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2021 Annual Meeting
Meeting Begins: 11/20/2021
Meeting Ends: 11/23/2021
Call for Papers Opens: 1/20/2021
Call for Papers Closes: 3/24/2021
Requirements for Participation
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Meeting Abstracts
Rhetorical Strategies Used in the Qur’an for Creating the "Other": Examples from Surahs 5 and 9
Program Unit: Linguistic, Literary, and Thematic Perspectives on the Qur’anic Corpus (IQSA)
Jáchym Šenkyrík, Charles University
In academia, there exist today many important studies dealing with the issue of sources of the Qur’an’s polemics towards people of different faiths (esp. Jews and Christians). They posit the question, with what type of Christians or Jews or other non-Muslims was the Prophet’s ummah in contact? (Cf. studies since Geiger 1833 until today; more recently, for example, Van Riel 2019; Slade 2014; Gilliot 2011; etc.). However, in recent years another perspective has emerged that has shifted its focus from the external circumstances to the internal use of the “Qur’an’s creative rhetoric” (Reynolds 2014; cf. also Hoffmann 2020; Hawting 1999; Griffith 2011; etc.). It focuses on the usage of various rhetorical devices in Qur’an’s polemics with different groups of people. This contribution follows the latter perspective in order to ask the question of what rhetorical tools the qur’anic texts utilize in polemics with different faiths for creating the opposition between the “Other” and the “Self.” This opposition establishes a specific symbolic role for the “Other,” helping the “Self” to differentiate itself from the “Other.” The follow-up questions then ask about the purpose of creating this kind of contrasting imagery. Why are these particular rhetorical devices deployed for creating the image of the “Other”? Furthermore, are there also instances that problematize these oppositional stances? These questions will be answered by looking deeply at the two surahs revealed among the latest to Prophet Muḥammad, Q al-Ma’idah 5 and Q al-Tawbah 9. These surahs bear much polemical material towards non-Muslims, in which can be discerned the creative usage of rhetoric (cf. Q 5:17f, 59ff, 72f, 116; 9:30f, 109, etc.). On the other hand, some verses also problematize the clear distinction between the “Self” and the “Other” (cf. esp. 5:43ff; 9:1ff). This contribution will thus show how the Qur’an’s powerful rhetoric (hyperbole, irony, metaphor, vocatives, etc.) is used in order to create the opposing images between “Self” and “Other” as well as the purpose of this contrasting imagery in its immediate literary context.
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Bible or Aristotle? Biblical Bodies in “The Timeline”
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Ingunn Aadland, IKO–Church Educational Centre
“The Timeline” is a pedagogical tool produced to support Bible teaching for children in church catechism. In use, the illustrated timeline is rolled out on the floor. It displays 53 biblical narratives, each represented by one illustration, in chronological order. It starts with Adam and Eve in the creation narrative, and goes on with the stories of the Israelites, Jesus’ ministry, and concludes with the feast in paradise. “The Timeline” has sold well, and one can find it in almost every local congregation in Norway.
Complaints about the lack of female protagonists in recent Children’s Bibles are met in that Ruth and Rebecca are among the selected stories. Yet, ideas about gender in Antiquity, often assigned to Aristotle, appear to reflect on the present reception of the biblical narratives. There is no text on the timeline, yet some of the illustrated characters direct themselves to an implied addressee, through their gaze. In images that present both male and female bodies, the females have their eyes closed or only one eye visible. The illustrations in “The Timeline” reveal gendered power-relations, and appear to assign completeness to the male body, and deficiency to the female. Throughout, they cast women as deviant from the male. This paper presents an analysis of “The Timeline” through the lens of disability and gender studies. What are the body norms and stigmas produced through the illustrations? How do present interpreters imagine biblical bodies?
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Nor Anything Moist or Dry, but that it is in a Clear Book: The Significance of Two Approaches to Qur’anic Hermeneutics for the Iranian Constitutional Movement of 1906-7
Program Unit: The Societal Qur'an (IQSA)
Latifeh Aavani, Harvard University
This presentation examines the significance of two opposing approaches to qur'anic hermeneutics among Usuli Shi'i jurists in the Iranian constitutional movement of 1906-1907. The first approach was practiced by the anti-legislation jurists, namely those that opposed the constitution, the parliament, and the enactment of positive law besides Shari‘a. In this paper, I argue that the Qur'an is central to the arguments of the anti-legislation jurists in two respects: firstly, in all three anti-legislation treatises that I examine in this paper (by Fadl Allah Nuri [executed 1909], Abul-Hasan Najafi Marandi [d. 1930], and MuHammad Husayn Tabrizi, [d. unknown]), the structure of argumentation develops through the discussion of several verses of the Qur'an; and secondly their interpretive method with regard to these verses is literalist (the precise meaning of which I explain in the paper). More specifically, for the anti-legislation jurists, verses such as ‘nor any seed in the dark recesses of the earth, nor anything moist or dry, but that it is in a clear Book’ (Q al-An‘am 6:59) indicate that the Sharī‘a is complete, and therefore there is no space for modern legislation. Moreover, these jurists argue that whoever rejects the literal meaning of these verses, as they understand them, and argue that the scriptural sources do not offer adequate rulings have arrogated to themselves the Divine right to legislation (tashri‘) and thus they can be deemed infidels.
In the second half of the paper, I juxtapose this approach with the significantly different interpretations of the disputed verses proposed by the pro-legislation jurists. By focusing on the legal category of ‘emerging issues’ (al-mawdu‘at al-mustahdatha), the pro-legislation jurists, such as Muhammad Husayn Nayini (d. 1936), argued that there are necessarily issues that are not mentioned in the scriptural sources, and thus the disputed verses cannot be interpreted literally. Indeed, Nayini accuses the jurists with who follow the literal meaning of these verses of implicitly following the hermeneutic methods of the Akhbaris (a literalist school of Twelver Shi‘ism that had become sidelined by this point) despite the fact that the anti-legislation jurists self-identified as Usulis, the now mainstream interpretative tradition. As part of this argument, Nāyīnī focused on the concept of ghayr mansus (the area for which there is no scriptural text), using this concept to create a theoretical basis for positive law besides the rulings of the Sharī‘a.
By contrasting these two approaches, this paper seeks to show the enduring significance in the modern period of various pre-modern approaches to qur'anic hermeneutics, and the way this field shaped the central discussion among the ulama regarding the meaning and legitimacy of the goals of the Iranian constitutional movement.
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Tacit Tongues: The Development of Glossolalia in Late Antiquity
Program Unit: Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity
Philip Abbott, Stanford University
Glossolalia consumed Paul's community at Corinth. Like many Second Temple Jews, the Corinthians envisioned glossolalia as speaking in the language(s) of heaven, and they demonstrated spiritual preeminence by participating in this angelic speech. Bewilderingly, however, this practice that infatuated the earliest Christians virtually disappears in the second century. How could this happen? This paper argues that as Christians became increasingly exposed to Platonic notions of heaven, particularly via Philo, their conceptions of heavenly speech changed. Rather than imagining heaven as a place filled with angelic praises to divinity in foreign angelic languages, they believed heaven was a static realm of utter silence, without any speech whatsoever. As a result, practices of silence took the place of glossolalia as a marker of spiritual prestige for Christians. In other words, while first-century Christians placed importance on (rambunctious) glossolalia, which was the medium of heaven, later Christians found similar cachet in practices of silence, which for them was also the medium of heaven. Thus, the practice of glossolalia never truly vanished, it simply changed registers from ecstatic, animated speech to utter silence.
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Ambiguity as a Bridging Identity: The Role of Semantic Ambiguity in Forming the Prophetic Identity of Muhammad
Program Unit: The Qur’an and Late Antiquity (IQSA)
Diaa Abdelmobdy, University of Copenhagen
While Muhammad’s prophethood as presented in the Qur’an has been thoroughly investigated historically and theologically, it remains to be studied from a linguistic-rhetorical perspective. This study is a result of research conducted in the frame of the Ambiguity and Precision in the Qur’an project in which I work as a Ph.D. fellow. The project is held at the University of Copenhagen under the supervision of Professor Thomas Hoffmann. The study aims to explore the role of qur’anic language in shaping Muhammad’s identity as a prophet through analysis of a number of early Meccan passages, i.e., Q al-'Alaq 96:1–5; Q al-Muddaththir 74:1–7; Q al-Muzzammil 73:1–11; Q al-Duha 93:6–11; Q al-Sharh 94; Q al-Kawthar 108. The analysis focuses on ambiguity, which I define as the existence of at least two probable interpretations of a stretch of speech, as it appears in a number of polysemous words such as rabb, muzzammil, muddaththir, yatim, and dall. Other relevant techniques receive attention: second-person pronouns, the vocative, the active participle, and rhetorical questions. The American theorist Kenneth Burke (d. 1993) offers exciting methodological possibilities that could be exploited in studying the rhetorical aspects of ambiguity. According to Burke, the need for rhetoric arises when experiential ambiguity (that stems from life experience) interacts with symbolic ambiguity (that stems from language). In this interaction, ambiguity is effectively utilized as a rhetorical strategy. I combine Burke’s ideas with theoretical concepts belonging to identity studies such as self-identity, identity change, and role identity. The analysis reveals that ambiguity functions as a strategic management tool for overcoming identity uncertainty. By identification, the central concept in Burke’s rhetoric, ambiguity creates a bridging identity: a certain type of identity that links past biographical experience (e.g., orphanage which is mentioned in Q. 93:6) with a current role (as a prophet). In qur’anic expression, ambiguity is deployed to transfer the prophet from the stage of ya-ayyuha’l-muddaththir (“O thou shrouded in thy mantle”) in Q. 74:1 to the stage of ya-ayyuha’n-nabiyy” (“O Prophet”) in Q. 33:1. This finding suggests that qur’anic scholarship needs to reconsider qur’anic ambiguity not as a translation problem or a source of puzzlement but as a rhetorical device employed to achieve purposes. Besides, the insights gained from this study may be of assistance to reassess some of the various frameworks of qur’anic chronology that has been developed in Western qur’anic scholarship so that the chronological order of qur’anic chapters and passages could be constructed based not only on circumstances of Muhammad’s religious career but also on the rhetorical development of his prophetic identity.
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No Christian Left Behind: Faith-Learning Integration for Academically at Risk College Students
Program Unit: Teaching Biblical Studies in an Undergraduate Liberal Arts Context
Anthony L Abell, Trinity College of Florida
Faith-learning Integration suggests a systematic process linking biblical content and Christian worldview derived from it with educational content. This endeavor faces difficulty in academically at risk college students because of several characteristics such as lack of academic tools to do college level work and biblical illiteracy. Faith-learning integration requires critical thinking skills to incorporate faith into learning. One stage in assisting these academically at risk students is to use basic faith-learning concepts to teach them critical thinking methodology. Critical thinking skills learned will remain useful throughout their college experience and into their professional careers.
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Worship as a Denouement in Isaiah’s Structure
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Andrew Abernethy, Wheaton College (Illinois)
Praise infiltrates the Book of Isaiah more than any other prophetic book. Joseph Blenkinsopp makes this abundantly clear in his catalogue of at least 25 hymns or passages with hymnic influence from across Isaiah. A few scholars go further and recognize how worship is significant in the structure of the Book of Isaiah, specifically noting how Isaiah 27 and 66 both end with worship on Zion (Beuken; cf. Gärtner; Mitchell). Going even further, this paper argues that worship is more prominent in the structure of Isaiah than previously recognized. The argument will begin by observing how the topic of worship emerges at the conclusion of all of the major sections of Isaiah: Isaiah 1–12 (ch. 12), 13–27 (27:13), 28–35 (35:10; cf. 51:11), 40–55 (55:12–13), and 56–66 (66:18–23). Next, a linguistic comparison of these texts with one another and within the book as a whole will enable us to assess what, if anything, the recurrence of this theme at the conclusion of these sections reveals about editorial and redactional activity in the book. It will be apparent that worship is an impulse that animated the shaping of the sections of Isaiah and therefore the entire book (cf. 1:11–14; 66:23). The denouement of worship, then, is a significant feature in Isaiah’s structure.
