Testament, the Septuagint and other Greek literature. Important as these sources are, documentary papyri offer a unique perspective, because everyday word usage is arguably more likely to determine meaning than literary usage. In the paper, I briefly review similar studies and then explain my method, which involves searching papyrological databases for papyri containing various possible spellings of the eiren-root, within an appropriately defined date range and other appropriate restrictions. The bulk of the paper is a presentation and analysis of the search results. A number of results relate to the so-called “peace-officials”, that is law-enforcement officers, with various different titles including the eiren-root. I investigate what these officials did and what that tells us about the meaning of eirene. I then examine a number of individual papyri in more detail. On the basis of these results, I conclude that the eiren-root refers to good order and well-governed systems. On popular Christian posters and greeting cards, the Pauline peace texts are illustrated by calm meadows and lakes, but in the documentary papyri, the word is used in connection with the arrest and movement of criminals, the busy unloading of corn and the bloody victories of Roman armies. All these activities either involve or produce well-ordered systems.
I conclude by outlining implications for the Pauline texts. Romans 5:1 is the subject of a well-known text critical debate about whether the verb is indicative (“we have peace with God”) or subjunctive (“let us have peace with God”). My research is evidence that eirene often refers to external and objective good order, thus suggesting that the indicative fits better in context. Philippians 4:7 is taken by some commentators in a subjective sense, promising a sense of well-being and calm for one who prays. My research suggests that it is more likely to be a promise that God’s good government of the world will uphold the pray-er in her faith. This paper uses under-used evidence to shed new light on an important Pauline concept.
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ANE Gods in Contemporary White Evangelical Fiction
Program Unit: Bible, Myth, and Myth Theory
Christopher Douglas, University of Victoria
This paper examines the strange re-emergence of Ancient Near East gods in two famous contemporary white evangelical works of supernatural speculative fiction: William Paul Young’s The Shack and Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness. These novels’ divine beings are not just contemporary analogs of ANE gods, but are actually their historical descendants. In crafting their respective popular theodicies, Young and Peretti have inadvertently rediscovered the ancient Israelite polytheism of three millennia ago, for the simple reason that justifying the gods’ ways to humans is an easier task than justifying God’s ways to humans. Young’s novel is a modern day theodicy that tells the tale of a man’s loss of faith when his daughter is kidnapped, abused, and murdered. When he returns to the scene of the crime years later he discovers not the murderer but an unusually multicultural Christian Trinity who help him accept his ignorance about questions of free will, evil, and God’s justice and goodness. Though the Father says they are not “three gods,” the divine beings proliferate into five persons, as a Native American man as God the Father is added, and, in an allusion to Job, Sophia (Wisdom) is discovered underground in a cave to counsel him. Peretti’s similarly-bestselling This Present Darkness is premised on an evangelical theology of “spiritual warfare” and “territorial spirits,” in which a town in the Midwest slowly becomes aware that New Age gurus and psychology professors are inviting “Ba’al Rafar,” a demon lieutenant of Satan, to have dominion over their region. Through prayer, the evangelicals in the town, “the saints of God,” must power angelic defenders to beat back the demons and reclaim their spiritual territory. I examine these novels through the lens of historical-critical Bible scholarship and ANE studies to see the way in which, as Mark Smith and Daniel Boyarin’s works attest, both the Trinity and angels are historically descended from the traces of the gods of an ancient Israelite polytheism. As monotheizing reformers collapsed the pantheon into a single God, merging El and YHWH, the other gods were disappeared or demoted to angels. But traces remained, as is seen in ancient apocalyptic theology in Daniel of the “Son of Man” and named patron / territorial angels, as well as the lingering imagery of Two Powers in Heaven, Metatron, the apotheosis of Wisdom, the Word, and others. Both novels, in different but significant ways, undo the monotheism that had caused such problems for theodicy, and which initially prompted a “retreat” into “semipolytheism […] when a semidivine being of demonic nature was introduced” (James Crenshaw). In The Shack, the array of renewed divine beings of the expanded Trinity work to distribute responsibility for the problem of evil embodied in the murder of Mack’s daughter. In This Present Darkness, the angels and demons who had been demoted from godhood return as named divine beings who have supernatural agency and power, and whose combat displaces and makes more abstract the distant monotheistic God who becomes less directly responsible for human suffering.
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Reading Paul, Rehabilitating Paul: Judaism and the Law in the Euthalian Apparatus
Program Unit: The Bible in Ancient (and Modern) Media
Luke Drake, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Euthalian apparatus comprises a set of Late Antique paratextual materials that accompanied and epitomized the Pauline letters, Acts, and the Catholic letters. Hundreds of Greek manuscripts—as well as various Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Old Church Slavonic, and Gothic witnesses—contain components of the apparatus, attesting to the influence of this ancient material on the reading practices of Late Ancient and medieval Christian readers. Early studies (Zacagni, Wettstein, Harris, Ehrhard, Von Soden, etc.) of the apparatus centered on questions of authorship and the authenticity of its respective components (prologues, bioi, kephalaia, etc.). More recent studies (Dahl, Hellholm, Blomkvist, Scherbenske) have established the function of ancient rhetorical theory within the apparatus, as well as the apparatus’ relationship to the corresponding New Testament literature (Blomkvist). Very little work, however, has been done on the theological propensities and cultural concerns reflected in these paratextual materials. In this paper, I discuss the ways in which the apparatus (and the many manuscripts that carry it) articulates Jewish-Christian difference—with a specific emphasis on its representation of the Jewishness and “conversion” of Paul—and thereby shaped Late Ancient and medieval receptions of the Pauline corpus and the "conversion" narrative of Paul in Acts. Finally, I situate the apparatus’ positions alongside and within those of contemporaneous early Christian exegetes (assuming a 4th-5th c. CE date of composition).
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“And He Appeared, Standing before Him”: Polymorphic Depictions of Jesus in Light of the Human-Like Angels of the Jewish Novels
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
Rebecca Draughon, University of Virginia
Often in the apocryphal acts, Jesus appears on the scene in a new form or in multiple forms simultaneously. This polymorphic depiction of Jesus, as it shows up in the apocryphal acts, is thought to be a development of the Gospel’s nascent polymorphic tendency. In turn, the Gospel writers themselves are thought to be influenced by the various metamorphoses undertaken by gods in Greek literature. The possibility of Jewish origins for the phenomenon, however, remains largely unexplored by scholars, if not outright denied. This paper seeks to disrupt the notion that Greek sources are the sole influence on early Christian polymorphic depictions. I accomplish this by comparing the polymorphic depiction of Jesus in the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of Cannibals with the depiction of angels assuming very human-like forms in the Jewish novels of Tobit, the Testament of Abraham, and Joseph and Aseneth. The payoff of this strategy is two-fold. First, the literary development of anthropomorphic angels in the novels is often overlooked in favor of the more supernatural and otherworldly depictions of angels that become popular in the Second Temple Period. Taken together, the examples of angels assuming human form in these novels show a development of the concrete anthropomorphic depictions of divine or semi-divine beings present in the Hebrew Bible. Second, the anthropomorphic characterization of divine beings in these texts help us populate the world of ideas wherein Christian authors strove to depict Jesus. Consideration of a human-like class of angelic characters in the ancient Jewish novels can help to fill in the landscape of the type of divine beings Christian writers might have known. By collecting these examples of divine beings that appear as humans, we not only see the development of a literary thread that traces back to the anthropomorphic angel encounters in the patriarchal narratives of Genesis; we also see how the sometimes startlingly human depiction of the post-resurrection Jesus in the apocryphal acts is not necessarily foreign to the Christian writers’ Jewish literary roots.
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Exegesis of Genesis as Theological Argument in Augustine
Program Unit: Early Exegesis of Genesis 1–3
Volker Henning Drecoll, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
Augustine's use of Gen. 1-3 aims to defend the biblical text against a Manichaean interpretation. The search for a rational understanding of creation competes with the Manichaeans' claim of offering a better understanding of the world. Augustine agrees that a rational explanation of creation is necessary. Therefore in his major work De Genesi ad litteram, he does not only discuss philosophical concepts that may be helpful for the explanation of the biblical text (or should be avoided), but looks for a comprehensive interpretation that is persuasive by its rationality. The paper raises the question which impact this claim has on the exegetical methods by analysing two examples: a) the integration of the angels into the exegesis of Gen.1, b) the concept of soul that is developed for Adam and Eve and its consequences for antrhopology.
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Iblis, al-Shaytan and Shayatin: Qur’anic Demonology and the Reception History of Jewish and Christian Traditions in Late Antiquity
Program Unit: The Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition (IQSA)
Rachel Claire Dryden, University of Oxford
Demons or devils feature extensively in the Qur’an, with the noun shaytan, from the same root as the Hebrew sh-th-n, occurring 88 times in 36 surahs. In addition to references to generic demons or devils, the Qur’an also shows clear affinity with Jewish and Christian traditions in its association of a singular, definite figure, al-Shaytan, with the same figure who led Adam and Eve astray in the Garden (Q al-Baqarah 2:36; al-A‘raf 7:20, 22, 27; Ta Ha 20:120), and who represents evil personified (Q 2:186, 208, 268, 275; Al‘Imran 3:36, 155, 175; al-Nisa’ 4:38; al-Ma’idah 5:90; al-Anfal 8:11; Yusuf 12:5; al-Nahl 16:98; al-Isra’ 17:53; Maryam 19:44; al-Fatir 35:6; Ya Sin 36:60; Fussilat 41:36; al-Zukhruf 43:62; al-Mujadalah 58:10, 19). After his expulsion from heaven (where he is known as Iblis), for refusing to bow before Adam (Q 2:34; 7:11; 15:31–32; 17:61; al-Kahf 18:50; 20:116; Sad 38:74–75), he attempts to lead believers astray (Q 4:60, 83, 120; 5:91; al-An‘am 6:43, 68, 142; 7:175; 8:48; Ibrahim 14:22; al-Nur 24:21; al-Furqan 25:29; al-‘Ankabut 29:38; Luqman 31:21; Muhammad 47:25; al-Hashr 59:16).
Besides the story of Adam and his wife in the Garden (Q 2:35–37; 7:19–35; 20:117–121), there are a number of other biblical characters who appear in the Qur’an in connection with al-shaytan/ shayatin – Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (Q 2:102; al-Anbiya’ 21:82; al-Naml 27:24; Saba’ 34:12–13, 38:37; 27:24); Joseph (Q 12:42, 100); Moses (Q al-Qasas 28:15), and Job (Q 38:41) – which reflect or even mirror, specific (extra-)biblical texts and traditions and thus constitute key evidence for the reception history of Jewish and Christian traditions about demons.
With this in mind, this paper will outline the following details about qur’anic demons:
-The terminology used to refer to them;
-Their nature(s), characteristics, and activities;
-Their appearance in narratives that reflect specific Jewish/Christian texts.
It will do this from the point of view of the Qur’an as a repository of Jewish and Christian lore, ask what this tells us about the reception history of such texts, and analyze the value of the Qur’an as a reflection of (extra-)biblical traditions.
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War and Bread: Barley at the Gates; A Literary Study of the Multivalent Dream Narrative of Judges 7:13–14
Program Unit: Joshua-Judges
Curtis L. Dubay, Catholic University of America
This study presents a literary analysis of the Midianite soldier’s dream in the Gideon narrative of Judges 7. The analysis is conducted using a combination of narrative-critical and socio-historical techniques. It demonstrates how, in writing the narrative, the author exploits the multivalence of Hebrew words to generate the enigmatic dream image of a tumbling loaf of barley bread. It also demonstrates how this remarkable symbol actually functions on multiple levels in the narrative. On the familiar surface level, the dream image of the tumbling loaf of barley bread serves as a strange, but simple, metaphor for the victorious sword of Gideon and his army of three hundred. At a deeper level, the loaf of barley bread transforms, through its inherent literary multivalence, into a vivid word picture that reveals not a sword of iron, but a divine sword of war, fire, dreadful sound, and madness in the night. At an even deeper level, the lowly loaf of barley bread prophetically reveals YHWH’s battle plan to Gideon, thus explaining Gideon’s curious reaction when he overhears the dream of the Midianite soldier.
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Eschaton or Eschatons? A New Approach to the Qur’anic Rhetoric of the End
Program Unit: The Qur’an and Late Antiquity (IQSA)
Conor Dube, Harvard University
The debate over the eschatological nature of Muhammad and his movement has a long history. Most recently, Stephen Shoemaker has argued forcefully that he was a fully eschatological preacher, one who envisioned the world coming to an end in his own lifetime. This paper draws on late antique studies of eschatology to argue that the Qur’an’s eschatological discourse must be seen in a more multifaceted and contingent way. Specifically, it is necessary to distinguish between a strict and a loose sense of eschatology. Following Gustav Hölscher, the former entails “that grand drama of the end times in which worldly time comes to an end and a new eternal time of salvation dawns.” Contrastingly, a loose eschatology is an end that does not involve the destruction of the cosmos or the ultimate cessation of history but rather inaugurates a new era of fundamental difference that remains within the existing temporal framework. The most obvious parallel to “loose eschatology” in the Qur’an is the punishment narratives, which can be understood as God intervening in history to punish those who disobey Him, inaugurating a time of righteousness. This theorization allows us to better understand the early Islamic movement’s eschatological mode. Instead of Muhammad preaching that the end of the world was coming in his lifetime, we should understand his eschatological traditions as referencing a coming upheaval that will essentially change the existing order. Thus, in Q Maryam 19:75, a distinction is made between “the Punishment” and “the Hour”: “when they are confronted with what they have been warned about—either the Punishment or the Hour (imma 'l-‘adhabah wa-imma 'l-sa‘atah)—they will realize who is worse situated and who has the weakest forces.” These events should be held distinct: the “Punishment” is a this-worldly eschaton that anticipates but does not coincide with “the Hour,” the ultimate end of history. This distinction is echoed in a number of places in the Qur’an, most directly in Q al-An‘am 6:40, al-Hajj 22:55, and al-Sajdah 32:21. Finally, having developed the notion of “loose eschatology,” I contend that we may have some support for this theory in early sources. In particular, it seems that the Battle of Badr was remembered by Islamic tradition as an eschatological event in this loose sense. Examining the traces of this memory in the exegetical literature shows that the Qur’an combined two eschatological timeframes—one, an immediate, communal punishment, and the other, an end to history and occasioning of final judgment—in a flexible way that was able to shift with changes in the fortunes of the early community.
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What Is a Manuscript? Milik’s Assembly and Modern Dissembly of Enoch Fragments at Qumran
Program Unit: Qumran
Elena Dugan, Princeton University
In this talk, I will use J.T. Milik’s assembly of 1 Enoch “manuscripts” at Qumran to critically reflect on how and why we create manuscripts out of fragments found in the Judean Desert.