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Centralization and Decentralization at the Table: Esther in Dialogue with Isaiah
Program Unit: Meals in the HB/OT and Its World
Andrew Abernethy, Wheaton College (Illinois)
When one brings the meal motif in Esther (1:3-4; 1:5-8; 1:9; 2:18; 5:4-8; 6:14–7:9; 8:17; 9:18; 09:22) and the eschatological banquet in Isaiah 25:6-8 into dialogue, a dialogical and canonical vision emerges. The result is a reading that coordinates the ideal of centralized feasting with the diasporic reality of decentralized feasting in Purim. This paper will carefully consider the dynamics of centralization and decentralization in feasting within these books and then ponder how this intersects with the adjustments to feasting within families and religious communities during the era of COVID-19.
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Food Studies and the Contributions of Feminist Biblical Scholarship
Program Unit: Meals in the HB/OT and Its World
Susan Ackerman, Dartmouth College
Feminist biblical scholars have contributed significantly to research regarding the roles women played in food processing in ancient Israel, especially the processing of harvested grain (wheat and barley) to make bread and related products (beer). Less is known about consumption, especially the degree to which women were able to join together with their households and larger community on feasting occasions
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The Construct of Private Enmity and Enemy Terminology in the Second David Psalter 51–72
Program Unit: Book of Psalms
Klaus-Peter Adam, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago
Violence and the social construct of private enemies play a pivotal role in the second David Psalter 51-72. The headings of the collection allude to ideal-typical constellations of David and his opponents (in 51, 52, 57, 59), and at the same time these perceptions of enmity strike associations to conflict settlement between private opponents as a general backdrop of these texts.
This paper poses the question: Can the enemies in the second David Psalter be assigned to a particular social construct of private opponents, and how do they relate to biblical conflict settlement laws?
In a first assessment, I will embed the subsequent deeper reflection on the enemy terminology in the general context of the construct of private enmity in antiquity and its hallmarks that are clearly reflected in the enemy allusions in Ps 51-72: The fluent passage from rhetorical to physical enemy attacks (Ps 57:5); the collective nature of private enemies that typically assault a victim as a collective (59:7-8, 15-16; 63:10); an overt act of a declaration between the two opponents, that is, a form of a public assertion about the mutual enmity (55:12-15; 22; 57:5); and, correspondingly, the clear cut role expectations for a private enemy or a friend once a dispute began. The dynamic of the dispute may best be described as feuding mechanisms typical for conflict settlement in kinship-based societies.
Seen against this background of social constructs of private enmity in general, a number of significant aspects of the enemies in Ps 51-72* present themselves. The paper will pursue three trajectories:
It will first consider the characteristics of the enemy terminology that the 2nd David Psalter exhibits, such as the use of composites (evil doers, blood thirsty men 59:3), the focus on the extreme of the enemies intent to kill (51:15-16; 55:24; 58:6; 59:3). I will also assess the gradual distinctions from the enemy terminology in the first David Psalter, before evaluating how these differences play out for the character of the sub-collection Ps 51-72*.
Second, I will ponder to what extent, when bracketing out the allusions in the headings, we can recover the legal discourse on enmity and revenge in the collection of the second David Psalter. I will in particular analyze enemy terminology as reflection of the legal discourse on private enmity and conflict settlement in the second David Psalter. This will allow for a more precise understanding of the function of the Psalms without their headings within the collection. I will ponder whether the sub-collection can be aligned with specific law collections, for instance, enemy concepts and homicide law in the Covenant Code, Deuteronomy, and the Holiness Code.
Thirdly, the paper will consider the function of the headings in the Psalter collection with regard to the specific construct of private enmity that underlies them. The paper will describe how enmity and the pursuit of David as ideal-typical righteous in the narrative traditions of 1Samuel 16-2Sam 5 presents a legal frame of reference of the redaction of the second David Psalter.
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On Dreams and Angels: A Discussion of References to Motifs of Jewish Apocalypticism in the Book of Qoheleth
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Moritz F. Adam, University of Oxford
This textual study concerns itself with problems in the interpretation of Qoh 5:3 and 5:6. These two verses are examples of the tendency in the book of Qoheleth to subtly polemicise against other contemporaneous theological ideas which do not map onto Qoheleth’s larger intellectual system. Another example along the same lines is Qoh 6:10 in relation to Job.
In the examples at hand in chapter five, we find engagement with two central motifs found in Jewish Apocalyptic literature (cf. e.g. Dan 7:1, 1 Hen 13:8) whose intellectual origins lie approximately in the same intellectual milieu as critical wisdom literature. Both of these are concerned with revelation of knowledge, specifically the conveying of it through dreams and angels. In the case of the latter it must be noted that my reading assumes a repointing of the Masoretic text as lĕpānay hammalāk instead of lipnê hammalāk.
Through this study I seek to contribute to scholarship on the book of Ecclesiastes in the context of its Geistesgeschichte. Specifically, I will suggest that while Qoheleth’s overall rhetorical tendency is not polemical, the study of these verses enables one to understand the book’s intellectual tendencies in its historical-intellectual milieu. This study will then consider the thrust of Qoheleth’s argument at large, in which such tendencies recur more implicitly. Specifically, I will suggest a relationship between Qoheleth and early Jewish Apocalypticism the nature of which I will seek to explicate through the exegetical consideration of the aforementioned verses and literary and larger thematic analyses. This paper is a small part of my doctoral project, which is entitled “On Time and Theology. The Thought of Qoheleth and the Emerging Jewish Apocalypticism in the Hellenistic Period.”
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African Understanding of Biblical Disability and Its Theological Implication on People Living with Disability in Nigeria
Program Unit: African Biblical Hermeneutics
Deborah Doyinsola Adegbite, Bethel Institute of Theology & Biblical Research
This paper explores Biblical disability and the understanding of Disability Theology from African Perspective through theological meaning of disability at street level. It discusses ignorance as a form of disability, how people with disabilities made themselves the victims of fake prophets, how deliverance ministers view and treat them religiously, and theological implications of street level disability theology for Nigerian Pentecostalism.
This paper also demonstrates Nigerians’ hermeneutical approach to interpreting the Bible using Reader-Response principles. The focus is limited to exegesis of John 9:1ff. (the story of the man born blind) in Gospel and in Acts of the Apostles 3:1-7 (the story of the lame man at the beautiful gate).
The findings highlight the socio-economic situation of those living with disability in Nigeria and conditions that underlie some preaching methods.
The paper concludes that with the political situation and economic problems in Nigeria might make it difficult or impossible for people living with disability to be relevant or be treated with respect even in the Church.
Key Words: Nigeria, Bible, Disability, Theology, Church, Culture, Pentecostal
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An Intercultural Reading of Mark 11:12–14, 20 in the Context of Yoruba Beliefs about Authority and Nature
Program Unit: African Biblical Hermeneutics
Adewale J. Adelakun, Obafemi Awolowo University
In Mark 11: 12-14, 20 Jesus curses a fruitless fig tree. It is one of the rare cases where Jesus uses his power to destroy nature. Jesus speaks to the tree and it withers because it is fruitless contrary to its semblance of having fruits. Jesus’ action has been adequately discussed from both ethical and theological perspectives. However, my aim in this paper is to interpret the text in the context of the Yoruba belief about authority and nature. There are certain Yoruba mythological and sagacious sayings which correlate with Jesus’ action in the text. Intercultural hermeneutics method will guide my interpretation of the text. The method is advocated by John Mbiti, Justin Ukpong and other interpreters of African descent. I will point out the implications of Jesus’ action for environmental degradation in Africa in my conclusion.
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Call Me Madonna: Concerning Mama’s Babies and Theology
Program Unit: LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics
Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones, Boston College
Call Me Madonna: Concerning Mama’s Babies and Theology
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David's "Conception in Iniquity" according to the Palaea historica
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
William Adler, North Carolina State University
According to the medieval collection of midrashim known as the Yalkut ha-Makiri, Jesse’s wife Nitzeves learned from a maidservant that Jesse had offered to emancipate her in exchange for sexual favors. She and the maidservant then agreed to secretly exchange places at the time of her pre-arranged liaison with Jesse. When his wife became pregnant after he unwittingly spent the night with her, Jesse erroneously supposed that David, the child conceived from their union, was illegitimate. A very similar tradition is also attested in two witnesses to the Greek text of the Palaea historica, a Byzantine retelling of biblical history composed sometime after the 9th century. The story is cited here to explain the meaning of David’s confession that "I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me“ (Ps. 50[51]:5). A more expanded version of the same tradition also appears in the commentary of Acacius the Sabaite on the Great Canon of Andrew of Crete (12th century). Acacius claims to have learned the story from an aging monk whom Acacius had met while visiting Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. In this paper, I will explore the various witnesses to the tradition and offer some thoughts about its origins and avenues of transmission.
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Narrative Catachresis in the Gospel of Mark: Making Sense of Suffering Royalty
Program Unit: Jesus Traditions, Gospels, and Negotiating the Roman Imperial World
Stephen P. Ahearne-Kroll, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
In The Psalms of Lament in Mark’s Passion: Jesus’ Davidic Suffering, I argued that Mark evokes several Psalms of Individual Lament (PssLam) to depict Jesus as a Davidic figure who is simultaneously royal and suffering, all the while expressing his suffering through protest and demands for God to intervene on his behalf. David is often depicted as such in these psalms and so is a fitting model for Jesus’s characterization in Mark. While this may be a defensible argument, Hans Leander’s excellent work on Markan imperial discourse has helped me think more complexly about Mark’s Davidic characterization of Jesus. I can now see that it is part of a larger, complex effort to present Jesus as a Israelite royal figure that appropriates Roman imperial discourse while simultaneously undermining it. This contradiction is more subtle than presenting Jesus as an alternative to the Emperor as an anti-Rome revolutionary. Instead, Mark constructs his narrative to include a major stream of discourse that presents Jesus as a wholly redefined Son of God and Christ that defies conventional expectations of a royal son of God or anointed one—a royal figure that suffers and whose divine sonship is claimed most fully on the cross. Mark’s depiction of Jesus can be viewed as narrative catachresis, understood as an expansion of the more limited employment of the postcolonial concept of catachresis, which is usually focused on an intentional misuse or redefinition of a single culturally important term as part of the strategy of negotiation by a colonized group. From the very beginning of the narrative, Mark asserts that Jesus is Son of God and Christ, and the rest of the narrative unfolds catachrestically to embrace Jesus’s royal nature and yet carefully redefine it to create a category of royalty that only comes to full expression on the cross in 15:39 and at the empty tomb in 16:6-7. This narrative catachresis presents a way for hearers of Mark to negotiate life in the Roman Empire as a community with a messianic charismatic leader who died such a shameful death.
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Epistemology of Exegesis: Tafsir and Ta’wil in Early Sunni Qur’an Commentaries
Program Unit: Qur’anic Studies: Methodology and Hermeneutics (IQSA)
Kamal Ahmed, Princeton University
Both al-Tabari (d. 310/923) and al-Maturidi (d. 333/944) titled their qur’anic commentaries as works of ta’wil rather than tafsir. This paper examines these two terms and seeks to trace their development and usage. I argue that these terms were used in the earliest Sunni exegetical works (100-300 AH) to represent different levels of epistemological certainty. Tafsir was used to denote meanings that were considered integral to the text itself and to be accepted at a level of (near) certainty (qat‘). Ta’wil was used to denote the best possible interpretations of the text, however numerous and mutually exclusive. These multiple meanings were then sorted and ranked for plausibility according to hermeneutical methods developed by different interpretive communities. It was only later that ta’wil came to represent allegorical interpretation, whether by Ismailis, Sufis, or the mutakallimun. For the early Sunni exegetes, the ahl al-ta’wil, as al-Maturidi refers to them repeatedly in his exegesis, were the scholars, often jurists (fuqaha), who strove to discover layers of meanings in the text. Even exegetical comments from early generations such as the Followers (tabi‘un) were treated as “ta’wil” unless there existed other corroborating evidence to raise their exegesis to the level of certainty of meaning reserved for “tafsir.” To establish these conclusions, I will explore how early exegetical statements attributed to Mujahid ibn Jabr (d. 104/722), Muqatil ibn Sulayman (d. 150/767), and Sufyan al-Thawri (d. 161/778) were treated in 3rd century commentaries. Third century exegetes such as al-San‘ani (d. 211/827), al-Tahawi (d. 321/933) as well as al-Tabari and al-Maturidi needed to navigate the conflicting exegetical statements made by Companions and Followers. In order to establish their own interpretive meanings, especially in issues of fiqh and kalam, third century exegetes posited their interpretations, or ta’wilat, as even more authoritative than the earliest transmitted exegetical statements, or tafsir, thereby blurring, if not reversing, the distinction between these two terms.
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Assessing Judaeo-Islamic Scriptural Heritage: A Case Study of Ibn Kathir’s Stories of the Prophets
Program Unit: Qur'an and Biblical Literature
Mohammed I Ahmed, University of Cambridge
Ibn Kathir’s Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyā’ (Stories of the Prophets) relates a great number of narratives of Islamic prophets and patriarchs, from the first human, Adam, to the seal of the prophets, Muhammad. The book is more intricate in its detail of prophetic narratives than the Qur’an. This compels Ibn Kathir to maintain a reliance on overwhelmingly Jewish external source material, to fill the prophetic narratives with details that provide coherence, totality, and agreement with set precedence. In so doing, similarities and differences emerge between his accounts and preceding Jewish accounts. The biggest points of divergence are the result of Ibn Kathir’s adherence to the concepts of Ꜥiṣmah (infallibility) and sharaf (dignity) of prophets. Ibn Kathir presents the prophets as incorruptible and unquestionable, in line with the Qur’anic view. The Jewish tradition however, often presents them as flawed human beings. This comparative analysis illustrates the manner in which Ibn Kathir utilised and remodelled Biblical narratives of prophets in order to uphold the two Islamic principles of Ꜥiṣmah and sharaf.
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Should Christians Continue to Consume Animal Foods in an Era of Crisis? A Nutritional-Intertextual Study of Genesis 1:29–30 during the Pandemic
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
Hojoon J. Ahn, McMaster Divinity College
In Genesis 1:29–30, God establishes a way of life surrounding how to eat. What does this mean via a nutritional-intertextual approach to the canonical texts? Through a scientific-nutritional analysis of Genesis 1:29–30, we conclude that the plant diet as part of God’s creation order was sufficient and good. However, we also question why God allows animal meals in Genesis 9:3, which presumes an animal’s death (cf. Genesis 3:21). Some would say that God permits animal foods because the first plant meal was deficient. Since the plant diet that God gave in Genesis 1:29–30 was nutritionally sufficient, it is difficult to say that animal diets are allowed in Genesis 9:3 to fill the nutritional deficiency. We argue that the emergence of the death of animals and animal diets is related to the idea that sins before God must be dealt with through death. To be more specific, we argue that God’s permission to eat animals in Genesis 9:3 is a temporary measure to solve the problem of human’s sin and its consequences. The problem of sin and its result could never be ultimately solved by repeated deaths of animals since they were just mediums and shadows to look toward/prepare for the Messiah. As the ultimate Passover lamb and sin-offering, Jesus Christ died “once for all” (Heb 10:10), fulfilled these shadows, and revealed the meaning of his death through the botanical sacrament. Therefore, we now infer that, after Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected, not only the animal sacrifices but also the animal meals will no longer have reason to be done in our lives. Of course, eating animal products itself is not a sin because God permits it (Gen 9:3), and none of us can condemn and judge each other (Rom 14:1–14). Our attempt is to show a meaningful way of life based on our scientific-intertextual reading of Genesis 1:29–30 with love and compassion in this era of crisis. We also believe the results of this study have a realistic meaning when considering the situation of animal diets as the cause of epidemic diseases such as Covid-19, the reality of factory farming, and the climate crisis as a by-product of environmental pollution via raising too many animals, etc.
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An Introduction to Biblical Studies with Ethics and Pachinko
Program Unit: Korean Biblical Colloquium
John Ahn, Howard University
This overview offers the framework for our discussion and session.
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Reexamining the Prophet like Moses in Acts 3:22 and 7:37
Program Unit: Intertextuality in the New Testament
Kai Akagi, Japan Bible Seminary
Christians have long confessed Jesus as having the threefold office of prophet, priest, and king. Two of the scriptural texts commonly cited in Christian interpretation as reflecting prophetic christology are the quotations of Deuteronomy 18:15, 18–19 in Acts 3:22 and 7:37. While some other New Testament texts, including in Luke-Acts (4:24; 13:33), identify Jesus as a prophet, does Deuteronomy 18:15, 18–19 function in Acts itself as a predictive prophecy fulfilled in Jesus as a singular anticipated prophet like Moses? Through considering the internal logic of the two speeches, their rhetorical and narrative contexts, and the reception of Deuteronomy 18:15, 18–19 and the Acts speeches in Jewish and patristic literature, I propose that Acts’s speeches cite Deuteronomy 18 as speaking of prophets in general rather than identifying Jesus as a singular prophet like Moses. By doing so, these two speeches affirm the prophetic anticipation of Jesus as the messiah, confront their narrative audiences for disregarding Moses and all the prophets who spoke of Jesus, and warn that they are cut off from the people of God unless they heed the call to repentance. They do so, moreover, in accordance with a Lukan theme of scriptural fulfilment in Jesus.
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Justice in the Fourth Gospel: A Christological, Covenantal, and Communal Paradigm
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Adesola Akala, University of Durham
The term “justice” is an elusive concept in John’s Gospel where the κρίνω word-group does not seem to reflect a social sense of justice that cares for the oppressed or marginalized (cf. Matt 12:18, 20; 23:23; Luke 11:42; 18:7-8). If the concept of justice exists in the Johannine narrative, what does it look like, and how is it communicated? This paper proposes that Johannine justice is rooted in the OT concept of mishpat (judgment), characterized by chesed (covenant love) which shaped Israel’s communal relationship with Yahweh. To the nation of Israel, Yahweh was simultaneously divine king and judge whose rule was inaugurated with a covenant ratified by manifestations of divine glory on Mount Sinai under Moses’ leadership (Exodus 24). Yahweh required faithful worship and committed obedience to his commandments, lived out within a community that reflected his covenant love. Failure to fulfil the requirements for this divine relationship resulted in the execution of covenantal justice by Yahweh, the divine Judge. Remarkably, the Johannine narrative resonates with these motifs of God’s divine relationship with his people. The Prologue unveils Christ as the Word who is eternally one with Israel’s God (1:1-2). John’s ingenious introduction culminates with a flashback that transports readers to Mount Sinai, Moses, and the Tabernacle that housed the commandments and the glory of God (1:14, 16-17). Herein lies Johannine justice, Christologically unveiled in the Son who embodies Yahweh and his commandments, is the object of faith and obedience and takes on the role of divine Judge. The Son calls people to believe in him, those who do not believe reject God’s word and commandments, and thereby come under eschatological judgment (3:18). Those who believe in the Son are committed to obeying his commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (15:12-13). In sum, the Gospel of John presents a paradigm and cornerstone for social justice. Johannine justice is Christologically unveiled in the commitment of believers who manifest love that flows from a covenant relationship ratified by the sacrifice of the Son, which is mirrored in community and displayed to the world.
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Greek Isaiah and the LXX Lexicon
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Matthew Albanese, University of Oxford
It is widely accepted that the Greek Pentateuch served in some capacity as a lexicon for later Septuagint translators. Yet some scholars demand a higher burden of proof than what is typically provided for such claims. In this paper I evaluate this topic in light of a discussion between Emanuel Tov and James Barr concerning whether the translator of Greek Isaiah appropriated the unique lexical pairing of גֵּר and γιώρας from the Greek Pentateuch directly into his work. Rejecting Tov’s appeal to Greek Isaiah’s unequivocal use of this pairing, Barr remarks: “No features of context or content have been adduced that might explain why the Isaiah translator, if he was consulting the LXX, avoided the massive majority of Pentateuchal renderings and just here adopted this highly unusual rendering, which is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew term.” In spite of Barr’s criticism of Tov, I propose that the translator of Greek Isaiah did in fact utilize the Greek Pentateuch as a lexical storehouse for this pairing. Even though I agree with Barr regarding Tov’s insufficient appeal to lexical statistics, I address Barr’s criteria of appropriation by highlighting four contextual and thematic features in Isaiah 14:1-4 in support of a direct appeal to the Greek Pentateuch. I conclude that the Greek Pentateuch’s lexical material included in Greek Isaiah 14:1-4 is in fact grounded upon other thematic and intertextual connections between these two literary corpora. Thus, perception into the lexical appropriation from the Greek Pentateuch into Greek Isaiah is reserved solely for those with ears to hear. As a result, this argument refines discussion of lexical appropriation from the Greek Pentateuch by demonstrating how interaction with contextual and thematic features of later Septuagint books contributes to our understanding of the Greek Pentateuch as lexicon.
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The Lord’s Final Perfection: Telos kuriou as Eschatological Salvation in Jas 5:11
Program Unit: Letters of James, Peter, and Jude
Martin C. Albl, Presentation College
James 5:11 reads, “You have heard of the perseverance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord (to telos Kuriou), because ‘the Lord is compassionate and merciful’” (NRSV). There is no scholarly consensus on how to understand the phrase telos Kuriou.
This paper argues that the telos Kuriou should be understood as the eschatological salvation of those who persevere through the trials of life. In addition to telos Kuriou, James uses several other phrases to refer to eschatological salvation: a person is “saved” (sōzō: Jas 1:21; 2:14; 4:12; 5:15; 5:20); a person inherits the kingdom (2:5); a person receives the crown of life (1:12). The sense of 5:11 thus closely parallels the sense of 1:12, “Blessed is anyone who endures temptation. Such a one has stood the test and will receive the crown of life…”
James’ choice of telos hints at one aspect of how James understands this salvation. This use of telos is one instance of James frequent use of the tel- word group, including the adjective teleios (1:4 [2X]), 1:17, 1:25; 3:2, the verb teleioō at 2:22, and the verb apoteleō at 1:15. This vocabulary signals James’ fundamental concern with completion and wholeness. One’s faith is completed by action (2:22); one completes the law through love (2:8). The “perfect” (teleios) person is one in whom the virtue of perseverance is complete (1:4). The perfect person is able to control the tongue and passions (3:2); this perfect person is integral and whole, the opposite of the double-minded person (1:6-8).
Salvation, then, is understood as one’s final completion or perfection in God’s kingdom: the telos Kuriou. Job, then, is a specific example of the person who has withstood the trials and temptations of life and has attained wholeness and received the eschatological crown of life (cf. 1:2-4; 12). Here James assumes his reader’s familiarity with traditions such a one finds in the T. Job 4:9-10, where Job’s resurrection is construed as his reward (“winning the crown”) for his patience.
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"Die Editio critica maior des griechischen Psalters": A New Long-Term Project of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Felix Albrecht, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen
This paper provides a brief history of the Göttingen Septuagint Editions up to 2019, and focuses on the new Psalter Project “Die Editio critica maior des griechischen Psalters” (Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen), which started at the beginning of 2020. The paper illustrates some of the challenges of the planned editorial work. First, an overview is provided of the editorial history, from the earliest printed versions to the Sixtine edition, followed by all other modern editions. Second, attention is drawn to one of the most urgent research tasks, namely the reconstruction of the fragmentary hexaplaric tradition.
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How does Collaborative Work Catalyze Personal Research?
Program Unit: History of Interpretation
Isaac Alderman, Baruch College (CUNY)
How does Collaborative Work Catalyze Personal Research?