That there are eleven manuscripts of 1 Enoch at Qumran is an oft-repeated fact. It is usually formulated so as to clarify that these manuscripts are non-overlapping and incomplete—so Nickelsburg’s commentary says, “Cave 4 yielded eleven manuscripts of various parts of 1 Enoch.” The move there, as in Milik’s initial publication, is to indicate that there are fragments of an Ethiopic whole—these pieces are “identifiable” with the Ethiopic, or “corresponding” to the Ethiopic. I want to suggest that this hypothesized analogy between Ethiopic whole and Aramaic fragments exerted a far stronger influence on Milik’s philological work than he admitted or scholars have recognized. I am especially interested in how he assembled manuscripts attesting more than one of the five books which make up the work 1 Enoch, despite the fact that no single fragment preserves a join between two different books.
I will demonstrate ways that Milik imported meta-level assumptions from the Ethiopic recension about the order, arrangement, and anthologization of Enochic Books to guide his philological creation of manuscripts. I will be especially critical of the cases in which he assembled Enochic compilations, 4Q204, 4Q205, and 4Q206, being manuscripts apparently attesting more than one Enochic book. I will present an alternate description of independently circulating documents which are equally consonant with our Qumran artifacts. Milik assembled eleven manuscripts, I argue, out of material that could just as easily be dissembled, and reassembled to make twelve, thirteen, or fifteen manuscripts.
I do this first by demonstrating how strange it is to find compilation manuscripts of multiple Enochic Books outside of Ethiopia—nearly all of our evidence witnesses only a single work, and no tradition preserves Enochic books “in order” except the Ethiopic. Next, I highlight the paleography-centric methodology of Milik for constructing manuscripts, while also problematizing the idea that one scribe necessarily equals one manuscript. I note previous scholarship which dissembles some of Milik’s “manuscripts” into multiple sets as creating the conditions for the possibility of more deconstructive work.
Finally, I offer reflections on why it matters if we do, or do not, spot multiple Enochic books in a single manuscript at Qumran. What is at stake has to do with reading practices at Qumran, and how readable texts emerge from inscribed fragments. When these fragments become a manuscript, and 1 Enoch with its multiple books combined into one philological set becomes a ‘text,’ we designate it as an entity intelligible to different kinds of inquiry—from writers, scribes, traditionists, etc. My talk will, however, question the material basis on which this idea of an Enochic anthology is founded in the Second Temple period, and open up new possibilities for imagining Enochic textuality at Qumran.
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Vulnerable Bodies and Vulnerable Geographies
Program Unit: Exile (Forced Migrations) in Biblical Literature
Ericka Dunbar, Drew University
Forced migration and exile are foundational experiences for Jewish life in the Diaspora. The book of Esther details the complexities of diasporic living not only for the Jews, but for young girls forced to migrate from their native homelands spanning from India to Ethiopia, to the Persian Empire’s power center, Susa. In this paper, I will argue that attention to forced migrations in the book of Esther illuminates the establishment of a sexual trafficking economy by Persian imperial subjects. Persian officials make strategic use of anxieties over gender and sexuality in order to legally engage in forced migration and sexual trafficking as they gather, abduct, and transport countless minority/minoritized girls across national borders for the king’s sexually pleasure. In the process of migration, national, home, and bodily borders are crossed as the girls are transported from their native provinces to Susa; from their homes to the king’s palace; and from harem, to the king’s bedroom, to another harem as the king sexually exploits the girls each night, for several years. After Esther is chosen as queen, the nameless girls remain in exile as they are not permitted to return to their homes of origin but remain in the king’s palace, a violent and unsafe space, where they experience prolonged exposure to threat, trafficking, and trauma.
Parallel to the experiences of contemporary minority/minoritized subjects from Asian and African geographies, the girls in the narrative world are exploited based on gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, and class, intersectional oppressions that leads to heightened vulnerability to sexual trafficking. Forced migration thus materializes as threats to bodily, sexual, physical, spatial, and psychological security and constitutes collective trauma for minoritized female bodies from these locations and places
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The Form of God and the Space of Prayer in the Greek Pseudo-Clementine Novel
Program Unit: Prayer in Antiquity
Patricia Duncan, Texas Christian University
In the seventeenth book of the Greek Pseudo-Clementine novel, we find a curious, esoteric discourse on the dynamic, geometrical form (μορφή) of God and the location of God in void space (τὸ κενόν). There are good reasons to suppose that the material was largely borrowed, and indeed much of the work that has been done on the passage has been of a source-critical nature. Scholars have looked for and found illuminating connections in a variety of ancient literatures, including early Merkabah mysticism and the writings of Plato, Philo of Alexandria, Clement of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nyssa, but the contribution of the passage to the overall shape and message of the Pseudo-Clementine novel has been given little consideration. I would like to suggest, first, that there are some fairly clear indications of editing that are consistent with the author of the Greek Pseudo-Clementine novel as we have it. In addition, in some of these editorial maneuvers, we glimpse an author who shows that his reasoning about the form of God is informed not just by written source materials, but also by experiences of ritual practice, and especially of prayer. Reflection on the space of human consciousness is, in certain ways, opened by the (fictional) autobiographical mode of narration in the Pseudo-Clementine romance, but consciousness is also a subject of reflection in this and other passages in the novel. In this paper, I will draw upon concepts of critical spatiality to explore especially the spatial dimensions of prayer and of human longing for God that are intimated in the discourse on God in Klem. 17.7-12. From what would seem to be a marginal social location on the landscape of Christian late antiquity, our text invokes a God who is experienced in human consciousness as something like an ineluctable centripetal pull toward the center of all things.
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Karen L. King's Contributions to Early Christian Studies
Program Unit: Inventing Christianity: Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, and Martyrs
Benjamin Dunning, Fordham University
This paper celebrates the career of Karen L. King, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School.
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Redescribing Pliny the Elder’s History of “Magic”
Program Unit: Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Andrew Durdin, Florida State University
In his brief essay “Trading Places,” Jonathan Z. Smith argues that there is “little merit in continuing the use of the substantive term ‘magic’ in academic discourse”. For Smith, “[w]e [scholars of religion] have better and more precise scholarly taxa for each of the phenomena commonly denotated by ‘magic’ which, among other benefits, create more useful categories for comparison.” In their historical context, Smith’s words speak to a larger reassessment of the category magic that took place in the study of ancient religion starting in 1990s. Yet, despite those critical explorations, today most simply register magic’s interpretive drawbacks but do not pursue alternative problematics or suggest different terminology to re-frame these materials as evidence for other aspects of society. Smith’s essay, by contrast, not only clearly elaborates these drawbacks and rejects an abstract concept of magic, but it also takes concrete steps to reorient these issues to new analytic ends. Specifically, in reading the Greek “magical” papyri, Smith offers a protocol for redescribing “magical” materials in terms of broader historical trends in late antiquity and as speaking to larger theoretical concerns.
The goal of my paper is to pursue Smith’s critical position by redescribing a key text in the study of ancient Mediterranean magic: Pliny the Elder’s brief “history of magic” from his Natural History. In opening book 30, Pliny offers a history of the magicae vanitates, tracing this “most fraudulent of arts” from its ancient origins in Persia up to his own times. Written around the late first century CE, modern scholars have variously situated this passage as evidence for ancient magic. On the one hand, given its encyclopedic nature, some scholars have seen this passage as a trove of information useful for reconstructing earlier Hellenistic views on magic. On the other hand, others have interpreted Pliny’s text in its first century context as solidifying a cumulative idea of ancient magic (starting in 5th century Greece), framing a capacious and flexible concept while simultaneously amplifying its stigmatizing force.
I suggest that if we are to take Smith’s rejection of magic as an interpretive category seriously, then we must reassess Pliny’s history as ancient evidence, specifically its first century context. I argue that rather than understanding Pliny’s text as crystallizing a strong view of magic in antiquity, it might be more useful to set it in a wider context of Roman intellectuals attempting to cognize the human diversity of their vast empire and to frame categories with which to organize and evaluate this perceived diversity. To this end, Pliny’s text, with its capacious view of magia, would repay analysis alongside other Roman attempts to theorize cultic diversity such as Varro’s tria genera theologia and Cicero’s writings of divinatio from the first century BCE, or Seneca’s De Superstitione from a century later.
All said, I propose that when Pliny’s text is seen in light of these wider intellectual experimentations, the characterization “magic” becomes, as Smith notes, simply a “distraction” from other important historical and social changes in the first century CE.
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Competing for Prayers: Patronage and Monastic Identity in Late Antique and Early Medieval Northern Mesopotamia
Program Unit: Religious Competition in Late Antiquity
Reyhan Durmaz, Brown University
How did Christians in rural regions perceive and present their communities in late antiquity and the Middle Ages? Christian identities have been studied mostly through elite forms of cultural production and expressions heretofore. Pointing out the need for the study of rural Christianities, some scholars have recently turned to texts and material culture to discover manifestations of Christianity in regions far from major urban centers in antiquity. In this talk, I approach the question of “Christian identity” through the lens of monastic patronage in rural northern Mesopotamia. In light of local historiography, hagiography, epigraphy, and architecture, I argue that Christian families cultivated local monastic identities by means of patronage of buildings in the region. And they competed with one another through such patronages. This analysis shifts our focus from theological disagreements and confines of parishes as paradigms of community-formation, and nuances our understanding of Christians’ self-understandings and self-representations in rural landscapes.
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"In the Days of His Flesh": The Humanity of Jesus in the Argument of Hebrews
Program Unit: Hebrews
Bryan R. Dyer, Calvin College/Baker Academic
By many scholars and in numerous ways, the significance of the humanity of Jesus has been identified within the argument of Hebrews. Yet, there has not been a full-length treatment pulling together the threads of the author’s argument in which Jesus’ humanity plays an important role. The intent of this essay is to identify those areas of Hebrews’ argument where Jesus’ humanity is discussed and to begin to address the question of why Christ’s humanity is so important for the author. In the essay I identify five aspects of Hebrews’ argument where Jesus’ humanity plays a role. First, I follow Moffitt in seeing Jesus’ humanity as the point of contrast with the angels in Hebrews 1-2. It is his humanity that allows Jesus to be elevated above the angels and reign in the world to come. Second, the humanity of Jesus is vital for the author’s presentation of Jesus as a high priest. Looking closely at 5:1-10, I trace how Jesus’ humanity is a key qualification for his high priesthood. Third, the author develops Jesus’ humanity to establish not only that Jesus is a high priest, but that he is a merciful and sympathetic one. Fourth, Jesus’ humanity is key to understanding not only how Christ is qualified to serve as a high priest in the heavenly sanctuary, but also to understanding what he offers God. That is, it is Jesus’ perfect humanity that he offers to God in the heavenly sanctuary. Finally, the parenetic function of the epistle is clear in the author’s presentation of Jesus’ humanity as it establishes him as an exemplar of faithful endurance for the recipients in their own struggle.
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The Writing on the Walls: Materiality and Affect in a Late Antique Monastery
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
Daniel Eastman, Yale University
The present paper interrogates literary and material evidence from monastic communities in the late antique eastern Mediterranean to address a specific question: how did the built environments of monasteries help to shape the emotional experiences of their occupants? I argue that the formation and practice of monastic “affective piety” (how one should feel towards God) was intimately entwined with the texts and paintings displayed on the floors, walls, and niches of the spaces in which monastics lived.
Drawing on late antique monastic self-help literature in Greek and Coptic, I argue first that a primary goal of monastic affective piety was the cultivation of “fear” towards God as eschatological Judge. The paper highlights how exhortations to mobilize “fear” towards God that instructed monastics to meditate on the end of their lives, the final judgment before the throne of God, and the punishments allotted to those in hell created affective “scenes” that monastics could visualize to cultivate feelings of fear. Such scenes, I contend, were widespread not only in monastic literature, but also in the material environment in which monastics dwelt, insofar as monastics were “primed” by their audiovisual surroundings to experience the same scenes of fear emphasized in monastic literature.
In arguing for this assertion, the paper turns to a particular material context, the Monastery of Apa Jeremiah in Lower Egypt, active from the fifth to ninth centuries. On the one hand, inscriptions and dipinti on the floors and walls of this monastery point to a pressing and continual awareness of the final judgment that accumulated in the material record over time. Monastics wrote prayers for the souls of others (or themselves) on the surfaces around them, and in turn such highly visible prayers were viewed by other monastics, prompting the inscription or painting of additional prayers on the walls of the monastery. Finally, the paper argues that the emphasis on the final judgment found in the literary and epigraphic records also influenced how monastics viewed the depictions of Christ enthroned which adorned many of the apsidal prayer niches situated in the eastern walls of monastic cells. Without discounting other interpretations of these apse paintings, I argue that in their local context they were most likely to have been experienced by monastics kneeling or standing before them as depictions of Christ as eschatological Judge.
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Pauline Primacy over Peter in the Apocryphal Acts
Program Unit: Inventing Christianity: Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, and Martyrs
David L. Eastman, The McCallie School
An important issue negotiated in the apocryphal acts was the relationship between Peter and Paul. Paul’s description of the Antioch incident (Gal 2) suggests tension between the apostles at one point, yet the author of Acts shows continuity in their message and mission, particularly through the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, where a group that included Peter issued a statement that supported the Pauline mission. The author of 2 Peter offers a somewhat ambiguous endorsement of Paul’s writings, but otherwise the literary record goes silent about the connection between Peter and Paul.
The apocryphal acts present later reconstructions and reimaginations of the afterlives of the apostles, and here the Peter–Paul relationship continued to be an object of speculation. This paper examines the Acts of Peter and Acts of Paul through the lens of the Peter–Paul question. The Acts of Peter presents Peter as a relatively successful preacher and wonder-worker, a foundational figure in Roman Christianity. However, details in the Acts of Paul show that another author/editor viewed Paul as the primary figure for the Roman church. In this text two forms of evidence are presented for this perspective. First, Paul’s preaching was more successful in overturning Roman power structures. Second, Paul courageously stayed in Rome to face his fate, unlike Peter, who in the Acts of Peter had attempted to leave Rome to avoid martyrdom and in the Acts of Paul is implicitly labeled a “deserter.”
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Do Not Forsake Me When I Am Old (Ps 71:9)
Program Unit: Book of Psalms
Michelle Eastwood, University of Divinity, Melbourne
Psalm 71 is possibly the only psalm written by an old man. It has also been long ignored in the literature and often discounted in commentaries as an amalgam of short phrases. In this paper, I will argue that Psalm 71 has an internal integrity and individuality that speaks into some of the issues facing our ageing population today.
For many, old age is a time of vulnerability and despair. Physical, cognitive and mental decline can leave the ageing individual at the mercy of others – family, friends and staff employed to care for them. In a western society that values independence, self-reliance and agency, these losses are often magnified. However, old age is also often a time of spiritual and emotional growth. It can be a time of reflection on all the blessings and fortunate times of a life lived in faith. It can be an opportunity to think deeply about one’s relationship with God and to prepare for the next part of the journey.
These themes are both present in this poem of lament that allows us to hear both the vulnerability of old age and the spiritual fortitude that has been developed over many years. The psalmist can be seen to swing between the negativity of fear and the positivity born of praise. In this way, it gives us a template to deal with our own fluctuating emotions and the language of hope and despair.
The psalms, as liturgical poetry, allow us to connect with the concerns and fears that are often hidden or dismissed in Christian cultures that encourage a focus on blessing and wealth. The ‘I’ of the psalmist’s voice can be heard as our own in this plea to connect with ‘thou.’ The strength of God is contrasted with the weakness of humanity.
Although the psalmist was almost certainly a man, I will also consider how this psalm is heard differently when it comes from the voice of an older woman. I will consider the way biblical poetry can cross the gender divide and provide a voice for many members of our faith communities. The language, metaphors and imagery will be considered for the way it includes or excludes vulnerable listeners.
Finally, this paper will propose that in terms of considering the psalms it is just as important to consider what is being heard, as what is actually being said within the psalter.
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The Death of the Kings
Program Unit: Deuteronomistic History
Ruth Ebach, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
In the Deuteronomistic History, the concept of announcement and fulfilling is one of the structuring elements to create a narrative thread. Having a closer look at the details, a lot of tensions between the almost prophetic announcements and the narrated events become obvious. The paper pays special attention to the kings’ death and analyzes the differences or even contradictions between texts within the Deuteronomistic History (regarding Baesa in 1 Kgs 15:33–16:14; Ahab: 1 Kgs 21:19 and 22:40; Josiah: 2 Kgs 22:18–20 and 23:29–30) and in comparison to some notes in prophetic books, esp. in Jeremiah (Jeroboam: Am 7:10–17; 1 Kgs 14:20 and 1 Kgs 15:29; Jehoiakim: Jer 22:18–19 and 2 Kgs 24:6; Zedekiah: Jer 34:5; 52:10–11 and 2 Kgs 25:6–7).
The famous questions: Have Josiah (2 Kgs 22:20) and Zedekiah (Jer 34:5) died or been buried “in peace” or not and what happened to Jehoiakim’s corpse? – are not the only test-cases for a concept of fulfilled prophecy regarding the dying kings. The answers to these questions have a deep impact on the dating – as can be seen in the exegetical discussion – and on the interpretation of the passages as well. Astonishing enough, the evaluations of these words by the modern exegetes show a large variance from a “striking example of unfulfilled prophecy” (Cogan/Tadmor regarding 2 Kgs 23:29) to an (exact) fulfillment (e.g. Fritz and Pietsch). Trying not to absolutize modern concepts of fulfillment, the paper analyzes the innerbiblical handling within the deuteronomistic layers (in DtrH and in the dtr prophetical books) and also looks at Chronicles and the multifaceted textual history, in which several attempts can be identified to solve some of the problems concerning these (un)fulfilled prophetic words in their own manner.
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Text, Translations, and Translators: Looking at the UBSGNT Editions from a Translator’s Perspective
Program Unit:
Edgar Ebojo, United Bible Societies
Ever since its conception, the UBS Greek New Testament has been claiming to be a critical Greek text edition prepared primarily for translators. This promotional tag has its strongest appeal particularly to those who are on the ground working with translation teams worldwide. But what exactly makes the UBSGNT the Greek text edition for Bible translators? What’s in it that’s not found in other Greek text editions available in the market today? With all the textual and paratextual features historically integrated throughout all its editions (including those that are no longer in use), what picture of a translator being targeted emerges?
Accordingly, with the rapidly changing contexts of Bible translation globally, this paper will probe alongside the profile of Bible translation teams in the field,
particularly from the global South, who are actually using UBSGNT in their translation task, to assess the adequacy (if not relevance) of the current features of UBSGNT.
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The "Ideal Version of a Text...": Looking at the Greek Text behind David Bentley Hart's The New Testament: A Translation
Program Unit: Nida Institute
Edgar B. Ebojo, United Bible Societies
In his The New Testament: A Translation, David Bentley Hart used the term “Critical Text” to describe the Greek text he used as the initial textual base for his translation. He claimed that this Critical Text is “based on earlier and different manuscript sources”. He, however, also integrated into this Critical Text readings from what he calls as the “Majority Text”, setting these readings in single square brackets. As a result, Hart concluded that the source text behind his translation is “an approximation to an ideal version of the (NT) text that in actuality we shall never be able to identify entirely”. The aim of this presentation is to investigate Hart’s claims about the Greek text underlying his translation, and explore what implications his translation presents to those who are involved in Bible translation, specifically in the area of identifying the textual base for any New Testament undertakings. Ultimately, I hope to verify as to how “ideal” is Hart’s “ideal version of the (New Testament) text.
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The Circumstances and Consequences of the Foundation of Colonia Aelia Capitolina in Jerusalem
Program Unit: Polis and Ekklesia: Investigations of Urban Christianity
Avner Ecker, Bar-Ilan University
A series of excavations by archaeologists of the Israel Antiquities Authority in and around Jerusalem and two newly discovered inscriptions regarding Hadrian's visit to the province in 130 CE revive the discussion regarding the local circumstances preceding the Imperial advent and the impact of the subsequent foundation of Colonia Aelia Capitolina. In this lecture I will present a synthesis of these new materials with well-known historical sources and less-known papyri and inscriptions. The evidence suggests that Jerusalem, before the foundation of the colony, was a legionary camp surrounded by satellite civilian settlements that belonged to different administrative units. Some of these settlements can now be mapped and their administrative roles can be postulated. The occupants of these settlements were Jews, Christians (with bishops of Jewish descent), soldiers, veterans and their families. All seem to have reached some sort of modus vivendi, in a process reminiscent of the "Middle Ground" model pertaining to the formation of colonial societies. Regardless of whether Hadrian decided to establish a colony in Jerusalem before or after the Bar Kokhba Revolt, his decision undoubtedly handed Jerusalem over to the soldiers, the veterans, and their wives and children, at the price of offsetting the delicate equilibrium reached over the years with the Jewish population. This was the first time in the history of Judea that the Roman Army directly influenced the processes of urbanization. I will argue that this, as precedent, signaled the end of the so called "Jewish Region" in Judea and the demise of its toparchy system, thus opening the way for the completion of the urbanization of the province.
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Applying Memory Studies to the Theme of Exile in the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Exile (Forced Migrations) in Biblical Literature
Diana V. Edelman, University of Oslo
Biblical memories are preserved in and accessed via texts; their interpretation can be informed by memory studies but need to be analyzed using literary methods to understand the emphases in their chosen forms of presentation and the standard literary patterns that have been used to emplot them. We can access alternate versions of the same memories in the Septuagint vs MT tradition, but we lack sufficient source material outside the Bible to be able to be certain about which memories may be historically reliable, which may be adapted, and which may be fabricated. This issue is less important than trying to understand how the memories in the texts inform and shape corporate identity for the religious community of Israel.
Exile, forced and voluntary, is a biblical and ancient Near Eastern theme that is related to different literary patterns. It is a constituent element of treaty curses and of origin stories, for example. Sociological studies of contemporary diasporic communities indicate a range of responses to exile, which can help us think about why the particular responses found in the texts were selected and what that might tell us about their implied authors and audiences. Also, trauma studies can help inform the issue of which texts likely would have been created by first generation survivors and which second or third generation.
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“As is Written in the Torah of Moses”: The Form and Authority of "Torah" in Chronicles
Program Unit: Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah
Cynthia Edenburg, Open University of Israel
The Book of Chronicles opens with the genealogy of Adam, which leads directly into other genealogical material found in Genesis, and throughout Chronicles are citations and references to various Pentateuchal laws and parenetic material. Moreover, there are multiple references throughout the book to the “Torah of Moses” and the “Torah of Yahweh”, which are occasionally combined with the citation formula “as it is written in.” The question of the form of the Pentateuch presumed by Chronicles and the authority it held for the Chronicler needs to consider not only the overt mentions of the Torah of Moses or Yahweh, but also the references to acts performed in accordance to what was “commanded to Moses”, as well the range of Pentateuchal citations and references in Chronicles. For instance, which Pentateuchal passages are cited, and which are not, and what citations occur in Chronicles’ Sondergut? Pressing methodological questions arise in evaluating implications of the purported citations and intertextual references. For example, to what degree does lack of reference imply intentional disregard of Pentateuchal material or motifs, and in which cases is it feasible that the material was not available to the Chronicler and represents post-Chronistic development within the Pentateuch? Furthermore, does the selection of citations indicate what was authoritative in the eyes of the Chronicler, while what was not considered authoritative was left out? Or might the references have been selected at random in order to impart to Chronicles the authority of the work revered as the “Torah of Moses”?
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AQSamA, the MT, and Old Aramaic: Clarifying the Alternation of ʔel and ʕal in Samuel-Kings
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Historical Books
Paul Edgar, University of Texas at Austin
Samuel-Kings frequently uses the preposition ʔel in order to mark relationships that are normally marked with ʕal in the classical corpus. One verse which exhibits this phenomenon particularly well is 2 Sam 2:9.
wayyamlikēhû ʔel haggilʕād wə-ʔel hāʔăšûrî wə-ʔel yizrəʕeʔl wə-ʕal ʔepraîm wə-ʕal binyāmin wə-ʕal yisrāʔēl kullō
This unexpected exchange of prepositions occurs regularly for other relationships that are normally ascribed to ʕal, too. Most scholars conclude that the appearance of ʔel in 2 Sam 2:9 is erroneous. They reason that the relationship should be marked with ʕal because Yahweh is causing David to reign over each polity. The same is true for the many other instances where ʔel appears when ʕal is expected. While the phenomenon is often noted as an error in the text, the nature of the error is seldom explained. The few extant explanations ascribe the alternation to an error in textual transmission, post-exilic phonological conflation, or a combination of both. This paper demonstrates that the phenomenon is in fact a correct feature of Classical Hebrew. Using evidence from the Masoretic Text, from 4QSama, and from Old Aramaic texts such as the Tel Fakhariya inscription, it argues that the preposition ʔel was intentionally used to mark both sets of relationships, those normally associated with ʔel as well as several relationships normally ascribed to ʕal. Moreover, the period during which ʔel operated in this manner is distinct; it should be included amongst linguistic features which assist in dating texts.
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Magic and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance: Defining Magic in the Ancient Mediterranean World
Program Unit: Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Bryn Mawr College
Scholars have compared the scholarship on magic to riding a rather rickety bicycle; we continue to make progress in understanding ancient magic as we pedal forward working with the evidence, but every once in a while we need to stop and do some maintenance on the bicycle itself, our definition of the category of magic.
We always start with etic definitions, with the presuppositions we bring to any inquiry from our own culture and upbringing. Ultimately, we end up with etic definitions as well, since we cannot analyze another culture as though we were part of it. For the modern scholar, ‘magic’ is always an etic category, formulated for the purposes of analyzing and understanding the ancient world. We cannot do without definitions altogether; any attempt to do so just ends up bringing back in implicit – and therefore unexamined – etic definitions. However, we can come up with better etic definitions if we look to the way the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean world made their own emic definitions and drew their own categories. If we refine our intuitive modern etic definitions with reference to the evidence for the ancient emic classifications, the bicycle may still end up a bit wobbly, but we will be able to make better progress.
To begin with, magic is not a thing, but a way of talking about things. It is thus a ‘discourse’, like sexuality, or religion, or science, or literature, and the label of ‘magic’ thus depends on who is doing the labeling. When we speak of ‘magic’, therefore, we should always explain: ‘magic for whom?’. Any specific piece of evidence from the ancient Mediterranean world provides an example of magic for that particular person, from one particular perspective. To speak of ‘magic in the ancient Mediterranean world’ is thus to refer (loosely) to the whole range of things that various people in those cultures during those times could label as magic. I therefore propose that:
Magic is a discourse pertaining to non-normative ritualized activity, in which the deviation from the norm is most often marked in terms of the perceived efficacy of the act, the familiarity of the performance within the cultural tradition, the ends for which the act is performed, or the social location of the performer.
Each piece of this definition needs unpacking, and its usefulness can be demonstrated through a closer examination of some of the evidence for that most famous of ancient magical tricks, drawing down the moon. This act is explicitly labeled magic by some of the earliest sources, and many different examples of this Thessalian trick appear throughout the entire range of the evidence. The examples stress different aspects of the non-normativity of the act: some the social location of the performers, some the non-normative ends for which it is performed, some for the weirdness of the performance, and others for the extraordinary power and efficacy of the rite.
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On the Rhetoric of Ruins and Restorations: Conflict over Cult Sites in Late Antiquity
Program Unit: Greco-Roman Religions
David R. Edwards, Florida State University
The ruins and restorations of cult sites are a significant conflict zone among different Greco-Roman religious groups of late antiquity. In the latter part of the fourth century CE the pagan emperor Julian “the Apostate” and the Antiochene Christian bishop John Chrysostom “the Golden-Mouthed” engage in rhetoric concerning the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and the temple of Apollo in Daphne, each for their own purposes in competing for both the construction and the erasure of the past. By rebuilding the Jewish temple Julian would be invalidating the Christian claims that their deity had personally seen to its destruction in recompense for Jewish infidelity and the rejection of Jesus, precisely as Jesus himself had predicted. Julian would thereby be able to erase the Christian claims on the past—particularly claims of victory and superiority which were maintained in the present—inscribed in the temple’s ruins. Chrysostom, correspondingly, expounds on the Jerusalem temple’s ruins as a way to construct scriptural history as Christian history: the temple’s ruins are simply the apex of a history of Jewish idolatry and impiety, and an enduring monument to this polemicized past. Similarly, concerning the temple of Apollo, Julian favors it with lavish enhancements as an attempt to efface the recent Constantinian past which is highly conspicuous through the decrepit and neglected pagan structures. Chrysostom, however, references the ruins of the temple of Apollo as an enduring sign of the Christian god’s victory over Julian and paganism, connecting the past events of the temple’s destruction some twenty years earlier to his present, in precisely the fashion Julian sought to counteract. Both figures, then, find significant meaning in the enduring ruins or renewed restorations of cult sites. They are an indelible indicator of either victory or defeat, power or impotence, and are therefore hotly contested.
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Stoic or Biblical Moral Teaching in John Chrysostom’s Quod nemo laeditur nisi a se ipso?