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A Reading of Luke 19:1–10 from a Puerto Rican Perspective
Program Unit: Poverty in the Biblical World
Gonzalo R. Alers, Drew University
The struggles and frustrations of thousands of Latinas and Latinos who cross their national borders to find in the United States better living conditions, peace, security and equality are augmented by a racist, violent, and oppressive environment that serves as a reminder of the rejection and inhospitality of supremacist groups. Inequality is exposed every day to the world community with deplorable acts of violence, injustice and mistreatment. Latino/Latina adversities and frustrations are shared by other groups and communities around the world. A sharp contrast with the rest of Latino/a and Hispanic countries is the island of Puerto Rico and its inescapable peculiarity: in addition to its roots with “Latinidad” that goes back for more than 400 years, the Island has been controlled by The United States of America for the past 122 years, with an ongoing process that tends to erase the native identity and idiosyncrasy. In this sense, what about those who are somehow marginalized and oppressed in their own native soil? How disdain and violence can diminish individual and collective dignity, as well as the very essence of a society? This paper will attempt to contrast Puerto Rico and the story of Luke 19:1-10 in terms of the concept of internal colony.
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Formal Semantic Indicator: A Novel Analytical Device for Numismatic Iconographic Typology
Program Unit: Numismatic Evidence and Biblical Interpretation
Alexei Alexeev, University of Ottawa
The formal semantic indicator (FSI) is a novel analytical device developed to facilitate the description and faceted classification of numismatic iconographic types. The Serpentarium Mundi project serves as a testing ground for the FSI methodology (Alexeev 2020; 2021). The main objectives of this paper are to (1) introduce the FSI methodological framework to the broad academic community and describe its initial developmental steps; (2) demonstrate the device’s experimental application through the example of a particular iconographic sub-domain; and (3) solicit expert feedback from specialists in the field of numismatic typology regarding the methodology’s rigour, merit, contribution, and perspectives.
The introduction briefly discusses the pertinent theoretical and methodological concepts, such as the knowledge organization (Hjørland 2008; Smiraglia 2014; Svenonius 2000); domain ontologies (Staab and Studer 2016); faceted classification (Broughton 2006; Hjørland 2013, 2017; Hudon 2020; Ranganathan 1987; Szostak 2014; Vickery 1960, 1975); typologies and taxonomies (Bailey 1994); visual semiotics (Hébert 2020; Saint-Martin 1990); image theory (Mitchell 1986; Panofsky 1939); applied iconography (Rafferty and Hidderley 2005; Shatford 1986); and ontology-based iconography (Gartner 2019). Special attention is paid to the notion of numismatic artefacts as compact semantic units representing a distinct semiotic system (Elkins and Krmnicek 2014; Howgego 1995).
The FSI’s compositional components correspond to three main ontological categories: beings, properties, and relations. The device is comprised of three fundamental facets and contains twenty-six corresponding relational facets. There are (1) identifiers (deity, hero, mortal, notable, anonym, animal, creature, object, pair, duplet, group, set, cluster, and label); (2) descriptors (epithet, syncretism, representation, prosopon, morphology, aspect, and vector); and (3) operators (association, conflict, context, contiguity, and inversion). Thus, the FSI’s semantic hierarchy consists of three levels: (1) fundamental facets (e.g. “identifier”); (2) relational facets (i.e. iconographic categories, e.g. “deity”), and (3) iconographic subjects (e.g. “Apollo”).
The proposed nomenclature format for numismatic iconographic types consists of two facets: (1) primary and (2) secondary. The primary (essential) facet represents the main type and consists of two kinds of integrals: (1A) subject, a direct identification; and (1B) feature, a concise description of the subject’s distinctive formal characteristics. The secondary (existential) facet represents the dependent subtypes and consists of two kinds of differentials: (2A) variation, a summarizing inventory of the formal characteristics related to the subject’s morphology, aspect, or surroundings that distinguish one subtype from the others; and (2B) idiosyncrasy, a summarizing inventory of the subtype’s distinctive contextual attributes, related to the type-bearing coin’s origin, such as the issuing authority, mint, or date. The resultant nomenclature scheme can be represented as a four-part syntactic string: subject : feature : variation : idiosyncrasy (e.g. “Apollo : arrow-holder : left : Hadrianopolis”).
This presentation intends to initiate a discussion guided by three principal questions: Is the proposed set of twenty-six categories and the corresponding nomenclature scheme functionally sufficient for describing the enormous variety of numismatic iconographic types? What are the best practical ways of augmenting the proposed nomenclature scheme by adding corresponding numerical notations? Can the proposed methodological approach be successfully extended to other research domains?
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The Translation Technique of the Vetus Latina: Method and Criteria for Analysis
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Joshua Alfaro, Universität Salzburg
While much has been written on the translation technique of the Greek Septuagint, less attention has been given to the translation techniques of its secondary translations. This presentation will focus on that of the Vetus Latina. Research in the last several decades has made it clear that the Vetus Latina is an essential witness for understanding the textual development of biblical books, sometimes witnessing to an otherwise unattested textual form. Descriptive study of the Vetus Latina’s translation technique is necessary to show where the translators either represent or depart from a Greek Vorlage. As with the study of the Septuagint’s relation to its Hebrew source, certain grammatical, syntactical, and lexical features can be chosen as objects of study to reveal the Latin translator’s techniques. Taking the book of Esther as an example, this paper illustrates how the Vetus Latina’s translation technique can be studied, an assessment of Vetus Latina Esther’s stylistic characteristics, as well as its place on the spectrum of literal to interpretive rendering. Special attention will be given to the issue of revision towards Greek in the Vetus Latina textual transmission and the use of other secondary translations (in particular, Old Georgian and Armenian) as independent, corroborating data.
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The Canaanite Woman in Matthew 15:21–28: A Study of Matthean Particularity and Universality
Program Unit: Women in the Biblical World
Sammy Alfaro, Grand Canyon Theological Seminary
A careful reading of the Gospel of Matthew reveals two seemingly conflicting mission statements, whose contradiction is further highlighted in that they are both uttered by Jesus. The first of these is found in Mt. 10.5-15, where Jesus sends his twelve disciples on a missionary endeavor. Significantly, Jesus places specific limits for whom they are to proclaim the gospel. First, the intended audience is stated negatively: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles (ἐθνῶν), and enter no town of the Samaritans” (v. 5b, NRSV). Then, the indicated recipients are designated positively: “but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (v. 6). With these statements, Jesus stipulates firmly that the twelve are to take the message of good news to the Jews, and not the Gentiles.
In sharp contrast, however, Jesus’ gives an apparently contradictory mission statement in the Great Commission (28.16-20). In verse 19, the resurrected Christ commands the eleven: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (πάντα τὰ ἔθνη). Why would Jesus first confine the mission of his disciples to Jewish people and then make it universal? Why prohibit his disciples to preach to the Gentiles and then send them out to all the nations? What is the reason for such disparate missionary guidelines?
Jesus’ shocking recognition of his own mission further complicates the seemingly contradictory nature of the mission of the disciples. In the pericope of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15.21-28, Jesus declares: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (v. 24).” This statement seems to unequivocally indicate that in his ministry Jesus was limited to the Jews. What is more, Jesus seems to take a hostile attitude toward the Gentile woman. After she requests Jesus to heal her daughter, he says to her: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs” (v. 26). How is it possible to reconcile what Jesus says on this occasion with what he commands his disciples in the Great Commission? This paper seeks to explain the statements Jesus makes to the Canaanite woman by placing them within the broader overlapping Matthean themes of particularism and universalism.
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The Value of Patristic Exegesis for Understanding the Theological Implications of the Anthropomorphic and Anthropopathic Depictions of God in Hosea 11:1–9
Program Unit: History of Interpretation
Amy N. Allan, Wheaton College (Illinois)
The anthropomorphic and anthropopathic depictions of God in Hosea 11:1–9 provide a fruitful opportunity to highlight the benefits of incorporating insights from the history of interpretation within biblical studies, especially when the ultimate goal is to uncover the text’s theological implications. In the midst of what appear to be diametrically opposed characterizations of God, who is depicted as both the loving parent of a toddler and the angry punisher of a nation, Yahweh makes the declaration, “for I am God and not a man.” Thus, Hosea 11 presents a significant interpretive opportunity for better understanding how humanlike portraits of God can be read alongside the emphatic statement that God is not a human. For early Christian commentators, to take biblical anthropomorphisms and anthropopathisms as literal depictions of God violated the principle that any claims made of God must be both ἄξιος τοῦ θεοῦ (“worthy of God”) and θεοπρεπής (“befitting God”), which ultimately derives from their belief that Scripture is theologically coherent. At the same time, these interpreters were committed to the didactic import of the sacred text at every point, often reckoning with texts both in terms of the "plain" sense of the words and also at the level of theological claims arising from the texts. These commitments led early Christian commentators to find constructive meaning in an individual biblical text's flow of thought that could be connected to theological conclusions that make sense with the rest of Scripture. This paper will first identify and explore the theological tensions that surface from a careful reading of Hosea 11 in its literary context. It will then highlight the value of patristic exegesis for constructively resolving these tensions. Within Hosea 11, God is seen to punish Israel for failing to "return," but the text leaves several questions unanswered: What precisely aroused God's anger in the first place? What causes God to turn toward mercy? Was God's earlier anger justified? How are we to interpret the physical description of God's heart recoiling? Does God have any purpose in these dealings with Israel? By considering interpretive insights provided by patristic commentators such as Jerome, Theodoret, and Cyril of Alexandria, we can gain insights into what questions the text invites us to ask, and how to answer these questions with respect to both the text's discourse and its place within Scripture as a whole. For readers today who are interested in what conceptual coherence might be found in texts such as Hosea 11, both in its literary-historical setting and in terms of its theological implications, the interpretive strategies formulated by the church fathers have much to contribute.
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Power, Metaphor, and Divine Judgment in Hosea 2
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Amy N. Allan, Wheaton College (Illinois)
Accepted paper for the IBR group on the Book of the Twelve
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Echoes of the Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation in Heavy Metal Lyrics
Program Unit: John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern
Tobias Ålöw, University of Gothenburg
The reception history of the Book of Revelation has been widely discussed, with scholars such as J. Kovacs & C. Rowland, I. Boxall, T. Beal, and B. D. Chilton, tracing the manifold ways in which the biblical text has been understood and used in theological writing, music, drama, literature, visual art, etc. But whereas these, and other, studies have provided both broad-scope overviews, and detailed analyses of individual artifacts of reception, the question of how John’s Apocalypse forms a rich and recurrent source of inspiration for Heavy Metal music has, with few exceptions (see below), not been adequately addressed. This is unfortunate, considering the significant impact of the biblical text on this particular musical genre, and its sizeable audience. From Black Sabbath’s “Electric Funeral” (1970), through Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast” (1982), to Avenged Sevenfold’s “Beast and the Harlot” (2005), John’s dark and frightening account has lent itself to the musical and lyrical aesthetics of Heavy Metal. Indeed, there is arguably a deep connection between the ancient biblical text and this particular post-modern form of art. Both the Apocalypse and Heavy Metal use vivid and terrifying symbols to shake the respective audiences into waking up to the true reality of things. Moreover, they share many characteristics in ways they do so, employing imagery of death, horror, destruction, and violence.
Accordingly, building on previous studies of R. Till, and T. Malkinson, my paper addresses the hitherto largely neglected reception history of the Apocalypse in Heavy Metal, with special attention to its reuse in so-called thrash metal; an extreme subgenre, characterized by its overall musical/lyrical aggression and intensity, and not seldom disdain of Christianity. Triggered by the interpenetration between two seemingly incompatible discourses – on the one hand, the ancient biblical tradition, on the other, the secular practice of heavy metal music – I examine the literary reuse of John’s Apocalypse in Metallica’s “The Four Horsemen,” Megadeth’s “Blessed be the Dead,” and Testament “Seven Seals.” Taking my theoretical/methodological point of departure in G. Genette’s notion of transtextuality, I identify and describe: (a) the biblical material brought into play by the pertinent lyrics; (b) the different literary forms it takes as it is brought over; and (c) the shifting functions it plays in the new lyrical contexts. Through analysis of these aspects, the paper not only contributes to the ongoing work of mapping the reception history of the Bible in general, but also sheds new light on the rarely acknowledged issue of how words, images, and ideas derived from John’s Apocalypse take form in the historical, cultural, and hermeneutical, context of Heavy Metal.