Program Unit: Biblical Exegesis from Eastern Orthodox Perspectives
Robert Edwards, University of Notre Dame
John Chrysostom has often been described as a moralist, and a Stoic one at that. But can this Christian preacher’s moral teaching be described as Stoic, when biblical exegesis forms the greater part of his work? Chrysostom’s 'Quod nemo laeditur nisi a se ipso' is a fitting test case for this question, since the treatise is a sustained reflection upon the pseudo-Stoic dictum “no one can be harmed unless he harms himself,” and at the same time is taken up primarily with exegesis and re-narration of Old Testament narratives. It has been claimed that this treatise is mostly Stoic and contains hardly any genuinely Christian teaching; the biblical narratives employed are instead molded to the whims of this apparently Stoic preacher. However, this paper will argue that the influence instead runs in the opposite direction: this Stoic moral teaching becomes so thoroughly incorporated into the Christian commentary tradition that it ceases to be Stoic in any meaningful sense. Instead, like other moral gnomai found throughout Chrysostom’s works, the phrase “no one is harmed unless he harms himself” functions as a distillation of scriptural narratives, thus transforming the dictum into a single, now distinctly Christian, moral teaching. Further, Chrysostom puts forward the phrase to be used as a sort of spiritual exercise: one that is both metonymic—standing in for these extended biblical narratives—and mnemonic—serving as a pithy
reminder of the narratives which might otherwise prove difficult to recall. Thus, as one is confronted with a disturbing circumstance, by recalling the phrase “no one can be harmed unless he harms himself,” one is reminded of the expanse of biblical narratives which all
witness to this same truth. In this way, the gnomic expression is packed full of scriptural—and not Stoic—meaning. In addition to this more constructive argument, it is noted that the Stoic “backgrounds” which are so often the hallmark of contemporary patristic scholarship
are less helpful in this case because (1) Chrysostom’s thought does not engage with Stoic teaching in any significant way, and (2) many Stoic teachings, such as this one, had long since ceased to be Stoic, and had been thoroughly assimilated into the thought of various other philosophical schools. Thus, rather than arguing that Chrysostom Stoicizes, and so does violence to, the biblical narratives which he interprets, this paper will show how this moral teaching becomes Christianized, as Chrysostom baptizes it in the waters of the
Christian scriptural commentary tradition.
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Paul, Jerusalem, and the ἐκκλησίαι τῶν ἐθνῶν
Program Unit: Polis and Ekklesia: Investigations of Urban Christianity
Kathy Ehrensperger, Universität Potsdam
At first glance Paul’s relationship to Jerusalem seems ambivalent. He stresses that he did not go there after his call - he went to Jerusalem only after three years (Gal 1.18-19), meeting ‘only’ with Kephas and James. He further stresses that he was part of the Antioch delegation to Jerusalem due to his revelation (Gal 2.2), presents himself in a leading role in the negotiations with the ‘pillars’ (Gal 2.7-9), and seems to part company with colleagues from Jerusalem after the so-called Antioch incident (2.11-13). However, the brief notes on these events need not be seen as indications of a separation, but rather the opposite, as evidence of continuous links between the emerging Pauline network of Christ-followers from the nations and that in and around Jerusalem. The fact that Paul considers it of upmost importance to collect funds from the ἐκκλησίαι τῶν ἐθνῶν, which he eventually intends to transport to Jerusalem himself (Rom 15.25), indicates that he considers Jerusalem not only of crucial importance for himself but for these ἐκκλησίαι as well. Jerusalem is the center of Paul’s perception of the world (Rom 15.19), geographically as well as in any other aspect, as it is for any Jew of the first century (Cf. Philo who formulates, Jerusalem is the metropolis of the Jewish people). It is the center of the world for those who through their entire way of life express their relationship to the one God. Now that through Christ people from the non-Jewish nations also are relating to this God, Paul, through his fund raising activity is determined to establish a link between the ἐκκλησίαι τῶν ἐθνῶν and Jerusalem. In this paper I will argue that the Philippians serve as a decisive base for Paul’s fund raising activity, building on Julien Ogereau’s emphasis that the koinonia discourse in that letter reflects an economic interaction between the partners involved. But rather than seeing this as a partnership for the advancement of the euangelion generally, I consider it specifically tailored to serve the purpose of fund raising in order to establish a decisive link between the ἐκκλησίαι τῶν ἐθνῶν and Jerusalem.
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Imagine—No “Works of Law”! Struggling with “Erga nomou” in Changing Times and Places
Program Unit: Paul within Judaism
Kathy Ehrensperger, Universität Potsdam
Imagine – no ‘Works of Law’! Struggling with ‘Erga nomou’ in Changing Times and Places
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Appropriation, Omission, Visualization: Transforming the Latin Commentary Tradition on the Apocalypse of John into the Vernacular in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century
Program Unit: John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern
Susanne Ehrich, Universität Regensburg
The need arises in the 13th and 14th centuries, especially in England and France, to regard the Revelation of John and its exegesis not merely as the domain of clerics, but also something to be dealt with by the laity. The lavishly illustrated translations of the Apocalypse into Old French and Anglo-Norman are well known, but with the Middle High German Apocalypse of Heinrich von Hesler, we find an attempt from the German-speaking world to make the last book of the Bible accessible even to laypeople with their salvation in mind. Biblical commentaries in vernacular tongues emerge during a period when the visions of John’s Revelation were being increasingly linked to historic events and figures, not least because of the great influence of Joachim of Fiore’s († 1202) sophisticated historical interpretation of the Apocalypse on theological commentaries, literary texts, and artistic works. Nevertheless, a wide variety of approaches on how to handle both traditional and newly emerging exegetical trends can be found in vernacular commentaries on the Apocalypse and their illustrations: on the one hand, we see attempts at confronting the recipients with a complex theological argumentation relevant to the contemporary context; on the other hand, new exegetical paths are often shunned in favour of the timetested interpretations of figures such as Bede the Venerable († 735) or Haimo of Auxerre († ca. 865). In the case of Heinrich von Hesler’s Apocalypse from the second half of the 13th century, central passages of the text of Revelation are completely ignored in the commentary. This paper will explore what strategies were used by vernacular commentaries on the Revelation of John in terms of selecting, interpreting, and refining the extant Latin commentary tradition, as well as what motivations might lie behind these choices? What kind of exegesis was considered appropriate for lay audiences? How was this theological thinking conveyed? As well as concentrating on textual strategies and prevalent themes in vernacular commentaries, the paper will also take into consideration the visualization of the Book of Revelation in miniatures and its specific arrangement in a lay context.
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The Republican Dilectus and the Jews: Lentulus in Ephesus (Jos. AJ 14. 228ff).
Program Unit: Hellenistic Judaism
Claude Eilers, McMaster University
In 49 BCE, while levying troops in Ephesus, the consul Lentulus Crus exempted Jews from serving in them. A group of six documents preserved by Josephus in AJ 14 relate to this decision, including three slightly different copies of the edict itself (AJ 14.228f., 234, 238ff.) and three documents that refer to it (14.230, 231f., 236f.).
The documents themselves present a tangle of textual problems, owing in part to a complicated history of transmission that began before they came into Josephus’ hands. They also present three questions concerning Lentulus’ decision that can be clarified (I will argue) by considering these documents in the context of what we know about the Roman dilectus, or military levy.
First, Lentulus exempts from service in the legions πολῖται Ῥωμαίων Ἰουδαῖοι (‘Jewish citizens of Rome’). Doubt has been expressed whether these were Roman citizens in the full juridical sense by (e.g.) Troiani (1994, 14) and Pucci Ben Zeev (1998, 151-3). Lentulus, however, was in Asia raising citizen legions in which only Roman citizens normally were eligible to serve.
A second problem is how wide the exemption was meant to apply. Lentulus mentions only Ephesus, but the letter of Ampius Balbus refers to this decision applying to 'the Jews of Asia'. Gruen (2002, 294 n. 15) and Pucci Ben Zeev (1998, 164) explained this as an error on the part of either Balbus or a copiest (cf. also Juster (1914, 144)). But that is probably unnecessary: to judge from Polybius’ description (6.19-20) of the Roman dilectus, citizens were required to report from far and wide, so citizens from outside of Ephesus were expected to report. Indeed, Lentulus’ reference to Ephesus in his edict refers to the place where the dilectus was held, not the residency of exemptees.
Third, and finally, considering Lentulus’ exemption within the context of the dilectus highlights the strangeness of the document introduced as a 'Decree of Delos' (AJ 14.231), which reports official instructions not to harass the Jews because of the exemption. The document cannot come from Delos (Eilers, 2005), but the concern over the possibility of a negative reaction outside Ephesus would nonetheless be noteworthy. I will argue the document comes from Ephesus itself.
All this goes to reinforce the important observation of Rajak (1984, 112ff.) that the exemption was not meant to be a universal ruling applicable henceforth. Again, the context of the dilectus implies that Lentulus’ decision applied only to this particular levy.
Eilers, C. 2005. "A Decree of Delos Concerning the Jews?" SCI 24, 65-74.
Gruen, E. S. 2002. Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans. Harvard.
Juster, J. 1914. Les Juifs Dans L'empire Romain. Geuthner.
Pucci Ben Zeev, M. 1998. Jewish Rights in the Roman World. Mohr Siebeck.
Rajak, T. 1984. "Was There a Roman Charter for the Jews?" JRS 74, 107-123.
Ritter, B. J. 2015. Judeans in the Greek Cities of the Roman Empire. Brill.
Troiani, L. 1994. "The πολιτεία of Israel," in F. Parente and J. Sievers, eds., Essays in Memory of Morton Smith, 11-22. Brill.
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Underdetermining the Beatitudes: Some Theological Functions of Jesus’ Blessings
Program Unit: Theological Interpretation of Scripture
Rebekah Eklund, Loyola University Maryland
Perhaps the most common argument over the beatitudes in biblical scholarship today is whether the beatitudes describe or prescribe. That is, do they name categories of people favored by God; do they reveal God’s priorities? Or, are they implicit commandments (if you want to be blessed, then be like this)? This dichotomy is helpful only inasmuch as it allows us to trace two primary strands in the reception history of the beatitudes: in short, premodern interpreters tend to highlight the prescriptive, and contemporary authors the descriptive. But it is ultimately a false dichotomy, one undergirded by a lingering commitment to a singular, fixed meaning of a text. Instead, the beatitudes may function as either descriptions or implicit commandments, or both simultaneously, depending on context. This paper tests this claim by exploring the theological function of the Matthean blessing on the poor in spirit alongside the Lukan blessing on the poor.
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The Female Vessel of Qur’anic Revelation
Program Unit: The Qur’an and Late Antiquity (IQSA)
Emran El-Badawi, University of Houston
The Qur’an makes ample reference to God’s many acts of revelation. We may regard wahy as revelation to a prophet, while tanzil is a broader category of revelation to humankind. Revelation to mankind includes various objects (scripture, water from the heavens; wages; etc.) There is ample modern literature on the biblical and Judeo-Christian echoes of these qur’anic passages, but little to nothing about its more ancient female, pagan structure and imagery. The male or female characteristic of these objects, often gleaned from their very names, are too rich in meaning to ignore. This presentation examines three cases where revelation takes place through a female vessel, and where the vessel is accompanied by two female helpers.
The first case is that of the God’s “tranquility” or (female) “dwelling” (Arab. sakinah; Q al-Tawbah 9:26; al-Fath 48:4-26; cf. Q al-‘Imran 3:154). Finding His believers in duress and homeless God sends down his sakinah within which they find tranquility after battle. This is the same tranquility found in a man’s “dwelling” within his wife (Q al-Rum 30:21), the dwelling of birds in a tree, and the dwelling of divinity among its people in rabbinic literature (Heb. shekinah) and echoed in Matthew 18:20. The second case is the parallel story of the Qur’an’s revelation and the birth of Christ (Q al-Qadr 97). God’s revelation is planted deep in Mary’s womb, as it is planted deep in the “night of darkness” (laylat al-qadr; cf. Aram. qdr). Out of this darkness emerges a constellation “brighter than a thousand moons” (khayr min alf shahr; cf. Aram. h-y-r; sh-h-r). This discussion leads to the third case, the revelation of the Qur’an in the “month of Ramadan” (shahr ramadan), the ninth month of the Arabian calendar. That is to say the Qur’an is formed over a nine month period, as Jesus did in Mary’s womb and coinciding with the harvest season or rebirth of the earth.
Through this presentation, I argue that the Qur’an’s story of its own creation is composite, reflecting more ‘recent’ Judeo-Christian counterparts, but also ancient pagan imagery hard-coded into its Arabic language. The most ancient layer in this story, I argue, is the imagery of the goddess Allat/Ishtar: the winged goddess (crane) of the heavens, the morning and evening star, and the resurrector of the earth (Tammuz).
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The Rabbinization of the Enemy: Villains in the Service of the Pharisees
Program Unit: Midrash
Gilad Elbom, Oregon State University
This paper examines several midrashic narratives that offer a curious rabbinization of the enemies of Israel, most notably Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and Zeresh, wife of (and, according to rabbinical literature, advisor to) Haman. Both figures show remarkable proficiency not only in the Hebrew Bible but also, and more importantly, in rabbinical literature itself. The ingenuous recruitment of otherwise irredeemable villains in the service of the rabbis promotes a clear Pharisaic agenda, especially in the context of the political rivalry with the Sadducees. The competition between the House of David and the House of Zadok reaches an explicit level when Zechariah (3:1-4) names the rival authorities. Joshua, the high priest, is wearing filthy clothes, standing in front of an angel of God, humiliated by Satan, the accuser. God forgives the unspecified sin of the priest but entrusts Zerubbabel, a righteous king, with the task of rebuilding the Temple (4:8-10). A midrashic expansion of the scene (b.Sanhedrin 93a) records a rather humiliating conversation between Nebuchadnezzar and Joshua. In his role as prosecutor, the ruler of Babylon demonstrates outstanding knowledge of the God, the Law, and the traditions of the Jewish nation, including the Oral Law, while the high priest who stands before him, presented here from an anticlerical perspective, resorts to petty technicalities in a feeble attempt to defend himself. In a similar way, we must applaud Zeresh, the rabbis seem to say, for her impressive expertise in our hermeneutic tradition. After all, the extended narrative of the dramatic escape of King Manasseh from his imprisonment in Babylon, which she recites to her husband (Esther Rabbah 9:2; Midrash Abba Gorion 5), appears only in midrashic texts (the Aramaic translation of 2 Chronicles 33:10-13; j.Sanhedrin 51b; Pesikta de Rav Kahana, Buber Recension 25; Ruth Rabbah 5:6; Deuteronomy Rabbah, Va'etchanan 20). As a statement about the supreme importance and wide acceptance of rabbinical literature, the fact that Zeresh is familiar with this story implies that even the worst enemies of Israel, if knowledgeable in the Oral Law, are better than the Sadducees who reject it. In this context, it would also be interesting to examine some instances of the rabbinization of God: the portrayal of the Hebrew deity as a Talmudic scholar who endorses, imitates, and champions the midrashic practices of the Pharisees (b.Chullin 60b; b.Avodah Zarah 3b; Zohar: Vayechi 242b).
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Teaching Tip: Top Five
Program Unit: Teaching Biblical Studies in an Undergraduate Liberal Arts Context
Nicholas A. Elder, Marquette University
Students better retain content when they have actively engaged a topic, synthesized and evaluated material related to that subject, and “chunked” the new information into coherent, interconnected structures. In this presentation I offer a teaching tactic that requires active engagement, synthesis, evaluation, and “chunking.” I call it a “Top Five.”