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The Bible in the Discourse of Chaos: Analyzing Biblical Reception in Heavy Metal Lyrics
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Tobias Ålöw, University of Gothenburg
Already thirty years ago, sociologist D. Weinstein observed how heavy metal lyrics typically revolve around the two poles of ‘dionysian’ and ‘chaotic’ themes, and how the Judeo-Christian tradition provides a major source for the genre’s imagery and rhetoric of chaos. As Fisher and Watts succinctly and accurately put it: “from Sabbath to Slayer… biblical references abound in the metal scene.” Obvious examples are band names such as “Judas Priest,” “Exodus,” or “Avenged Sevenfold,” and song titles like Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast,” Testament’s “Seven Seals,” or Slayer’s “Cast the First Stone,” which all clearly echo biblical terminology. Still, the biblical roots run even deeper. Metal is a genre that regularly turns to Judeo-Christian discourse for its lyrical storytelling, and occasionally evinces both ingenious and thoughtful dialogue with the Bible.
But despite Metal’s long-standing occupation with the Bible, the lyrical corpus remains highly under-researched, and is only cursorily explored in a handful of studies. Moreover, analyses devoted to biblical reception in heavy metal lyrics are not only scarce, they are also (for the most part) theoretically and methodologically underdeveloped.
Accordingly, my paper has two objectives. First of all, it calls attention to this already substantial, yet ever-increasing, material, which may be of interest to scholars interested in the reception history of the Bible. Second, it suggests that G. Genette’s notion of transtextuality, and its methodological operationalization through the basic threefold approach – (1) identification of intertextual relations; (2) quantitative classification of intertextual relations; and (c) interpretation of intertextual relations – delineated by S. Gillmayr-Bucher, provides a fruitful framework for analysis. Finally, as a case-study, illustrating the usefulness approach, I also offer a brief analysis of Metallica’s “The Judas Kiss,” and its re-use of the New Testament story about Judas’ betrayal of Jesus, possibly as a metaphor for addiction.
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In the Middle of a Many-Coursed Meal
Program Unit: Meals in the HB/OT and Its World
Peter Altmann, Universität Zürich
This paper reflects on the strides taken over the course of the past decade in scholarship around the topic of food and feasting in the HB/OT in relation to the Ancient Near East and possible future directions for exploration. With regard to scholarly accomplishments, it highlights important studies of key iconographic and literary depictions of feasting in especially Levantine and Mesopotamian sources in connection to biblical portrayals. Turning to open vistas for study, it considers both Egyptian comparisons and links to Greek conceptions as possible avenues for future insights.
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Anointing the Body (Mark 14:3–9): Not as a Corpse
Program Unit: Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics
Xochitl Alvizo, California State University, Northridge
Anointing the Body (Mark 14:3-9): Not as a Corpse
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Qur’an vs Qira’at: Early Legal Discourses on Textual Authenticity
Program Unit: The Qur’an: Manuscripts and Textual Criticism (IQSA)
Yousef Wahb Aly, Faculty of Law, University of Windsor
Qira’at extend beyond recital renditions or exegetical traditions to theological conceptions of the Qur’an, its legal authority, and textual authenticity. Evolving around the same text, Islamic disciplines outlined an interdisciplinary framework to synthesize Qur’anic Studies. While theologians were concerned with the textual inimitability as a manifestation of God’s speech, legal theoreticians (usulis) scrutinized its jurisprudential authority within the dichotomy of primary and secondary sources of law. In investigating the authenticity of oral and written transmission, Qur’an scholars (qurra’) sought to standardize the canonized readings. Despite the Qur’an becoming a closed text after the ‘Uthmanic systemized print, the canonization of its qira’at continued over four centuries without agreed-upon criteria. This lengthy filtering process eventually established a tripartite taxonomy of canonical readings peculiar to that of the usulis who tried to limit the scope of canonical readings to maintain consistent legal interpretations. Furthermore, usulis incorporated, later, a theological-legal distinction between Qur’an and qira’at in response to the disputed authenticity of the text. Early Islamic legal and exegetical literature (8th and 9th centuries), concomitant to the establishment of the doctrinal legal schools (madhahib), relied on a wider array of qira’at than the later seven to ten dominant readings. The multi-layered meaning phenomena of qira’at influenced the deriving of legal rulings by confirming an agreed-upon opinion, outweighing one opinion over another, reconciling between conflicting opinions, extending the application of certain rulings, or clarifying an ambiguous meaning intended by the lawgiver. Moreover, qira’at triggered theoretical debates pertaining to distinguishing the preserved holy book from its variant readings, reducing the legal authority of non-canonical readings by equating them to verdicts of the Prophet’s companions (qawl al-sahabi) as secondary sources of law, and synthesizing textual additions (ziyadah ‘ala al-nass) of non-canonical readings as signals for abrogated verses (naskh). These debates paralleled evolving discourses of the epistemic principle of “true narrative” and the hadith concept of tawatur, denoting boundaries of legal certainty. There is sparse academic literature analyzing the impact of qira’at on the law. While qira’at’s canonization and history are fairly studied in academia, “the idea that specific types of readings were generated through early legal discourses has not been fully probed” (Shah, 2016, p. 203). In tracing these interdisciplinary interactions through the prism of Qur’an’s manuscript tradition, I seek to discuss how early usulis (8th – 9th centuries) defined Qur’an and characterized sources of law prior to qira’at’s prolonged canonization and taxonomy.
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Echoes of Genesis in the book of Chronicles: Their incidence and significance
Program Unit: SBL International Meeting Presentations
Itzhak Amar, Bar-Ilan University
Scholars continue to ask about the origin of the sources used by the Chronicler in his historical rewriting of the days of the monarchy. The central question is: Where did the Chronicler get the non-synoptic material found in the book? I will seek to answer this question through an examination of the connections between the books of Genesis and Chronicles. An investigation of the book of Chronicles (especially 1 Chronicles) will reveal that the Chronicler made extensive use of the book of Genesis. There is a solid basis for assuming that the book, or at least large parts of it, stood before the Chronicler and he often used it, especially in his free writing, that is, those portions that do not echo any part of the vorlage. I would like to show that the quotations from and references to the book of Genesis are not merely aesthetic, but were used with the intention of imparting to the new composition the meaning they bore in their original context in the book of Genesis. In this way, the book of Chronicles would become a platform that reverberates with the covenants and promises given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, thereby benefiting Yehud and its people.
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Moods of Exile: How Affects Affect Historiography
Program Unit: Historiography and the Hebrew Bible
Sonja Ammann, Universität Basel
The history of emotions is a much researched topic of the past 10-15 years. What remains much less studied, however, is the role of emotions in the writing of history. In ancient historiography, emotional states and reactions are commonly narrated with explanatory force for the deployment of events. Affects being a main driver of human actions, we could probably say that no history can be written without assumptions about emotional states. This applies not only to individual protagonists, but also to the general mood of an era. Modern historians, too, make assumptions and convey images of such moods – examples include Johan Huizinga’s Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), or recently Christopher Clark’s Sleepwalkers (2012) on the beginnings of World War I. The mood historians deem appropriate for their subject matter will guide their emplotment of historical facts and shape the storyline of the historical account. Of course, historians will seek to ground their assumptions about moods and atmospheres in contemporary sources. Consciously or not, historians of ancient Israel and Judah are often influenced in their attribution of affective qualities to events and eras by emotions conveyed by biblical texts.
The proposed paper will reflect on this issue taking as example the Judean history of the Neo-Babylonian period, where the assumption of certain emotions underpins plotlines such as «exile and return». The first part of the paper will contrast two accounts of this historical period, by Julius Wellhausen and Charles C. Torrey, which are set in a very different emotional atmosphere: In Wellhausen’s account, the history of the Neo-Babylonian period is essentially defined by what is lost and absent, characterized by feelings of longing and hope, while in Torrey’s account the Judean exiles are active and driven by entrepreneurial motivations, the prevailing mood being one of optimism. These contrasting historical accounts both have a basis in the diversity of moods depicted in biblical texts. The second part of the paper will therefore deal with biblical texts that convey such diverse moods of exile, paying particular attention to Ps 137. The gloomy atmosphere of this highly emotional psalm has proved especially influential in historical research, up to modern historical studies informed by trauma theory. The paper will discuss the extent to which this reception represents a selective reading and argue that the emotions in the biblical text are themselves a (retro-)projection shaping the memory of past events.
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On the Performative and Entertaining Use of Numbers in the Babylonian Talmud
Program Unit: Rabbinic Literature and Culture
Monika Amsler, Universität Zürich
In our present society, numbers are considered the virtual opposite of entertainment. Those who perceive them as such are quickly faced with the judgement of being “nerds.” Similarly, games and playfulness have, to a great extent, been moved out of the realm of adulthood (Ariès 1962). In late antiquity, by contrast, games were an important component of adult entertainment, including literary trivia or math games.
The approach to numbers was generally much different from the contemporary one. This was not only due to pervasive ideas like, for example, the Pythagorean ones, but also because of the simple fact that numbers were expressed in letters. This turned them into an important hermeneutical tool (Cuomo 2001).
Such interplay and playfulness with letters and numbers is also present in the Babylonian Talmud. Several scholars have pointed to the frequent organization of the talmudic text around numbers. This is mostly an implicit feature, observable in the number of examples accompanying a certain subject (e.g., Jacobs 1983; Valler 1995; Pasternak and Yona 2017). Sometimes numbered structures are more obvious, such as, for example, in the form of numerical sayings. At the same time, we also have quite some interesting scholarly work on talmudic mathematics that merits a contextual revisiting (e.g., Zuckermann 1878; Loewy 1935; Feldman 1931).
Indeed, a comparison with the arithmetic exercises in the Palatine Anthology points to the entertaining aspect accredited to arithmetic exercises. These exercises were not specifically addressing children or even students, as can be derived from the other material in the Anthology, but to challenge adults. Mathematical stories in the Talmud point to a similar mix between intellectual challenge and entertainment. This raises the question about the performative context of the arithmetic exercises and riddles in the Talmud. Entering the world of dinner games—by which we do not necessarily need to think of formal banquets or symposia—it seems that at least some of the numerical maxims and arithmetic stories could be the result of such games, or some sort of raffle)tags that accompanied presents, often leftovers, offered to the guests.
The present paper will provide an overview of this evidence and point to future avenues of thinking about performativity in the Talmud.
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“The Eyes of Faith”? Toward a Relational Understanding of Divine Presence in Late Antiquity
Program Unit: Religious Experience in Antiquity
Daniel An, Yale University
This paper explores the concept of divine presence in and through material objects in late antique Christianity. In asking how late antique Christians conceived of divine presence inhering in material objects, scholars of early Christian art have tended to front two analytical paradigms: vision and belief. For such scholars, divine presence is conceived as an ascription of divine agency or power to an object by late antique viewers on the basis of their belief in that presence. Such an approach, this paper argues, tends to result in a pair of linked dichotomies—presence/absence and belief/disbelief—that discourages further analysis of the ways that divine presence might be theorized as a social practice. The goal of this paper is to offer an alternative way of thinking about divine presence as a species of social practice: that is, as a process rather than a state, something that both objects and people “do” through interaction with one another.
Toward this goal, the paper examines two case studies that illustrate divine presence in late antique monastic Christian communities: apsidal niche paintings of Christ in a late antique Egyptian monastery, and portable crosses carried by monks in late antique Syro-Mesopotamia. In both cases, I argue, divine presence in these objects emerges as inextricable from the embodied, relational practices through which monastics interacted with the objects. The fact that such practices—including prostration, kissing, and speaking and listening—were also employed as relational behaviors between and among monastics helps to situation divine presence within the web of monastic social practice more broadly.