The tactic begins with students’ individual engagement with a new subject. After completing an assigned reading, students are asked to identify the top five most important things to know about that topic, person, or text. Students move from #5 down to #1 following specific formatting guidelines that help them see that presentation matters in a document. The assignment not only requires students to identify important information, but also to summarize that information in their own words and rank it. The initial part of this assignment thus develops the skills of information retrieval, synthesis, and evaluation.
Students then bring their “Top Fives” to class wherein they further engage the content with their peers and the professor in various ways. The presentation outlines several options for further engaging students’ “Top Fives” in class. One way to do so is by means of a “Snowballing Discussion.” This discussion method has individuals join into pairs, present their “Top Fives” to one another, and then create a new “Top Five” for their pair. Students are asked not simply to pick three pieces of information from one person’s “Top Five” and two from another’s, but rather are to find ways that they can further synthesize items in their respective lists. Pairs then join another pair to form quads and create another new “Top Five,” before these quads join together for the final synthesis of a new “Top Five” in groups of eight.
There are several pedagogical advantages to this tactic. First, the assignment asks students individually to evaluate and “chunk” new information into units that are more memorable. Second, centering class time around students’ “Top Fives” allows for supplementation through peer modeling and instructor correction. Third, the assignment creates a natural segue to both discussion of and instruction on a given topic. And fourth, the tactic is highly versatile. It can be employed in a variety of contexts for a variety of topics. I have used it for introducing biblical books in New Testament Overview classes, as well as for introducing new religious or theological concepts in introductory Theology and Religious Studies courses.
The presentation will itself be demonstrated in my “Top Five” format. This format mirrors how I often provide instruction following students’ individual completion of the assignment and peer engagement in the classroom. By presenting the tactic as a “Top Five” I will articulate both the instructions for the tactic and also the various pedagogical advantages that it offers.
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Mark and Aseneth: Odd Bedfellows?
Program Unit: The Bible in Ancient (and Modern) Media
Nicholas A. Elder, Marquette University
The Gospel of Mark and Joseph and Aseneth are odd bedfellows. The former is a product of the nascent Jesus movement and influenced by the Greco-Roman biographies. It details the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of a wandering Galilean. The latter is a Hellenistic Jewish narrative influenced by Jewish novellas and Greek romances. It expands the laconic account of Aseneth in Genesis 41 into a full-blown love story that promotes the romantic, theological, and ethical incentives of spurning idols and worshipping the Jewish God. Generically, theologically, and with respect to content the two texts are quite different.
Nonetheless, Mark and Aseneth exhibit a number of remarkable affinities. As to language and style, both are paratactically structured and avoid long, complex periods. They are repetitive with respect to words, clauses, sentences, and pericopae. Each employs a similar proportion of active to passive voice verbs, as well as present and imperfect to aorist and perfect tenses. They are similar in length, and the direction of each narrative dramatically shifts at its midway point. Both are intertextually echoic, evoking Jewish Scriptures metonymically rather than by direct citation. And each has a multiform textual tradition that went unprotected from dramatic revisions by later authors and editors.
In this presentation I elucidate these similarities and compare how subsequent developments of each tradition have altered their antecedent narrative(s). The later a-text manuscript family of Joseph and Aseneth revises its predecessors in a manner analogous to Matthew’s and Luke’s stylistic redaction of Mark. I then propose a reason for the correspondences between Mark and Aseneth and their literary reception by later tradents. Because they are vastly different with respect to genre, content, and theological outlook, their similarities cannot be pinned to generic conventions, authorship, place of composition, provenance, or literary influence in one direction or the other. Instead, the two narratives are akin to one another in media form and mode of composition. Mark and Joseph and Aseneth represent one instantiation of the complex relationship between orality and textuality in early Judaism and Christianity. Both are textualized oral narratives.
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The Qur'an in the Liberal Arts: Reflections on Pedagogy and Purpose
Program Unit: The Societal Qur'an (IQSA)
Elliott Bazzano, Le Moyne College
Why teach courses on the Qur’an in colleges and universities? An obvious answer to this question is “to learn more about he Qur’an.” But a more complex and specific answer must consider details. To what extent does institutional context matter, or even personal taste? What does it mean to learn about the Qur’an as an undergraduate student? In my experience teaching courses on the Qur’an over the past several years, I continually negotiate how much emphasis to put on the text versus the context: institutional context, current events, cultural baggage that each student (and instructor) brings to the course, and how the study of the Qur’an fits within the study of Islam, religion, or even the humanities more broadly.
This presentation will focus on a particular liberal arts context at a Jesuit Catholic college and consider challenges and questions that arise as a result of my own learning and teaching goals, which include equipping students with skills and awareness to build compassion and work toward social justice. Through sharing a number of assignments and learning activities, in conversation with scholarship on teaching and learning, this presentation argues that courses on the Qur’an can offers students both a deep engagement with the text itself—with attention to language, hermeneutics—as well as an inroad to any number of disciplinary vantage points such as literature, history, theology, and art.
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Post-Enlightenment Biblical Criticism and Theology, with Special Reference to De Wette and Vatke
Program Unit: History of Interpretation
Mark Elliott, University of St. Andrews
What happened once the Enlightenment had matured over a period of a century and seeped into culture and learning beyond philosophy? There are various illuminating answers to this question in the realm of History of Ideas/History of Philosophy and Culture, but in terms of the history of exegesis and interpretation, this is not so well covered in any systematic or programmatic way, although the likes of Lothar Perlitt, Otto Merk, Rudolf Smend and John Rogerson have done sterling work in the area. In the space of a 25-minute paper, it seems best to focus on two figures in Biblical scholarship whose achievement grew out of different philosophical and historiographical trends: W.M.L. de Wette and Wilhelm Vatke, who might each be taken as not representative but indicative figures in two generations (somewhat roughly, ‘Romantic’ early 19th century and ‘Idealist’ mid 19th century, respectively.) They both attempted to consider biblical theology in such a way that they were possibly the last to do so in mainstream theology departments at least for the following century. If ‘synthesis’ replaced ‘analysis’ as the major task of the critic in these decades, then it will be instructive to see how this operated in the pages of Einleitung and even in the exegesis of key texts. This paper will be less a work of comparison as of ‘soundings’ in what may yet prove to be a tradition of ‘biblical theology’ at the core and not penumbra of the post-Enlightenment scientific project.
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“I, Paul”: Contending with Autobiography in Writing Biography
Program Unit: The Historical Paul
Scott S. Elliott, Adrian College
Autobiographical narratives in the authentic letters of Paul are an interpretive crux in any effort to write a biography of the historical Paul. In this paper, I consider various fundamental questions and literary dynamics in relation to the autobiographical segments of Philippians. I propose that to whatever extent we separate the writing Paul from the self-represented Paul, the distillation that remains is still something other than the sort of historical fact that would satisfy the exigencies and expectations of modern biography. My argument is not that the project of writing a biography of the historical Paul is untenable, but that Paul’s own autobiographical narratives in his letters force us to think differently about the nature of any such biography and of the historical Paul it seeks to elucidate. The speaking subject of a letter seems more accessible than the authors of so many other genres. Self-narratives within a letter, therefore, seem to provide a degree of transparency rivaled only by a personal diary. However, even though New Testament scholars have discerned a single authorial hand behind the authentic letters of Paul, that is not the same thing as knowing the actual historical person responsible for writing those letters. Critics agree that Paul does not write autobiography for its own sake but rather actively patterns and presents himself in particular ways relative to his audiences so that he can employ his autobiography in some fashion pertinent to his argument and purpose. But taking such a position requires already knowing the writer behind these statements. What, then, is the basis of that knowledge? If each autobiographical vignette is a performance and thus provisional, then what is ultimately the subject of any biography we write? In his autobiographical statements Paul must, of necessity, write himself as an other. His self becomes a character subjected to a narrative emplotment. In these vignettes, various narrative aspects (e.g., character-narration, characterization, focalization, time, selection) intersect and mutually shape one another. The reliability of a character-narrator is tremendously ambiguous by virtue of the fact that it is at once both within and outside of the story. If we recognize that Paul’s depictions of others in his letters likely does not match what they would say about themselves, what impact does this have on our understanding of what he says about himself? My paper illustrates ways in which the Paul inscribed by the writer of Philippians complicates the Paul described in any subsequent biography because his own writing often resists the sort of stable and consistent subject we associate with the genre of autobiography. I argue that these dynamics have important implications and consequences for writing any reconstruction of the historical Paul.
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Reciprocity within Community: Biblical, Practical, and Theological Perspectives
Program Unit: Bible and Practical Theology
Anne-Marie Ellithorpe, University of Queensland
What might an approach that combines biblical interpretation and practical theology contribute to our understanding of the obligations community members have towards one another, and the ideals are to inform and guide relationships? Within this paper I bring an ancient oracle into dialogue with contemporary contexts as I consider what Amos 8:4–6, within its context, and in dialogue with Deuteronomy, implies in this regard. On the basis of these texts, I assert that relationships within communities are to be characterized by genuine reciprocity and identify such reciprocity as suggestive of the concept of civic friendship. Reciprocity is affirmed as integral not only to friendship, but also to life in community, and community obligations. Relationships of genuine reciprocity emerge as integral to the traditional relationships of agrarian peasants, as central to the vision of civic friendship that emerges through these ancient texts as relevant to a covenantal way of life, and as critically needed within contemporary communities.
I firstly explore the socioeconomic context of this oracle. Here I find genuine reciprocity to be a key characteristic of traditional relationships among rural agrarian peasants. Indeed, such reciprocity was integral to survival. Yet among the various interrelated factors that exacerbated poverty within Iron II Israel, I note that reciprocity became distorted and destructive, within the context of patron-client relationships, and within the marketplace. Thus these explorations acknowledge three forms of reciprocity, identified by Marshall Sahlins within his Stone Age Economics, as potentially characterizing patron-client relationships: balanced reciprocity implying fair exchange, generalized reciprocity implying altruism, and negative reciprocity implying the breakdown of effective exchange.
I then turn my attention to the practices and theology inherent within Amos 8:4–6 and various aspects of the Deuteronomic covenant, including practices of distorted reciprocity critiqued, and practices of genuine reciprocity identified as community obligations within the covenant community. I note that the way of life of this community is to be shaped by imaging God, and that reciprocity through (what may be called) civic friendship emerges as relevant to a covenantal way of life.
Turning to contemporary contexts, I observe that the destructive impact of distorted reciprocity continues to be evident, with neoliberalism fostering conditions for the accumulation of power and capital by economic elites, who prosper at the expense of the poor. I note that the prophetic rebuke and reforming critique within these ancient texts continue to be relevant to contemporary attitudes, life-style, and practices, with their encouragement of positive reciprocity, the pursuit of justice, and the valuing of all, all grounded (first and foremost) in God’s love and friendship. Distorted reciprocity is rejected as an inevitable aspect of societal and economic change. Rather, all are called to contribute to the flourishing of the broader community, through attentiveness to the appropriate reciprocity of their own practices, through the pursuit of justice, and through empathy towards and action on behalf of the marginalized other. I echo the call of these texts, for the imaging of God through civic friendship that recognizes the dignity of all.
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Women’s Ways of Blessing: An Intercultural Analysis of Poetic Blessings in the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Beth E. Elness-Hanson, Johannelund School of Theology
Blessings are palpable in both biblical accounts and contemporary African contexts. Blessings are more than polite niceties or kind words with spiritual undertones; they are imbued with phenomenological effectiveness and empowered by the fundamental nature of a God who blesses. The ontological efficacy—transmitted through words—is life-giving. This research goes beyond previous intercultural analysis of biblical curses in an African context and focuses on developing the other side of the blessing and cursing conceptual word pair in poetry. This project curates a “red thread” of women’s blessing in biblical Hebrew poetry (select examples include: Gen 2:23; Ruth 1:16–17; 1 Sam 2:1-10; Prov 1:8–9; 31:10–31; Song 8:6–7). An intercultural dialogue regarding African blessings creates a harmony with representative biblical poetry, developing a fuller understanding of women’s ways of blessing.
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John 17:21–23 and the Hermeneutical Culture of Union
Program Unit: Development of Early Christian Theology
Joel C Elowsky, Concordia Seminary
Numerous texts were in dispute in the Christological controversies of the early Christian centuries. One text, however, that gets to the heart of the differences about the doctrine of Christ that is often overlooked is John 17:21-23 which speaks of the unity of Christians on the basis of the unity which Christ and the Father share. While on the surface, this passage is often seen today through the lens of ecumenism, the interpretation of this passage in the history of interpretation gets to the heart of many of the concerns of the session: motivations for differing interpretations which include the relationship between Christology and anthropology, underlying philosophical assumptions concerning the creator/creature distinction, different hermeneutical and rhetorical approaches, and participation in the godhead—all concerns which contribute to different hermeneutical cultures (see Frances Young) between the Arians and the orthodox, and Alexandria and Antioch.
Arians of the 4th century understood John 17:21-23 as placing the Son of God on the same level with humanity, having a oneness and participation with the Father similar to the oneness other human beings share with one another and with God. In his contra Arianos 3.25-26 Athanasius addresses the passage head on. An extensive discussion of John 17:21-23 is needed, he says, because the Arians did not so much seek to elevate themselves up to God’s level as to bring God down to their level. They made Jesus out to be a creature, albeit a highly exalted creature who, just as we were, “was made God by participation,” meaning according to the Arians that the Son was not truly God by nature, nor is he proper to the Father’s essence (ousia). Rather, he is only a son by grace and participation as we are. Thus, concerning our passage, Athanasius insists on the fact that only the Son is God and one with the Father’s essence by nature when talking about our participation, as John 17:21 does. He insists that we are to be considered “gods” by grace and participation, not by nature. The participation the Arians envisaged was a demotion for God; the participation Athanasius and the orthodox envisioned was a promotion for us.
The 4th century exegetes of Antioch, such as Theodore of Heraclea and Theodore of Mopsuestia, were no less concerned with the Arian challenge to Christ’s equality and his being homoousios with the Father. But they chose a different approach to Christology than Alexandria that emphasized the creator/creature distinction even more than Alexandria did. They spoke of a relational unity of the human and divine in Christ and with us, as opposed to any type of henotic unity of nature espoused by Athanasius and others from Alexandria. The vocabulary of the union becomes especially important for Antioch as it maintains the creator/creature distinction through a synaphic union of the human and divine in Christ which mimics the union we have with Christ. Thus, the differing interpretations come about through a combination of soteriological, anthropological, terminological and cosmological concerns that inform the various hermeneutical cultures.