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Creation as Prophetic Initiation: Ismaili Exegesis (ta’wil) of the Quranic Adam Story
Program Unit: Qur’anic Studies: Methodology and Hermeneutics (IQSA)
Khalil Andani, Augustana College
The academic study of Ismaili Quranic ta’wil – often translated as “esoteric interpretation”, “allegorical interpretation”, or “spiritual exegesis” – is in its early stages with just one monograph by Hollenberg published on the topic. In that monograph, the author argues that medieval Ismaili ta’wil is meant to induce “new habits of mind” and thereby reinforce sectarian loyalty within the Ismaili movement and articulate veiled polemic against other Shi‘is in light of contemporary socio-political events. Accordingly, Hollenberg interprets the Fatimid Ismaili ta’wil of the Quranic story of Adam as a polemic against the Eastern Ismaili da‘wa that failed to recognize the Fatimid Imam-Caliph; in his reading, the Adam figure alludes to the first Fatimid Caliph al-Mahdi while Iblis refers to the da‘i who had betrayed him. Even though ta’wil in Ismaili thought is self-defined as a teaching that orients and guides the believer to his/her spiritual origin (awwal), Hollenberg’s thesis diverts the focus of Ismaili ta’wil to being primarily about socio-political events. In this study, I offer an alternative perspective to this reading by arguing that the Ismaili exegesis of the Adam story was coined to harmonize the Qur’an with Ismaili theology and soteriology and thereby deepen Ismaili community’s understanding of the Qur’an. My method is to analyze the Ismaili ta’wil of the Adam story as found in four sources: Sara’ir wa-asrar al-nutuqa by Ja‘far b. Mansur al-Yaman (10th CE), Asas al-ta’wil by al-Nu‘man (10th CE), Rawda-yi Taslim by Nasir al-Din Tusi (13th CE), and Zahr al-ma‘ani by Idris Imad al-Din (15th CE). I register core similarities of the Ismaili exegesis as presented over four centuries. I argue that the Ismaili interpretation of the Adam narrative found across these different Ismaili texts is primarily concerned with four theological goals: 1) safeguarding the absolute transcendence of God above all anthropomorphic qualities, such as vocal speech and literal breathing; 2) interpreting the creation of Adam from water and clay as his prophetic initiation as opposed to his physical creation, so as to affirm Adam’s natural birth from human parents; 3) establishing the concrete existence of the Imam and his da‘wa as a metahistorical channel of divine guidance on earth both before Adam and in succession to him; 4) positing Iblis as a renegade human teacher who reappears in every prophetic cycle, including that of Muhammad, to violate the protocol of taqiyya and betray God’s representative. The Ismaili reading of the Adamic creation story is primarily concerned with interpreting Quranic narrative in harmony with Ismaili theology, cosmology, and sacred history. One finds a consistent Ismaili exegesis of the Adam narrative from the 10th century to the 15th century, despite the varying socio-political contexts of these Ismaili thinkers. Therefore, the overall purpose of Ismaili ta’wil cannot be reduced to interpreting or situating socio-political events; it is self-styled as doing the opposite of this and this is confirmed by the content of the literature.
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In Search of the Quranic “Gospel”: Between Hermeneutics and History
Program Unit: Qur'an and Biblical Literature
Khalil Andani, Augustana College
The Quran speaks of God’s revealed message to Jesus as the “gospel” or al-injīl in the singular; it presents this injīl as a direct knowledge that God taught to Jesus and often mentions the injīl alongside the Torah (tawrāt) as if Jesus brought two revelatory teachings. The Quran further suggests that Christians continue to have access to the injīl. However, the identity of the Quranic injīl is hotly debated among medieval exegetes, modern scholars, and modern apologists. The injīl has been variously identified as a scripture that was subsequently corrupted by Christians, the New Testament, four canonical Gospels, or the Diatessaron. This paper sheds further light on the Quranic concept of injīl by reexamining the intra-Quranic and extra-Quranic contexts of the term injīl or “gospel”. I first argue that, from an intra-Quranic perspective, the injīl is not necessarily a book because the Quranic term kitāb denotes the idea of oral revelation as a manifestation of celestial divine writing as opposed to physical books. Second, I claim that the Quranic injīl is a specification of its revelatory idea of ḥikma, as every Prophet brings both kitāb and ḥikma. The Quran’s describes Jesus’ revelatory message as both tawrāt and injīl because the injīl is the ḥikma dimension of the tawrāt that Jesus taught. Finally, by considering Christian notions of the “gospel” prior to the Quran, I argue that the Synoptic Gospels, the New Testament, and certain Church Fathers had already envisioned a singular archetypal gospel that was subsequently manifested in the four Gospels. One early meaning of “gospel” in the New Testament was Jesus’ preaching about the Kingdom of God. In presenting Jesus’ teachings that God revealed to him as the true injīl, the Quran is reiterating an early concept of “gospel” found in the New Testament and echoed by Church Fathers.
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Critical Hook Culminating in Hebrews 10:9 Clarifies the Referent as Christ’s Physical Body Sown in Death, Not the Abolishing of an Eternal Covenant
Program Unit: Hebrews
Christy M. Anderson, Fresh Start Church
Many scholars, particularly the well-known commentator Vanhoye, have long puzzled over several difficult incongruencies in Hebrews 8-10. One of these incongruencies can be clarified today, and the evidence presented will further bolster Vanhoye’s own argument for the 3-fold superior second “ministry” of Christ. The most provocative insight related to the hooks used in chapters 8-10 culminates in the deliberate switch of the gender of the “hook” term itself from the feminine form, used 8 times, to the neuter form used in the 9th and final “hook” (in 10:9). The switch to the neuter grammatically indicates that the antecedent refers to the “first” incarnate “body” of Christ being sown in death and not to the first Covenant directly.
The author’s switch to the neuter form in 10:9 is significant, deliberate, and powerful. It is significant because it supports the idea that the referent of the “hook” terms first and second are referring specifically to “a person,” not covenants, nor ministries, nor worship as Vanhoye previously suggests (p. 302). It is deliberate, as Max Zerwick, in his book Biblical Greek Illustrated by Examples, explains this grammatical dynamic in Greek when he points out the fact that, “When the emphasis is on quality,” the neuter is used of persons, as also seen in Hebrews 7:7 and John 3:6; thus, the neuter here “lays down the absolute and universal principle based on the distinction and separateness, each in its own sphere, of the natural and supernatural orders” (Zerwick, p. 47). Finally, it is powerful, because even though covenant action is certainly in the background, the grammar and immediate context forces us to apply the referent as to a person who is dying and not to a Covenant being abolished, and by the greater context, to a climax in fulfilled Promises of God in Christ in 10:9 according to the 3-fold superior pattern of 8:6 (Ministry, Covenant, Promises) noted by Vanhoye to manifest at various levels of analysis throughout.
The author’s use of the “hook” to allegorically compare the two realms (9:8-10; earthly and heavenly) and two ages (the present age and the age to come), in which he pinpoints the referent of the ultimate “time of reformation” (in 9:10), sets the stage for his central and culminating message with regard to the incarnate “body” of Christ, and specifically, our Lord’s death, burial, and resurrection, which are specified in grammatical, contextual, and dynamic literary detail in Hebrews 10:9-10.
By recognizing the clear referent in this passage as centered on the physical body of Christ, the focus and culminating point of the book that the author seeks to bring to a climax in 10:9-10 is clarified for all readers. The change itself keeps Christ and His work at the center of the author’s focus and removes controversial disparities in logic that otherwise result, and to which commentators like Vanhoye were themselves dissatisfied in their own research when the traditional assumptions being made, which assumed the referent to be a Covenant directly, is forced upon the text.
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"It's Your Funeral!" Covenant Curses in Amos
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Jeff S. Anderson, Wayland Baptist University, Anchorage Campus
Amos 4:6-11 is drawn from the second of three poetic sermons in chapters 3-6, each beginning with the phrase, “Hear this word…” This oracle recalls a series of seven calamities that God "gave" to Israel. The number seven is probably not coincidental, as two key curse texts from Leviticus 26:24 and Deuteronomy 28:22 each echo seven remarkably similar covenant curses. Uttered in the first person, God announces this string of corrective judgments meant to awaken Israel to the realization that they need to repent. The recurring refrain, “yet you did not return to me” reveals Israel’s persistent refusal of divine correction. A hymn fragment follows the string of curses in 4:12-13, and celebrates the creativity of God.
Amos utters a third poetic sermon as a scathing lament (Amos 5:1-17). At the heart of this lament is second hymn fragment (5:8-9). The lament frames the hymn in a way that suggests the lament and hymn might be interpreted together. Amos 5:11-12 also takes up performative curse language echoed in legal curse texts. Israel will never drink wine from the lush vineyards they had planted; never live in the palatial houses of quarried stone. “You will build a house but not live in it. You will plant a vineyard and not enjoy its fruit” (Deuteronomy 28:30).
In the theophany of Amos 9:1-4 the Lord promises chilling images of sword and exile reminiscent of Leviticus 26:33. Amos 9:4 ominously concludes, “I will keep my eye on them for evil and not for good” (Amos 9:4, Jeremiah 44:27). A third and final hymn fragment (9:5-6) transitions to more promising language of a surviving remnant. Amos 9 reverses life-negating curse language altogether, replacing it with the blessing of restoration and renewal.
Allusions to covenant curses in Amos raise relevant issues for discussion: applying speech act theory to written texts, dating of the Torah’s/Amos’s curse texts, relation of the hymn fragments to the book of Amos, and the social function of curses and blessings.
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A rhetorical approach to the audience in Romans
Program Unit: SBL International Meeting Presentations
Robert D. Anderson, Denver Seminary
In the history of the interpretation of Paul’s letter to the Romans, the nature of the audience has been debated concerning whether the primary recipients are Jews or Gentiles. While many contemporary commentators see a primary or full gentile audience (e.g., Das), there are commentators (e.g., Mason) who propose a Jewish audience based on positive comments towards Judaism evidenced in the letter. Still others (e.g., Cranfield) propose a mix within the audience. I would suggest that there is a mix not just of Gentiles and Jews, but of believers and unbelievers, based on the rhetorical situation. An examination of the rhetorical situation, defined by Lloyd Bitzer as “the nature of those contexts in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse” ("The Rhetorical Situation," Philosophy and Rhetoric, Supplementary Issue,1992). What I am proposing is that a fourfold model of the audience based on the rhetorical situation can be constructed as follows: (1) The primary audience is composed of gentile believers (in Jesus as the Messiah), who have laid claim to replacement of Jews in the lineage of Abraham by faith, and who have withdrawn from the synagogue community; (2) a secondary audience consists of Jewish believers in Jesus and who are returning (or have returned) to Rome based on Nero’s rescinding of the edict of Claudius; (3) a watchdog audience composed of the broader Jewish community in Rome where unity is required for the protection of the believers in both groups; and (4) a gatekeeper audience who are decision makers. As per Richard Vatz’s examination of Bitzer’s process, an internal analysis of the text is also required to establish the rhetorical situation. As such, a brief examination of Paul introduction in Romans 1:1-17 will provide evidence for this model of the audience.
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What is given to Jesus as the “Prophet like Moses” in John 6:35-40
Program Unit: SBL International Meeting Presentations
Robert D. Anderson, Denver Seminary
The accepted understanding of John’s use of πᾶν ὃ in John 6:37 and 6:39 is that, in some way, πᾶν ὃ refers to the subsequent clause, either as depicting individuals (e.g., Schnackenburg) or the totality of believers (e.g., Bruce). This paper is an exploration of an alternative reading, where this combination refers to the antecedent declaration that Jesus is the bread of life, with that metaphor itself being a reference to the eschatological judgment and life-giving authority given to the Son as defined in John 5:17-30. As such, it is this eschatological authority that is given to Jesus in view here, not individual believers or believers corporately as suggested by many. Individuals are still in view in that those who believe receive the judgment and gift of eternal life. The bread of life narrative of John 6 is part of a larger narrative section running from John 5-7 where the identity of Jesus has been called into question and a series of proofs are offered to identify that Jesus is “the prophet.” The approach taken in this study will be to examine John 6:35-40 from this broader context. I will provide a thematic understanding of “the prophet like Moses” with reference to the analysis done by Wayne Meeks. A brief outline of the broader narrative framework of John 5-7 (as defined by Peder Borgen) provides a series of proofs of Jesus’s role. The dividing line being presented to the Jews who challenge him is faith in Jesus, who is the eschatological prophet providing the word of life. I will then argue that the adjective/relative pronoun combination πᾶν ὃ is a reference back to this authority given to Jesus as the bread of life with reference to the prophet.