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Strained Breath and Open Text: Exploring the Materiality of Breath in Relation to Reading Luke 4:16–30
Program Unit: Reading, Theory, and the Bible
Anne Elvey, University of Divinity and Monash University
My 2011 book The Matter of the Text: Material Engagements between Luke and the Five Senses (Sheffield Phoenix) drew on new materialist theory, in particular the work of Jane Bennett (Vibrant Matter) and Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris (Material Agency) to consider the hermeneutic implications of engaging with the biblical texts as matter. In that work, I underscored the unique materiality of any instantiation of a text – whether papyrus, parchment, codex, thin bible paper, light and shade on screen, and so on – and asked how we might read a text with its materiality, and material agency, in mind. The Matter of the Text performed readings of selected texts from the Gospel of Luke, using the senses as hermeneutic keys for mediating and finding connections between the text as matter and the text as word, to the extent that such distinctions make sense in relation to the material turn. In this paper, I build on that earlier work and focus on the materiality of breath. The breath is encoded in languages and texts, for example, through the quality of letters/characters, punctuation, space. David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous) refers, for instance, to the pointing in Hebrew as the ‘written’ breath. I argue that attentiveness to matter situates human bodies and textuality in their more-than-human contexts, where breath like the senses, acts as mediator of human and other-than-human material relations and knowing. The breath connects human bodies with their habitats, with air and atmosphere, with the ecological exigencies of climate and pollution. Breath is a key concept for a new materialist evaluation and explication, for example, of the Earth Bible ecojustice principle of voice and the related ecological hermeneutic of retrieval. Orality studies and performance criticism have implications also for exploring the materiality of breath in relation to reading biblical texts. Texts as oral performances are ‘brought to life’ through the material medium of breath. With reference to Theodore Hiebert on ruach (‘Air, the First Sacred Thing’ in Exploring Ecological Hermeneutics, ed. Habel and Trudinger), William Bryant Logan (Air: The Restless Shaper of the World), Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (eds, Material Ecocriticism) and Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds., Material Feminisms), and the work of Elaine Wainwright on habitat (Habitat, Human and Holy), this paper explores the materiality of breath as a way of engaging with the materiality of a text against a contemporary background where air and atmosphere are often strained. I offer a reading of Luke 4:16–30 from the perspective of the interlinked materialities of breath and text, arguing for a multilayered approach to reading that attends to the markers of breath in the reader, the ways the text affects the reader’s breath, the characters’ breath, and the way the text might speak into the strained breath of a climate change and pollution affected Earth.
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Bleaching the Text, Reading toward Activism: Transfigurations
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
Anne Elvey, University of Divinity and Monash University
In Australia, scientists have wept to see huge swathes of coral in the Great Barrier Reef bleached. The reef, at 2300 km long with an area of 344,400 sq. km., is roughly the size of Germany, half the size of Texas; it is Sea Country for over 70 traditional owner groups (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority). Australian poet Judith Wright was at the forefront of the 1967 struggle to protect the reef when its complex ecology was threatened by oil drilling, a campaign that was catalyst for the formation of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (The Coral Battleground). Many now see climate change as a key factor in the future of the reef with warming seas implicated in recent and predicted future bleaching events (GBRMPA; IPCC). Over the past several years, a network of activists opposed to the proposed Adani coal mine in the Galilee Basin, North Queensland, and its related infrastructure at Abbott Point on the North Queensland coast, is highlighting the threat to the Great Barrier Reef, not only through the exacerbation of climate change that proposed mega coal mines represent, but also through sea traffic across the reef as coal is shipped overseas. Taking inspiration from Wright, a number of poets have spoken out against the Adani mine and its impact on the reef (hope for whole: poets speak up to Adani). Traditional owners, other activists and poets link colonial attitudes with the fate of a reef and its capacity to serves its many creatures. This paper takes the Great Barrier Reef as living, active context – with particular reference to events of bleaching, both in relation to their impact on the ecology of the reef and on human observers, particularly scientists and activists. The particular text I have chosen does not refer to oceans or marine life, rather it highlights transfiguration. The coincidence since 1945 of the Feast of Transfiguration (fixed by Pope Calixtus III in 1457) and Hiroshima Day (6 August), has set up a poignant parallel and contrast that has resonance in addressing the biblical narratives of transfiguration themselves. In a related, though different way, the transfiguration of the reef, through bleaching, suggests a point of conversation with the texts of transfiguration. In this paper, I consider Luke 9:28–36 with reference to Mark 9:2–10. A hermeneutic of suspicion might ask if the episode supports or promotes what Norman Habel describes as “heavenism”. A hermeneutic of identification has two aspects: identification with the living context which includes traditional owners impacted by and resisting the Adani mine, the reef and its marine life, its scientist and activist kin, and identification with the more-than-human (including human) characters in the biblical narratives, as they encounter transfiguration. A hermeneutic of retrieval focuses on the Lukan reference to exodos in Jerusalem (9:31) as a moment of deep compassion in response to the suffering ahead, that is transformative, a sending out to complex, responsive and difficult, sometimes silence-inducing, action, that has resonances for activism now.
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Towards a Methodology for Dating Psalms
Program Unit: National Association of Professors of Hebrew
David Emanuel, Nyack College
The task of dating biblical texts is widely recognized as a difficult one, and the specific problem of dating individual psalms presents even greater challenges. Unlike many biblical books, the Psalter lacks many of the common elements necessary for dating texts—dateable events, people, and places. Despite such difficulties, the field of inner-biblical exegesis and allusion, with regard to the Psalter, demands the need for scholars to date psalms to a general era, or at least a relative standing to a source text. The present paper represents a modest contribution towards meeting the present challenge of dating psalms by evaluating the present dating methodologies practiced on individual psalms and proposing a methodological approach for the responsible application of dating evidence. The paper begins with a discussion of common pitfalls that frequently plague scholarly attempts at dating texts, such as, overreaching conclusions from limited data, and failure to collect all available evidence. Following this, the discussion turns towards evaluating evidence within the Psalter that serves as an indicator of date. Naturally, datable vocabulary and syntax play an important role in this process. And though recent volumes—such as Hendel and Joosten, How Old Is the Hebrew Bible?: A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study, Hurvitz, Dictionary of Late Biblical Hebrew, and Gar and Fassberg, A Handbook of Biblical Hebrew—have re-established the validity of Early, Transitional, and Late Biblical Hebrew, identification of such elements in a psalm need further evaluation before they are considered as evidence for determining a text’s date. Together with linguistic contributions to dating texts, the present study evaluates additional components—for example, a psalm’s genre, and the identification of literary dependencies—that determine a psalm’s date. In conclusion, the present paper outlines a process and guidelines for the responsible dating of psalms. Furthermore, it reasserts the idea that despite the challenges of dating psalms, the task remains a worthwhile endeavor for the benefits of furthering the field of inner-biblical allusion and exegesis.
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Psalm 106 and the Poetics of Narrative Lament
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
David Emanuel, Nyack College
As one of the larger historiographic psalms in the Psalter, Psalm 106 constitutes a cleverly constructed lament that recounts the history of Israel during the exodus and early conquest periods. After a brief introduction of praise (vv. 1-3) and the psalmist’s plea for God to look upon his people with mercy (vv. 4-6), the psalm first recalls Israel’s divine deliverance at the Sea of Reeds (vv. 7-12) and their initial positive response of belief in God and praise for what he did for them. From this moment onwards (vv. 13-39), the psalmist portrays a picture of persistent rebellion drawn from Israelite literary history. Verses 40-46 follow by summarizing the Israelites relationship with God during the desert period, one of rebellion, punishment, and deliverance. Then, in the final verses, 47-48, the psalmist explicates his impassioned plea that God would deliver them once more from their present distress.
A cursory glance at the psalm reveals a remarkable affinity to biblical narrative. It retells the story of Israel during the exodus and early conquest periods, and in this regard exhibits a lucid plot that is rarely exhibited in the Psalter. More outstanding, however, is that it boasts the frequent use of wayyiqtol verb forms—35 occurrences in 48 verses, reflecting the highest percentage in any psalm—a defining feature of Hebrew narrative. An unfortunate consequence of this characteristic is that Psalm 106, together with other historiographic psalms, bears the perception of being less poetic than its counterparts. To oppose this viewpoint, the present paper highlights the rich and diverse poetic forms within the composition. In addition to the frequent use of parallelism, the psalmist employs features such as paronomasia, rhetorical questions, inclusion, chiasmus, repetition, and biblical allusion to fortify his lament on behalf of the nation of Israel. For the analysis of Hebrew poetry, the present study primarily relies on the work of Wilfred Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to Its Techniques, which provides a comprehensive breakdown of both structural and figurative devices used in Hebrew poetry. Additionally, Samuel Goh, The Basics of Hebrew Poetry, and Alonso Shökel, A Manual of Hebrew Poetics, are used to supplement Watson’s work, providing additional data on poetic technique. The present study concludes that despite the ostensible narrative feel of Psalm 106, its author has skillfully employed a wide range of poetics within the composition and woven them together into a sophisticated literary tapestry.
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Relationship, Reciprocity, and Regency: Friends as Subordinates in John 15
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Daniel K. Eng, University of Cambridge
This study contends that the Fourth Evangelist portrays Jesus as the patron par excellence in the farewell discourse of John. The presentation will focus on the usage of φίλος in John 15:13–16, suggesting that the term conveys a regent who is obedient to a king. Thus, the role of Jesus’ friend is one of subordination, not equality. This best explains the saying “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends (John 15.13).”
An examination of Roman patron-client relationships suggests that Jesus is portrayed as a patron in John 15. Patrons, especially high-ranking officials, often gave clients the honorary designation of “friends.” Such friends were not equals, but subordinate to their patrons in loyal obedience (cf. John 15:14, 16). After Jesus’ self-designation as lord (13:14), the discourse of John 14–15 is characterized by calls to obedience and loyalty, in accordance with their subordinate relationship.
The phenomenon of patrons acting as brokers further bolsters the argument that Jesus is portrayed as a patron. Brokers gave clients access to otherwise inaccessible favors and services from another patron. With Jesus’ farewell discourse emphasizing oneness with the Father and affirming himself as the only way to the Father (14:1–14), he promises to broker the Spirit from the Father and (14:16) and declares that the Father will give his friends whatever they ask for in his name (15:16).
In addition, a patron-client relationship often resulted from a master manumitting a slave. Becoming freedmen, former slaves became clients of their former master, providing services out of willful reciprocity. This type of patronage is consistent with Jesus’ saying “I do not call you servants any longer…but I have called you friends (John 15:15).” Again, such friends are not equals, for they obey his commands (15:14) and maintain a relationship of loyalty.
Furthermore, Roman patronage language points to Jesus as a royal patron with regents who act in his place. Recent numismatic studies demonstrate the prevalence of φίλ- terms like ΦΙΛΟΚΑΙΣΑΡ on Roman provincial coinage, which publicized the relationship of local regents to the emperor. This is reflected in Pilate’s designation as φίλος τοῦ Καίσαρος in John 19:12. In accordance with the Gospel’s purpose for its hearers to believe that Jesus is the Messiah (20:31), the content leading up to John 15 emphasizes Jesus as the king. After his anointing (12:1–8) and triumphal entry (12:12–19), the disciples are commissioned to obey and bear fruit in his absence (14:15–16; 15:16). These elements support the notion that “friend of Jesus” is a title for a subordinate who acts in the king’s place.
With language consistent with reciprocal patron-client relationships in John 15:13–16, Jesus declares that his act of love is greatest. His ultimate sacrifice on behalf of subordinates makes Jesus’ patronage greater than Caesar’s. Thus, the evangelist urges loyalty to Jesus, the patron par excellence.
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"'Til the Day Breathes and the Shadows Flee": The Song of Songs and the Spectral Turn
Program Unit: Reading, Theory, and the Bible
Heidi Epstein, University of Saskatchewan
After World War II, the Shulammite in the Song of Songs has become a figure through which to register historical atrocities. In Paul Celan’s poem Todesfuge, allusions to the Shulammite help convey the anguish of genocide and the failure of covenant. Celan’s “Sulamith” is also a metonym for the death of language/music/poetry. ‘She’ thwarts the Song’s conventionally constructed messages of indomitable love and abundant life. Three decades later, Anselm Kiefer’s controversial series of Margarete/Sulamith paintings exacerbates Celan’s sense of the impossible reconciliation of German-Jewish culture. As Kiefer mixed Sulamith’s ashes and hair on canvas in Germany, across the Atlantic Toni Morrison harnessed the Shulammite to transmit other repressed knowledges about “the amnesiac conditions of American freedom” in her novel Beloved (Gordon, 2008, 169 and 8). Most recently, in Howard Jacobson’s novel, Shylock is my Name, the Shulammite joins forces with a revenant Shylock to avenge ongoing anti-semitic cruelties in Manchester, England. I shall constellate these troubling reconfigurations of the Shulammite to consider whether, rather than receiving them as isolated allusions to a biblical icon, these fleeting traces might be read more productively as the wanderings of a ghost, following Avery Gordon’s model of haunting (Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination). To Gordon, sociologists need to study haunting as an “objective force” (97) that produces dialectically material knowledge about “subjection and subjectivity” (20). Haunting is a historical materialist mode of production because the socio-psychic experiences that ghosts generate between the dead and the living and that mediate information about a very present past, shape social relations and institutions. Morrison’s “fiction,” for example, documents the socio-economic production of ex-slaves’ “complex personhood” through social systems haunted by ghosts. Haunting becomes a mode of social analysis and ghosts are “social figures” (8) who expose “blind fields” (107f.) and “exiled longings” in the history of the present (207). They clamour for a “something to be done” (139). Encounters with ghosts must be taken seriously—not repressed as private pathologies, but honoured with the collective creation of more socio-politically engaged “hospitable memories” (Derrida in Gordon, 58). Arguably, this is what Celan, Kiefer, Morrison, and Jacobson did when ghostly Shulammites captivated them. In light of her post-war haunts, how shall Song scholars create a hospitable memory for the Shulammite’s neglected history as a ghost? For readers haunted by the four texts I discuss, the arresting, socio-psychic knowledge the Shulammite imparts is that racism and slavery still animate global capitalism. Listening to her, we might reread the Song as: 1) a haunted text, informing historical material sociality; 2) as a “palimpsest” (143) among whose layers seethes a prophetic indictment of “modernity’s open wounds” (19); 3) additionally, I shall welcome this ghost by detecting and promoting her post-war musical habitus: in Jacobson’s novel, ‘Sulamith’ animates a musical rapprochement between the six and the 60+ million, one that unleashes structural protest, and calls all readers to “Make Some Noise.”
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Gender, Body, and Race as Pilological and Metacritical Concept in Hebrew Bible Studies
Program Unit: Philology in Hebrew Studies
Dorothea Erbele-Kuester, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Gender and, often along with it, body and race emerge in texts of the Hebrew Bible through speech acts. I would like to show how on the one hand philological research and on the other hand so called metacritical theories like gender/feminist studies and cultural anthropology shed light on the way texts create and delineate between genders and races. The restraint concerning metacritcal tools and theories like gender or others as sensory perception may be confronted by a through philological analysis. As a showcase shall serve the Hebrew term niddah which undergoes a dramatic change in the Hebrew Bible. niddah is coined as a technical term for the cultic condition into which women are placed by their menstrual cycle in the so called priestly literature. In later literature it adopts a polemical overtone and draws boundaries along gender, religious and ethnic lines. Hence, I shall argue that metacritical theories and terms help us to unravel the category the text implicitly or explicitly makes use of like gender, body and race.
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Greek Heroes, Jewish Giants, and the Apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres
Program Unit: Hellenistic Judaism
Ted M. Erho, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
The recent publication of an Ethiopic fragment of Jannes and Jambres and the re-editing of parts of P.Chester Beatty XVI (APF 65/1) sheds much new and surprising light on the apocryphon even though it remains lacunose. Most significant is its application of names of Greek heroes (Acamas, Ajax, etc.) to certain antediluvian giants said to have performed unbelievable feats. This exegetical manoeuvre both links and syncretizes elements of Jewish and Hellenistic mythology, not dissimilar to Pseudo-Eupolemus, but the rhetorical effect is quite different in each text, with the author of Jannes and Jambres focusing on the heroes’/giants’ inability to elude death despite superhuman abilities and their resultant damnation by God, the all-powerful one. A second area of particular interest is the relationship of this apocryphon to the Enochic corpus. Though the new textual evidence shows that Jannes and Jambres pointedly alludes to 1 Enoch ch. 7, which stands as one of the earliest references to that book in a work composed in Greek, equally notable are the potential narrative parallels between the apocryphon and the fragmentary Book of Giants. If the author of the former drew upon and/or heavily reworked material from the latter to suit his own narrative and theological purposes, the hybrid of Greek heroes and antediluvian giants might be far less surprising than it seems on first reflection.
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Caleb and the Territory of Judah
Program Unit: Deuteronomistic History
Angela Roskop Erisman, Angela Roskop Erisman Editorial
Caleb and the Territory of Judah
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Leviticus Rabbah: Space, Time, and Sacredness
Program Unit: Midrash
Johanna Erzberger, University of Bochum
The purity laws (Lev 14-15) and the ritual of the day of atonement (Lev 16) are often read as referring to a concept of holiness that translates into a spatial concept with the sanctuary establishing the center. In midrashim such as LevR spatial concepts are combined with and partly superimposed by temporal concepts, that function as hypertexts that establish both intertextual links that constitute smaller units of interpretation and that organize them. The paper looks at the way in which spatial and temporal concepts interlink in the midrash and asks for underlying ideologies.
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Babatha: A Judean Woman in Focus 100–135 CE
Program Unit: Polis and Ekklesia: Investigations of Urban Christianity
Philip Esler, University of Gloucestershire
By her bequeathing us her family archive of 35 legal documents (dated from 94-132 CE), Babatha is the Judean woman about whom we know most in the first two centuries CE. Born around 100 CE, she was probably captured or killed by the Romans in 135 CE in a cave near En-Gedi where she was hiding with other Judean fugitives at the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt. She lived in Maoza, a town devoted to date cultivation on the south eastern shore of the Dead in the Roman province of Arabia Petraea, just across the border from Judea. Although we do not know if she ever visited Jerusalem, it is unlikely that a Judean patriot like her would never have walked the 150 kms to Jerusalem, a comfortable three day journey. From her archive we have unrivalled evidence for the life of a Judean woman of this period: her (second) wedding contract, the document by which she registered her property in the Roman census of 127 CE and various documents evidencing her second husband’s financial fecklessness and the trouble this got her into. Most revealing are the documents relating to two suits in which she was involved in the period 125-131 CE: hers against the trustees of the estate of her infant son by her first husband for inadequate maintenance and the suit against her by her second husband’s relatives when she distrained some of his property when he died. Using the methodology of archival ethnography, we are able to create a reasonably complex portrait of a highly competent and tenacious woman exposed to opportunities and challenges, devoted to her husband(s) and son, and loyal unto death to the sacred traditions of her people. Surely she exulted to hold Bar Kokhba’s coins ‘for the freedom of Jerusalem.’
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Divination and Divine Abandonment in 1 Samuel 28: An Exegetical and Theological Reading
Program Unit: Book of Samuel: Narrative, Theology, and Interpretation
Philip Esler, University of Gloucestershire
1 Samuel 28 is the penultimate act in the tragedy of King Saul. Interpreting the interaction between Saul and the woman, a diviner not “witch” of Endor, initially entails investigating the process of summoning the spirit of the deceased Samuel in the light of comparable material from the ancient Near East and from ethnographic research in modern cultures. The results are then related to the wider narrative of Saul in 1 Samuel. This analysis, together with an assessment of the concluding meal, produces a more precise appreciation of Saul’s situation and a more favorable understanding of the woman than is usually the case. Challenging issues of theodicy arise from this picture of a man whom God has not only abandoned but also become hostile towards on arguably questionable grounds, yet a man who, when facing the death of himself and his sons and his people’s defeat by the Philistines, pulls himself together and on the morrow summons the strength to meet his fate with dignity and resolution. 1 Samuel 28 will be confirmed as a passage of profound exegetical interest and theological significance.
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Judge Not? The Pedagogical Puzzle of Right Interpretation and Wrong Interpretation
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Rebecca Esterson, Graduate Theological Union
When studying the reception history of the Bible, should students be asked to suspend judgement on a particular interpretation for the sake of the pedagogical goals of the course? Or is their Judgement essential to the process of learning and understanding? I have, in the course of teaching surveys on reception history, asked students to put aside questions of right interpretation and wrong interpretation, and to instead ask: What is this particular interpreter doing with the Bible? What are they responding to? How do they contribute to the life of the Bible and the biblical tradition in their historical moment? This has been especially important when students are first exposed to a form of interpretation that is from a biblical tradition they have had little knowledge of, such as rabbinic Midrash for some Christian students. I have, however, come to see this method as unsustainable. The week of the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh my class was assigned a Reformation-era reading with overt notes of anti-Judaism. My own inability to withhold judgement that day in class exposed the flaw in my approach. I have since recognized that asking students deny their own “historically effected consciousness” contradicts what we have come to understand about the role of social and theological location in the hermeneutical process. This paper will explore the pedagogical puzzle of right interpretation and wrong interpretation. In particular, it will consider the approach outlined by Gary Weissman, who argues for an embrace of student misreading of texts for the sake of the process of understanding in his book The Writer in the Well. “Misreadings” Weissman argues, “can be interpreted as creative responses to troublesome or curious aspects of a text that other readers—particularly those more versed in literature and literary analysis—disregard in order to write cohesive and compelling interpretations.” The suggestion that such misreadings can be productive is a provocative approach, and its application to biblical studies presents special challenges, but this paper will argue for its relevance to the pedagogical puzzle at hand.
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Capturing the Divine: Multistable Expressions on the Face of Jesus in Late Antiquity
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
Douglas Estes, South University
Ancient religious art seems to move between two worlds of depiction and representation. It was one task for an artist to depict people and scenes, yet another task of a different kind to represent religious truth in their art. In the ancient world, the evolution of artistic technique (for example, the invention of σκῐᾱγρᾰφία (“painting with shadows”)), brought greater opportunities to represent religious truth in art. One type of visual representation that evolved over time from at least late antiquity to modern art forms is the multistable image. A multistable image is an image that warrants more than one valid visualization. It is one that intentionally exploits ambiguity in the image, typically through the angle of perception. In this paper, I argue that some early faces of Jesus from late antiquity are rudimentary attempts at creating multistable images in order to express religious truths. After introducing the concept of the multistable image, I ground my argument in the development and discussion of ancient art and narrative in classical and Hellenistic literature. Next, turning briefly to the Gospels to show how narrative attempts to visualize Jesus through essence and actions—when transformed into art—required more than simple depiction. To depict the holy face of Jesus required new ways to represent religious truths. Next, I turn to the specific example of Christ Pantocrator (ca 6th century) as a case study of multistable expressions on the face of Jesus. I argue that the Christ Pantocrator is not simply two “sides” to Jesus’ nature but is also an early attempt at multistable imagery designed to pull the viewer in to experience the humanity and divinity of Jesus. Thus, the multistable image creates a scenario where the viewer cannot separate the humanity and divinity of Jesus, but is instead always confronted with the both/and of Jesus’ nature. I support this with appeal to later medieval and early modern art (which accomplishes multistability with more nuance), and conclude with two examples of how the reception of a multistable Christ Pantocrator may have influenced Christian theology.
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Rehabilitating James and His Soteriological Message: Jerome and Ambrose's Efforts at Reclaiming James and His Epistle for the Greater Church from the Critiques of Marius Victorinus
Program Unit: Letters of James, Peter, and Jude
Erik Estrada, Texas Christian University
Martin Luther’s rejection of the Epistle of James is very well known to students of church history. His statement about James being an epistle of straw, for example, has become part of common knowledge in introductory church history courses. Although Luther’s hostility toward James is well known, few are aware that similar hostility was shown much earlier toward James and the epistle bearing his name. Since the mid-nineteenth century, patristic scholars such as Angelo Mai, Adolf von Harnack and Charles Gore have recognized that in his Commentary on Galatians Marius Victorinus, the first known commentator on Paul in the West (ca. 280/290-365), penned the most hostile statements against James the Brother of the Lord ever expressed by a Christian author before Martin Luther. Although Victorinus’ anti-Jacobean sentiments have been well known to scholars of fourth-century Christianity, the impact of those negative sentiments has yet to be fully explored. Before the past two decades, scholars either maintained without demonstration that Victorinus was not read by his younger contemporaries (i.e., Ambrosiaster, Jerome and Augustine) who also commented on Paul, or scholars simply refused to fully engage this question by carefully comparing their commentaries on Galatians to detect any influence of Victorinus’ commentary. In this paper, I will argue that not only did Ambrosiaster and Jerome read Victorinus’ Commentary on Galatians, but I will also argue that Victorinus’ criticisms of James and key soteriological ideas in his epistle shaped the use these two younger contemporaries of Victorinus made of the Epistle of James in their commentaries on Galatians. By first establishing that Ambrosiaster and Jerome both used Victorinus, I will demonstrate that their reclaiming of James’ orthodox status and episcopal office within the early church was a significant milestone in the further integration of the Epistle of James among the canonical authorities recognized by the Western Church (Ambrosiaster and Jerome were at one point spiritual leaders within the Roman community). For it was in the second half of the fourth century that the local Church of Rome began to recognize the canonical status of the Epistle of James. Before this point, this epistle struggled to gain wide acceptance in the local Roman Church. Jerome and Ambrosiater’s rejection of Victorinus’ anti-Jacobean sentiments can be viewed as a prelude to the Roman Church’s acceptance of James shortly thereafter into its canon by Pope Innocent. Moreover, Ambrosiater and Jerome’s use of the Epistle of James reveals the unintended impact of Victorinus’ original critiques of James. Victorinus’ critique prompted them to reject Victorinus’ strict understanding of justification by faith alone, that is, a belief that justification is not obtained by any works whatsoever, including a Christian’s good works, and accepted the place of good works within the process of salvation. Despite Victorinus’ vigorous attempts to discredit the spiritual authority of James and the epistle bearing his name, these two younger Western contemporaries made deliberate efforts at re-incorporating the Epistle of James into the conversation about the fuller scriptural message concerning human salvation, faith and good works.
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Drinking Gall and Vinegar—Psalm 69:22: An Underestimated Intertext in Matt 27:34, 48
Program Unit: Matthew
Alida Euler, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
Although the resonances of Psalm 69:22 within Matthew’s crucifixion scene (Matt 27:34, 48) have long been noted, their contribution to the scene has been undervalued. This paper argues that the intertextual play with Psalm 69 is decisive for adequately understanding Matthew’s crucifixion scene.
Matthew’s gospel is deeply rooted within early Judaism and therefore the frequent references to Psalms have to be taken into account. The Psalms were widely known at Matthew’s time, and thus Matthew could expect his readers, especially those with a Jewish background, to discover the concealed dimensions of meaning that are unlocked by following Matthew’s intertextual network.
In Matt 27:34, which records Jesus making his way to his crucifixion, the Roman soldiers offer him “wine mixed with gall”. By altering the potion’s ingredients presented in his Marcan source (Mark 15:23), Matthew creates an explicit allusion to Psalm 69:22a, in which the praying-self is mocked by receiving “gall for my food”. By acting as the praying-self’s opponents, the Roman soldiers are portrayed as the mockers of Psalm 69:22a.
In Matt 27:48, the Jewish authorities offer a sponge soaked with vinegar to the crucified Jesus, which is a clear allusion to the second half of the same verse (Psalm 69:22b). Due to the mode of the offering and the intertextual relation to Psalm 69:22, the gesture, which could in itself be well-intentioned, is turned into a mockery. In this light, the Jewish authorities are also characterized as mockers of the praying-self of the psalm and thus are portrayed in parallel to the Roman soldiers.
Considering that Matthew not only refers to Psalm 69:22, but also to the verse’s context, the parallel between the Roman soldiers and the Jewish authorities extends to a crucial point in Jewish self-conception: Both groups are presented similarly as being accused of ἀνομία and therefore as acting against the Torah.
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Of Absent Wombs and Dry Breasts: Why Are the Maternal Experiences of Pregnancy and Breastfeeding Rare in the Visual Record of the Byzantine Cult of Mary?
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
Maria Evangelatou, University of California-Santa Cruz
Motherhood was the most highly valued role of women in the ancient Greek and Byzantine world, yet two of the most visible lived experiences of mothers, pregnancy and breastfeeding, are not prominent in the surviving visual record. This is particularly surprising when considering the Byzantine cult of Mary who was praised as the Mother of God, and therefore a powerful intercessor and protector of the faithful. The surviving literary record includes frequent references to biblical pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, including Mary; and recent research suggests that in the Greek-speaking Byzantine world mothers would often breastfeed their children up to 3 years old. Depictions of Mary pregnant or breastfeeding would have been relatable and potent visualizations of the theology of the Incarnation and of Mary’s role as a loving and compassionate mother of all. So why are such images so rare in the surviving visual record? This paper examines literary and visual evidence to suggest that an answer to this intriguing question must consider dominant patriarchal attitudes that censored female agency and power since antiquity.
In the ancient Greek world, the male-dominated establishment considered children and the wealth of the household as the property of men and saw women only as stewards rather than as sources of life and wealth in their own right. Images of women pregnant and breastfeeding, therefore literally generating, briefly “owning”, and independently nurturing their husband’s children might have been avoided because they could have conferred special agency and empowerment to mothers. Indeed, the usual scholarly justification for the absence of pregnant women from the visual record as protection against the evil eye is not particularly convincing. If visibility was of concern, protective symbols could have been used around pregnant women to invoke a successful term. At the same time, breastfeeding was a widely practiced maternal activity. In fact, recent scholarly claims about breastfeeding as limited primarily to wet nurses are not supported by the textual record and socioeconomic considerations. Yet despite the importance of maternal breastfeeding, the nurturing nature of female breasts was marginalized in the visual record while their sexual connotations were given prominence.