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The Road to Emmaus: Experiencing the Risen Christ and the Nature of the Resurrection
Program Unit: Psychology and Biblical Studies
Royce Anderson, Independent Scholar
The Road to Emmaus narrative (Luke 24:13-35) was pivotal in the growth of the Jesus movement following his Crucifixion and death. For his mourning followers, it was convincing evidence of his Resurrection. This and other post-crucifixion Jesus encounters are at the center of Luke's theology. As Hans Conzelmann (1960) noted years ago in his commentary on Luke, "It is the presence of the crucified Jesus that makes Christian faith possible." The Emmaus story has been described many ways, including as a "cult legend”. However interpreted, the Resurrection cemented the faith and commitment of Christians from the first century BCE on. This paper examines the Emmaus narrative through the lens of Group Dynamics, which describes the influence of groups on their members’ behavior. First developed by Kurt Lewin, the acclaimed “Father of Social Psychology”, this broad theory continues to be elaborated by social psychologists today. Specifically, I will explore the processes of group formation and group cohesion focusing on the concepts of bonding and belonging to partially explain Jesus’ influence on his followers. I will then examine the concept of charismatic leadership, first defined by Max Weber and expanded upon by psychologists and biblical commentators. This includes studies of cults as a subcategory of group formation. Methods to study Jesus as a charismatic leader have also been applied to Mohammad, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and others. On the negative side, it’s been applied to leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. I will explore how these concepts help describe the Jesus movement in the context of first century Mediterranean culture. Although these theories don’t fully explain Jesus’ remarkable and enduring impact, they do help us interpret the Emmaus narrative in a different light. Luke is called the “physician”, which implies that he understood the science of his time. This was a turbulent period in science and philosophy. A mere lifetime after Rome’s military subjugation of Athens and Palestine’s absorption into the Roman Empire, people were rediscovering Aristotle and challenging the prevailing Platonic paradigm. Aristotle’s view of physical reality held that a thing’s essence (those essential qualities that define its true nature) are distinguished from its accidents (incidental characteristics that don’t define its true nature). Visual and other perceptions are generally considered to be accidents. The well-educated first-century person would not be surprised that Cleopas and his companion did not recognize Jesus in the stranger’s physical appearance. But with the breaking of the bread (the Jesus movement’s core bonding ritual) they were emotionally overcome and identified the stranger with Jesus’ true presence … at least for a moment. The literary framework of this Lucan narrative suggests that Jesus’ true presence lies not in his physical body, but in his followers’ emotional responses to their shared breaking of the bread ritual.
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The Beelzebul Controversy: Contributions of Frans Neirynck to the Reconstruction of Q and to the Synoptic Problem (1986, 1995, 2001)
Program Unit: Q
Olegs Andrejevs, Loyola University of Chicago
The so-called Beelzebul Controversy (Mark 3:22-30; Matt 12:22-30; Luke/Q 11:14-23) has been something of a Grand Central Station in the study of the synoptic problem. It is a “go-to” text for Q skeptics and proponents of alternative synoptic solutions, featuring multiple Mark-Q overlaps (Q 11:15, 17b-18, and possibly 11:16 and 11:21-22) in addition to parallels in the double tradition. In the last decade alone, this text was engaged in publications by Eric Eve (2015) and Mark Goodacre (2018), proponents of the Farrer hypothesis (Luke’s use of Matthew and Mark).
For a Two-Document hypothesis (2DH) scholar, the text poses broader questions than simply functioning as an important battleground in the synoptic debate. The reconstruction of this Q segment is famously fraught with difficulties, which include separating Q from Mark in the Mark-Q overlaps and accounting for the origin of εἰδὼς in Matt 12:25a and Luke 11:17a. Of particular significance are Q 11:16 and the portion of Q listed by the Critical Edition (2000) as Q 11:[[21-22]]. In the latter, the double brackets tell the story (or, more accurately, pose the question): did Q feature the parable of the strong man?
In this paper, I would like to revisit the contributions to the study of the Q Beelzebul Controversy made by Frans Neirynck, in a 1986 article (addressing the issue of εἰδὼς) and a pair of essays (1995 and 2001, addressing the potential Mark-Q overlaps at Mark 3:27 and 8:11). These contributions and Neirynck’s reconstruction of Q have not received sufficient attention in recent scholarship. I will suggest that Neirynck’s observations extend beyond the sphere of a 2DH scholar’s immediate interests (such as Q’s reconstruction) and have direct implications for the synoptic problem.
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Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Ancient Greek Traditions
Program Unit: Nature Imagery and Conceptions of Nature in the Bible
Anna Angelini, University of Zurich
This paper aims at investigating ways of conceptualizing nature in ancient Greek traditions. It will retrace the origin of the notion of physis in archaic poetry and in pre-Socratic philosophy, as well as its development toward the idea of “laws of nature,” i.e., predictive and absolutely objective principles governing physical reality, which emerge in later philosophical traditions. It will pay particular attention to the role of divine powers in shaping and directing natural phenomena. In this regard, it will specifically investigate the relationship between the ideal laws of nature and natural law, as a universal moral code underlying reality. Such a perspective may offer fruitful potential for comparing notions of nature in ancient Greek literature and biblical literature.
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The Materiality of Late Antique Egyptian Monasticism: An Archaeology of Affect
Program Unit: Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World
Camille Leon Angelo, Yale University
Scholars have struggled to reconcile the literary landscapes of late antique Egyptian monasticism with archaeological realia. Hagiographies frequently portray monks as living in spaces far removed from civic society, but the material evidence seems to tell a different story. Monasteries were located across highly variable landscapes, which, archaeologists have argued, do not match the isolated topographies described in the textual accounts. Attempting to push back against the “mythology of the desert,” some scholars have understood the archaeological evidence as the “physical reality,” and the literary landscapes as “imaginary.” While this critique has its place and has helpfully highlighted the rhetorical utility of such hagiographies, it nonetheless remains an explanation rooted in a dichotomous view of city and wilderness that presumes that monastic spaces must be physically remote to be removed. Drawing on queer approaches to affect, archaeology, and ecocriticism, I will argue in this paper that the materialities of monasteries, in fact, could produce just this sort of emotional affect among their inhabitants. I examine the archaeological and documentary evidence of two late antique Egyptian women’s monasteries located in urban environments, showing how these spaces, despite their proximity, cultivated feelings of isolation and alienation in female monastics. At sites such as Atripe and Abydos in Egypt, material strategies of mediating access to spaces, bodies, and practices within monasteries served to regulate monastics’ attachments and intimacies in ways that reinforced their sense of separation, guardedness, and withdrawal.
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Debating the Domestic at Dura-Europos: The Christian Building in Context
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
Camille Leon Angelo, Yale University
At the ancient city of Dura-Europos, private homes were architecturally adapted across the late second and third century by different religious groups to serve the needs of their communities. Although the Christian Building, Synagogue, and Mithraeum all began as domestic structures and share a similar architectural development, the former’s domestic origins have received unique attention and ongoing emphasis. This has been cultivated and maintained across decades of scholarship, both through the use of terminology that presupposes a quasi-domestic character for the building, and in the efforts to situate the structure within a model of Christian architecture that endorses a direct progression from house-church to basilica.
Through a critical reexamination of the archeological and material evidence for the architectural adaptations made to the building by a Christian community in the third century, this paper argues that the emphasis does not align with material reality, but is a product of modern assumptions about ancient space. A quantitative analysis of the architectural adaptations indicates that, following its renovation to accommodate Christian community use, the building did not bear a material relationship with the specific domestic structure that had preceded it. Comparison of three-dimensional reconstructions and daylight simulations of the structure before and after renovation reveal that the architectural adaptations reconfigured the space such that visitors could use and experience it in ways that were categorically different from its domestic antecedent and, importantly, effectively divested it of the key architectural features that constituted Durene household space. Disentangling the material reality of the structure from modern imaginings, the Christian Building emerges a product of its unique built environment. The long-held view of the structure as occupying a pivotal place in a seamless trajectory of Christian architectural development is thereby shown to be untenable, while the contextual approach emerges as fruitful not only for fresh consideration of early Christianity and ritual space, but for understanding religion and the built environment at Dura-Europos more broadly.
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On Divine Malevolence and the Rehabilitation of Cain in Baudelaire's Poetry
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Elizabeth Apple, Vanderbilt University
Evil haunts Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (1957; 1861). Indeed, the collection’s title suggests that evil sublates even beauty. The collection attends to the titular provocation by devoting itself to a sweeping study of evil that blames, in turns, humans, Satan, and God for the existence of evil. Fleurs thus attends to the most persistent theological issue that monotheism provokes: theodicy, or the reconciliation of divine benevolence and manifest evil. Yet this paper demonstrates that although Fleurs attends to theodicy, the text does not ultimately participate in reconciling divine benevolence and manifest evil. Instead, Fleurs demonstrates that evil is primarily derivative of divine malevolence: the text is antitheodic. To this end, Fleurs enters a debate both ancient and contemporaneous. Theologians have engaged in theodicy since the genesis of monotheism itself, both proliferating arguments that “justify the ways of God to men [sic],” and proffering divine malevolence as a resolution of divine omnipotence and manifest evil. Yet scholars have not adequately explored either Fleurs’ position in this debate, or the extent to which Fleurs’ language recalls biblical source material. This paper explores Fleurs’ representations of divine malevolence—or its evidence of antitheodicy—by centering the poem “Abel et Caïn.” The poem appears in the text’s short “Révolte” section, which, in the 1861 edition, links the eponymous section with the final one, “La Mort.” “Abel et Caïn”—indeed “Révolte” taken as a whole—insists that evil issues not from humans or from Satan, but from God. Recalling both the Genesis 4 narrative and the book of Job, Baudelaire’s “Abel et Caïn” culls an antitheodic reading from the Cain and Abel legend.
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Confronting Our Dry Bones: Transitioning toward Community Post-traumatic Growth in Ezekiel 37:1–14 and in the Era of COVID-19 and Racial Injustice (USA)
Program Unit: Bible and Practical Theology
Deborah A Appler, Moravian College & Theological Seminary
Scholars note that the book of Ezekiel reflects the trauma experienced by this prophet and his Judean community who are forcefully displaced and exiled to Babylon. Ezekiel moves from wealth and privilege to a new home by the Wadi Cherith, under Babylonian control. The book of Ezekiel emphasizes that the exiled community's actions lead to their present predicament (9:9; chs 18, 20). Many of Ezekiel's sign acts and metaphors reflect the shame, despair, and trauma this community faces. In trauma studies, psychologists identified the possibility that those traumatized can choose to give up or grow beyond their suffering. Lawrence Calhoun and Richard Tedeschi (1999, 2004) labeled the latter posttraumatic growth (PTG). While this approach is usually applied to individual trauma, recent practitioners have applied PTG to traumatized communities who reconstruct their belief systems to create something life-giving. In Ezekiel, we witness this growth when the Temple and Jerusalem are restored (chs. 40-48). However, before the community can reach this new sense of wholeness, they need to come to terms with what causes their brokenness.
We argue that Ezekiel 37:1-14 serves as a transitional space and opportunity for the spirit to work in the exiled community to confront the roots of their trauma to grow wiser and healthier through PTG and apply it to our contemporary situation. God forces Ezekiel to deal with the reality of his nation's brokenness and the part in which he and his compatriots. Verse one describes how the hand of the Lord grabs Ezekiel and catapults him via God's ruah into the middle of a valley filled with scattered and desiccated bones that represent the present state of the community of Israel. Further, God leads him all around these bones (v. 2) so Ezekiel can gain perspective on this community's fractured nature, represented in these carcasses. Likewise, our nation is in exile and has been brought to a halt and forced to confront our dry bones--the murders of George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, and countless other BIPOC individuals, too many by police brutality. Further, we have faced the deaths of loved ones from COVID-19 and the inequities of testing and vaccine distribution. The dysfunction in our community is exacerbated by the violent political insurrection at the Capital and the gross injustices of society in general.