Similar patriarchal notions about the role of women survived in the Byzantine world, where the male-dominated Church establishment often worked to distance Mary from all other women, even though women themselves could have looked up to her as an empowering and relatable model. The so-called Blachernitissa iconography popular from the 12th century onwards (Virgin orans with a medallion of Christ on her bosom) can be considered a multivalent symbolic representation of Mary both pregnant and unlike other women. Literal images of the Virgin pregnant or breastfeeding remained rare in Byzantium, while they proliferated in Western Europe form the 12th-16th centuries. The paper focuses on the cult of Mary in the context of a broader sociocultural and visual tradition regarding motherhood, with roots in antiquity, and attempts to explain why certain lived female experiences at home and in the street did not gain the visibility they deserve in Byzantine Christianity.
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"When Abiathar Was High Priest": Is the Reading in Mark 2:26 an Error? Observations on Pre-text Textual Criticism
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Craig A. Evans, Houston Baptist University
"When Abiathar was High Priest": Is the Reading in Mark 2:26 an Error? Observations on Pre-Text Textual Criticism
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Rizpah Daughter of Aiah and Her Role in the Deliverance of Israel
Program Unit: Book of Samuel: Narrative, Theology, and Interpretation
Paul S. Evans, McMaster Divinity College
This paper looks at the character of Rizpah, daughter of Aiah, and reads her as a critique of the misogyny in the David story. In a patriarchal society where women derive power from their family position (and a royal woman from her relationship with a ruling man), as secondary wife (pilegesh) of Saul Rizpah may once have held a measure of influence, though she is not mentioned in the narrative at that point. However, when we first hear of her in the narrative, her husband has died, making Rizpah’s status precarious. In her initial appearance (2 Samuel 3:7), Rizpah is not granted any words by the narrator and is also denied any action, but is instead acted upon. Rizpah is a powerless secondary wife of a deceased king who is at the center of a power struggle for the kingship in Israel. A pawn in the hands of powerful men, she would have been left a disgraced woman (perhaps cloistered as David’s concubines violated by his son become later in the story). Yet, in her second appearance in the narrative (2 Samuel 21) Rizpah emerges as instrumental to Israel's salvation. Heroically watching over the corpses of those slain by the Gibeonites, throughout the heat of the summer, Rizpah functions as a rebuke to David’s failures and shames him into action. Furthermore, this forgotten and neglected character functions to show God’s concern for the victim and the powerless. It is Rizpah’s actions, and not David’s, that initiate a change the course of this narrative. Rizpah will be read as one of several women (and not the first Saulide) in the narrative of 1–2 Samuel who act to save David and his monarchy.
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Let Them Eat Straw: An Ecological Reevaluation of Isaiah 11:6–8
Program Unit: Animal Studies and the Bible
Jacob R. Evers, Fuller Theological Seminary (Pasadena)
The depiction of non-predatory predators in Isaiah 11:6-8 has long posed a challenge for interpreters. Debate has generally centered on questions related to allegorical, figurative, and literal approaches to interpretation, and on the resulting implications of the text for human beings. But the accelerated decline of global wildlife populations in recent decades raises questions of a different sort for ecologically concerned interpreters, prompting ways of reading that engage the portrayal of non-human animals with sensitivity to the ideology underlying the text.
As this paper demonstrates, analysis of the logic of the envisioned state of affairs—with empathy for the wildlife—exposes enshrined human interests that tend to be overlooked or underemphasized in interpretation. While the concept of divine blessing ensuring economic stability is certainly meaningful in an agrarian context, implications brought out by a close reading of the text undercut constructions of the imagery in terms of a peaceable or ideal scenario. In what sense can the domination of predators for the advancement of human agricultural interests be considered a desirable outcome? Calling into question the suitability of the depiction so construed, this paper ultimately returns to the question of whether an allegorical reading may be the most useful for reflection in the contemporary world.
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Between the House of the Father and the House of the Lord: Privacy and Purity in the Israelite Dwelling and the Israelite Temple
Program Unit: Archaeology of the Biblical World
Avraham Faust, Bar-Ilan University
Houses are not only shelters from the elements; they accommodate households and families of various types, sizes and social configurations, and therefore embody a variety of social and cognitive aspects. The built environment allows for certain types of social activities and interactions, and therefore structure the inhabitants' perceptions. This clearly seems to be the case in Iron Age Israel. In this period a house of a very rigid plan – known as the four-room house – became very dominant, and this rigidity in itself might hint at its social importance. The social significance of the house as a social unit is also exemplified by the language – the word for the physical, structure, or "house" is also used to designate a "family" and even larger kinship units. The issue was addressed at length by a number of scholars, including Shlomo Bunimovitz and myself, and we argued that this house was a microcosmos of the Israelite world, serving as a window into all aspects of Israelite society, from family structure and wealth, to ethnicity, cosmology, perceptions of space, and even notions of social justice.
Temples, which served as the dwelling of gods, had always fascinated scholarship, and consequently received an un-proportional amount of studies. While Iron Age Israelite temples are a rare phenomenon, both the textual information on Solomon's temple and the finds at the temple of Arad (until recently the only Iron II Israelite temples excavated, and the only one whose full plan is clear) had received much attention. While some had suggested that Arad temple bore some resemblance to the period's dwellings, the differences are clearly more striking. An analysis of the dwellings of the mortals and the dwelling(s) of Israel's God, in light of the understandings gained from previous studies, reveals that they transmitted different, and even opposing messages regarding hierarchy, purity, and exclusivity. These insights help to clarify the way many members of the Israelite society understood the differences between the realms of the holy and the profane, which in turn appear to present a complementary picture of the way they perceived the world.
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THB 2 and the Interrelation of the Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic Deuterocanonical Books
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Frank Feder, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
The second volume of the series Textual History of the Bible is dedicated to the deuterocanonical books. The importance of the interdisciplinary approach of THB 2 is particularly visible in showing the clear interdependence in the transmission of certain biblical books which are regarded as deuterocanonical in the Greek and Latin tradition, but have been apparently an undisputed part of the Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic tradition.
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The Coptic Versions of the Old Testament: A Multidialectal Mirror into the Early Christian Reception and Transmission of the Septuagint
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Frank Feder, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
The Coptic translation of the OT, there is no doubt, was made on the basis of the Septuagint. As we have a number of important manuscripts in different literary dialects of Coptic which obviously antedate the famous Greek pandect bibles B, S, A, they are, of course, very interesting for the textual history of the OT. Since the Greek manuscript record is rather sparse for the early 4th century, it is still largely not clear which were the Greek Vorlagen for the Coptic versions. The few available text critical studies on the Coptic versions have revealed so far that some Coptic texts show a close relationship to the oldest available Greek LXX text (Minor Prophets, Job), while others (Jer, Lam) show clearly the influence of a recension, which must have used Origine’s Hexapla, regularly giving variant readings which deviate e.g. from the text of Codex Vaticanus (B).
The biggest obstacle for a more detailed picture of the Coptic versions is the extreme dispersal and fragmentation of the manuscripts. However, a positive aspect of this is that new textual witnesses keep appearing to add to this picture.
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Hittite Rituals, Scribal Culture, and the Priestly Source: A Glimpse Behind the Scenes?
Program Unit: Israelite Religion in Its Ancient Context
Yitzhaq Feder, University of Haifa
The aim of this paper is to offer an assessment of how the study of Hittite ritual traditions can contribute to the study of the formation of Priestly ritual texts. Research into the formation and transmission of the Hittite ritual texts has made remarkable progress in the past two decades and has benefited from both a rich body of primary data and a growing scholarly interest in the relationship between ritualistic and scribal activity. Questions that have been explored pertain to the authorship of these rituals, the reason for their textualization and how these texts were used in ritual performance. This extra-biblical evidence promises to illuminate the scribal processes that underlie the composition of Priestly texts, but it also has limitations, considering several unique aspects of the latter. Considering these methodological complexities, we will explore whether or not the Hittite scribes can offer us a VIP pass, offering a glimpse behind the scenes of P.
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Conceiving Motherhood: The Reception of Biblical Mothers in Jewish Literature in Late Antiquity
Program Unit: Religious World of Late Antiquity
Sari Fein, Brandeis University
This paper considers how Late Antique biblical retellings compare to the “source text” of the Hebrew Bible. It draws upon my dissertation, which investigates constructions of biblical mothers and motherhood in Jewish art and literature in Late Antiquity. In this project, I ask how these texts “think with” biblical mothers in an attempt to re-articulate gender roles and Jewish identity in a way that was meaningful in the multicultural and pluralistic Late Antique world. Part and parcel of this project is a careful comparison of the constructions of biblical mothers in post-biblical literature with their constructions in the Hebrew Bible. These comparisons reveal how retellings of biblical mothers in different Late Antique communities reveal wider beliefs, assumptions, and anxieties about gender, family, and Jewish identity.
In this project, comparison is accomplished through the methodology of reception history. Reception history examines the “afterlives” of texts, which are given new meanings in different times and places in history. In Late Antiquity, Jewish communities found themselves in a precarious position in relation to the majority culture in which they were located. The production of texts (both written and visual) that retold biblical narratives provided an imaginative space for Jewish self-definition over and against hegemonic forces. Ancient authors lighted upon biblical mothers as rich sites for retelling: biblical narratives established mothers as protective figures who would intercede on behalf of their children, and biblical retellings expanded mothers’ roles to include resistance against outside forces which threatened the safety of Jewish communities and the integrity of Jewish identity.
This paper will begin with a brief overview of my project as a whole, including methodological considerations. I will then provide a “case study” in which I compare Rachel as a bereaved mother in Genesis and Jeremiah with the reception of Rachel in the Late Antique rabbinic text Lamentations Rabbah. I will ultimately argue that the rabbis depicted Rachel as capable of interceding with God on Israel’s behalf precisely because of the power she had as a grieving mother. This comparison contributes to our understanding of the community which created Lamentations Rabbah in Late Antiquity.
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Political Texts of Terror in the Book of Judges
Program Unit: Joshua-Judges
Peter Feinman, Institute of History, Archaeology, and Education
“Texts of terror” is a phrase reflecting the physical mistreatment and unnecessary deaths of some women. It has been applied most prominently to two women in the Book of Judges: a daughter in Judges 11 and a concubine in Judges 19. The daughter is sacrificed as the result of a vow to Yahweh by her father and the concubine is raped, dies, and is dismembered. By any standards of human behavior, such treatment would be considered abusive justifying the term “texts of terror” for their stories. The implication in the term is that the stories were about individual human beings be they fictional or non-fictional. In this paper, I will take the approach that this perception is in error. No individuals were hurt in the creation of the stories or in their performance. Instead the stories are political polemics where the anonymous females are symbolic or metaphorical figures. To judge the stories as reflective of the treatment of women in Iron I Israel or any other time period is roughly equivalent to analyzing the role of women in the United States in the 21st century based on a story about a terrorist attack on Lady Liberty. What is generally overlooked in the exegesis of these stories is that the author intended them to be texts of terror. The author of these political polemics wanted his audiences to be outraged over what was happening to the female figures he had created. As a result a key to understanding the intention of these stories is to determine who is at risk: what is or are the political actions which are being taken and who is or are threatened by them?
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Tefillin or Amulets? Reconsidering Milik’s Undeciphered Tefillin and Mezuzah
Program Unit: Qumran
Ariel Feldman, Brite Divinity School (TCU)
This paper takes a close look at two miniature scrolls published by J.T. Milik as tefillin (4Q147) and mezuzah (Mur 5). Milik was unable to decipher these two texts. Still he classified them as tefillin/mezuzah, because they were inscribed in a minuscule script and folded. The preliminary edition of 4Q147 has just been published in DSD 26, whereas a tentative reading of Mur 5 will see light in the forthcoming issue of RevQ. Since none of the two texts contains the passages from Exod and/or Deut one would be expect to find in a tefillin/mezuzah, this paper asks whether these are tefillin/mezuzot or rather unique specimen of Second Temple Jewish written amulets.
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The Priestly Narrative: A Biography
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Liane Feldman, New York University
One of the shared conclusions of pentateuchal scholarship over the last two centuries has been the identification of a discrete stratum of the Pentateuch which has been labeled “priestly.” Debates continue about its nature and scope, but in this talk I will experiment with the idea that this Priestly Narrative may once have existed on its own as an independent piece of literature. This book, or “history of the heavens and the earth,” to borrow from one of its earliest internal refrains in Genesis, is first and foremost a story about Yahweh’s movement from the heavens to a mobile tent shrine in one corner of the earth. Far from a disjointed list of sacrificial rituals or cultic law, this priestly pentateuchal text is a coherent narrative composition that tells its own version of the history of the Israelites and their god, Yahweh. More specifically, it tells the story of a deity who, despite the best of intentions, is surprised time and again by the behavior of his creation, and must continually adapt and reconfigure the relationships between these parts of creation. Yet, this sweeping and dynamic mythological narrative has largely been obscured from plain view. This is because at some point in the Persian period it was combined with other non-priestly materials, a process that resulted in the Pentateuch. The Priestly Narrative must be source critically reconstructed—untangled from its combination with these non-priestly materials. Much of the work of pentateuchal scholarship in the last two centuries has been precisely this. Despite such extensive work on this priestly text, few scholars have looked seriously at the source as an independent narrative whole. This talk will provide a biography of a source-critically reconstructed pentateuchal Priestly Narrative, with particular attention given to its literary artistry and scribal context. What is the literary profile of this Priestly Narrative? What can we learn about this story when we read it from beginning to end? What vision of the origins of the ancient Israelites does it present? And what, if anything, can reading this text as an independent story tell us about its compositional context? This talk will explore the idea of an independent Priestly Narrative, and seek to describe this piece of literature that can now only be accessed by undoing the work of a Persian-era scribe.
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Composing Ritual: The Epistemology of Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Ritual in the Biblical World
Liane Feldman, New York University
Sacrifice appears in numerous forms throughout the Hebrew Bible. It is the cornerstone of the priestly pentateuchal source, appears in selected episodes in Samuel-Kings, is the subject of debate and, at times, derision in the prophets, and is woven into the poetry of the psalms. For the most part, scholars who have studied these texts related to sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible have used them to reconstruct images of ancient Israelite cultic practices at various stages of its history. In other words, the question most asked of sacrificial texts in the Bible has been a historical one: what can we know about actual religious practice in ancient Israel? Yet, the value of these texts is not in recovering praxis, but is rather epistemological: how did these authors think about and represent sacrifice? In other words, the literary representation of sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible should be used to learn about thinking, not doing. Quite unlike ritual tablets from Ugarit or sacrificial lists from Carthage, sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible appears in the midst of narrative stories, prophetic speeches, and poetry. It appears as part of divine instruction, poetic parallelism, prophetic visi | | | |