In Ezekiel 37:3, God asks, "Mortal, can these bones live?" God challenges Ezekiel, who represents the traumatized nation, that the community has a choice to make. Will they choose to remain broken, dried, and lifeless, or will they choose life by creating a just society (PTG)? Today, we see glimmers of growth and hope through people coming together to feed the hungry, march against racial violence and injustice, and in communities having courageous conversations around systems of White Supremacy and other inequities in our nation. Reading Ezekiel 37:1-14 together with our contemporary context requires us to ask if we will breathe new life into the dry bones that surround us to create a narrative of hope like Ezekiel's.
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Recensional Method as a Clue to Rhetorical Purpose in the Admonition of the Damascus Document
Program Unit: Qumran
Avigail Aravna, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The scrutiny of the text of CD 4:12-5:19 that deals with the transgressions of the builders of the barrier leads to a better understanding of the text’s recensions and conceptions through its use of scriptures. Scholars such as Davies, Knibb and Kister have outlined the literary growth of the passage as the combination of halachic rulings concerning sexual conduct with the concept of the defilement of the sanctuary. In this paper I will focus on the numerous tropes of biblical separation terminology in lines 5:12-19 to show an additional stimulus for the rhetorical elaboration of the text and its inner arrangement.
I will compare this passage with CD 6:14-7:4, directed to the trespassers who led Israel astray; which also utilizes the text of Lev 20:25-26 to frame separation from outsiders as an instruction to who have been brought into the covenant.
This discussion, in its turn, has an influence on the identification of the builders of the barrier, as has been discussed by Hultgren in the Damascus Document and in other Qumran texts.
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Distinguishing Methods of Transmission through Attention to Imagery: The Case of 1 Enoch 54:1–5, 67:4–7 and Isaiah 24:21–22
Program Unit: Wisdom and Apocalypticism
Avigail Aravna, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
This paper will explore the literary narrative connected with the tradition about the judgment and punishment of the kings and mighty of the earth as found in the Second Parable (Chapters 45-57) and the Third Parable (Chapters 58-69) of Enoch. My paper took shape in contemplating David Suter’s suggestion that the parallelism between these passages is related to a perception of the nature of evil as both political and cosmic: a perception that is entirely consistent with an apocalyptic worldview.
These parallel passages, both of which portray the tradition of the imprisonment of the host of heaven and the kings of the earth in the valley of metal, were written or edited with the Book of Watchers in view. However, the Enochic passages also bear a significant resemblance to the structure and content of Isaiah 24:21-22.
While I believe that the imagery does not function in quite the same way in the parables as it does in the earlier Isaianic tradition, its use helps to identify distinct traditional units within the Enochic material that may be seen as part of a trajectory of development from the Isaiah passage to other Second Temple literature.
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Meme War: Xenophobia and Ideology in the QAnon Conspiracy Theory
Program Unit: Violence and Representations of Violence in Antiquity
Marc-Andre Argentino, Concordia
Conspiracy theories have infiltrated ever larger areas of cultural and political life. Conspiracy tends to be substituting or complementing fundamentalist religious values, while also providing content that is successfully used to advance political and ideological agendas. In light of recent violent attacks, emphasis has been put on how information is distributed through conspiratorial cultures in digital spaces. This paper will examine the discourse from the Qanon movement in an attempt to understand better how xenophobic conspiracies and tropes transition from fringe platforms to mainstream platforms, in an attempt to be more established and closer to the mainstream, by representing xenophobic beliefs as a legitimate “alternative view”. Using a mixed methods approach, this paper will seek to provide evidence in an effort to answer the following questions: 1) how does the ideological fringe community use tactics to influence the other, and if so in what manner does this influence represent itself? 2) Does the xenophobic framing of issues and discourse lead to violence?
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A Mixed Heritage: Stereotypes and Eschatology in Contemporary Evangelical Textual Criticism
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Yaakov Ariel, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Contemporary Evangelical textual criticism is varied and holds different schools of interpretations. While some promote more tolerant, or friendly, attitudes towards Jews and minority groups, others uphold Replacement Theology and deny any positive role for the Jews in God’s plans for humanity. One can also hear voices that express outright hatred along racist lines. The proposed presentation wishes to provide a map of evangelical textual criticism and its cultural and political contexts.
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Spillers, Sacrifice, and Sacrament: A Black Feminist Approach to the Racial Symbolics of Christian Order
Program Unit: LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics
Amaryah Shaye Armstrong, Virginia Tech
Frank Wilderson's use of the term "metaphysical holocaust" to describe what happens to Africans in the Middle Passage has increasingly gained significance in black studies as a way of distinguishing between anti-Semitism and anti-Blackness. Black scholars have increasingly taken this "metaphysical holocaust" as coincident with the transformation of African personality into black chattel that Hortense Spillers describes in her foundational essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe." Yet, Spillers makes explicit use of *eucharistic* terms, describing this transformation as *transubstantiation*. While on it's own, this may not be a crucial distinction, this paper situates Spillers' articulation of this black transubstantiation within a larger examination of sacrifice in her work. In so doing, I show how Spillers identification of Christian sacrificial logics in the racial order enable a non-analogical examination of the role of sacrifice in the reproduction of status that race names. This paper thus extends Spillers sacrificial insights to recast the difference between anti-Blackness and anti-Semitism in terms of sexuality, legitimacy, and the reproduction of Christian order.
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Isaac as a Check on the Story of Sibling Rivalry
Program Unit: Genesis
Russell C.D. Arnold, Regis University
Isaac is at the heart of two of the most significant stories of sibling rivalry in Genesis; his conflict with his older brother Ishmael, and his role in the conflict between his sons Esau and Jacob. These two accounts bookend Isaac’s life, the first coming soon after his birth, the second coming in the face of his impending death. Within the narrative, the estrangements that result from these rivalries also identify the parameters of the future relationships between the chosen sons within the covenant, Isaac and Jacob, and the “foreign” neighbors who are seen to be Israel’s enemies for generations to come (especially as they serve in postbiblical interpretations to represent Arab Muslims on the one hand, and Roman Christians on the other). Given the power of these conflicts and their history of interpretation, it is important for readers today to take care not to read into the text a more severe conflict/estrangement than is justified by the accounts themselves. This is especially important in the texts describing the climax of these encounters, which are full of ambiguity. The present paper seeks to revisit Isaac’s role in these rivalries as a check on the story of exclusion and separation, in favor of connection and mitigation of conflict.
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Working with the Gods
Program Unit: Social Scientific Criticism of the New Testament
Richard Ascough, Queen's University
There is plenty of evidence in early Christian texts suggesting that Christ adherents were laborers. For example, Paul presents himself as “working with his hands” while the writer of Acts narrates Paul and others interacting with people in various occupations. Using evidence from occupational associations, I will examine how the gods populated such working environments. Given the size of the Christ groups, it is unlikely that there were any exclusively “Christian” workplaces. Thus, I will explore strategies that Christ adherents might use to find balance between the diverse cult practices related to their occupation and the singular commitment to Christ that their leaders expected them to uphold.
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The Embodied Psychology of Divine Attachment in the Prayers of Job
Program Unit: Prayer in Antiquity
Shelley Ashdown, Dallas International University
Prayer is the most significant of all attachment behaviors by the worshipper with The Worshipped. In this paper, Attachment Theory is the research methodology to explore how prayers uttered by Job use sensory language to reveal the dynamic understandings of Job about his God. Attention is given to answering sensory research questions concerning the four criteria of divine/human attachment relationships in religiosity. The first query is for proximity maintenance and examines how Job utilizes sensory language to seek/find closeness to God. The second question concerns safe haven and explores how Job engages sensory language to seek/find refuge in God. The third interrogative relates to the notion of secure base and asks how Job employs sensory language to seek/find comfort in God. And finally, the inquiry for separation distress considers how Job enlists sensory language to express/alleviate separation anxiety from God. Sensory language from these four criteria reveal an embodied psychology of divine attachment in the prayers of Job.
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Chaos in the Land of Order: Egypt’s Geography through the Eyes of Ezekiel
Program Unit: Book of Ezekiel
Luiz Gustavo Assis, Boston College
Ezekiel’s oracles against the nations (chapters 25-32) have a straightforward geographical order in describing Yahweh’s methodical destruction of seven nations. As a Judean, he starts with the nations surrounding Judah, the Transjordanian polities to the east (Amnon, Moab, Edom), Philistia to the west (ch. 25), the territories north of Judah, Tyre and Sidon (chs. 26-28), and the land of Egypt in the south. In a few passages in Ezekiel’s oracles against Egypt, Yahweh seems also to have an orderly plan to destroy Egypt: from Migdol in the far northeastern Delta all the way to Syene (Aswan) in Upper Egypt (30:6; cf. 29:10). In the third oracle against Egypt (ch. 30), Ezekiel gets more specific on the geography of that territory by listing divine actions taking place in seven cities: Memphis (30:13, 16), Zo‘an and Thebes (30:14, 15b), Pelusium (30:15, 16), On and Pi-beseth (30:17), and Tehaphnehes (30:18). For those familiar with the Egyptian terrain, the text clearly shows a lack of geographical logic in the disposition of these toponyms prompting some scholars to disregard their mention as important for the oracle’s message. In this paper, I will argue that the Ezekiel’s erratic presentation of Egyptian geography was deliberative. By doing so, he underscored the chaotic outcome of Yahweh’s actions against Egypt. Just as the reader is spaced out by the destruction taking place in different parts of Egypt, so would be the Egyptians when experiencing Yahweh’s judgments. Furthermore, I will posit that by writing a disoriented presentation of the Egyptian geography in his text, Ezekiel was charging the Egyptian Pharaoh of not maintaining order (Ma’at) within its border, and allowing disorder (Isfet) to run amok.
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Reactions to the Assyrian Exile of the Kingdom of Israel in Isa. 10:5–15
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Shawn Zelig Aster, Bar-Ilan University
The "Ah Assyria" passage (10:5-15) has been extensively studied, and clearly mentions the Assyrian conquest of Samaria as an accomplished fact (v. 11). This passage responds to the exile of the kingdom of Israel in several ways, which will be explored in this talk. Firstly, verses 5-7 focus on two different Assyrian strategies for dominating territory, contrasting the taking of booty and lowering in status (i.e. the transformation of a kingdom into a vassal state) with the total destruction of a nation (i.e. exile and transformation into a province). Verses 5-7 can be correlated to the archaeological data emerging from the Assyrian province of Samaria, which shows extensive depopulation as a result of its transformation into an Assyrian province. Secondly, verses 8-10 refer specifically to the campaigns of Sargon II in the years 720-710, in which all of the areas mentioned were conquered and made into provinces. Thirdly, verses 13-14 explicitly engage the Assyrian boast of removing national boundaries. As I argued in my book _Reflections of Empire in Isaiah 1-39: Reactions to Assyrian Ideology (SBL ANEM, 2017), this reference, and other references in vv. 13-14, are taken from the boasts of Sargon II about his 714 BCE campaign to Urartu. This campaign was motivated by the Urartean king overstepping borders, and Sargon portrays himself as the restorer of borders. In Isa. 10:5-15, the prophet accuses the Assyrian king of ignoring the very borders he claims to respect. Linking the three points noted above, Sargon is here accused of ignoring the limits which ought to prohibit Assyria from exiling populations. This strategy of exiling populations was directly linked to the establishment of provinces, a practice which expanded greatly in the period of Sargon II. After discussing the passage, the talk will explore the horrid historical reality behind forced exile, and the ways in which this exile influenced Isaiah's theological view of Assyria. Exile by Assyrian forces cannot be seen as a privilege. Besides the cruelty involved in forced displacement, exile involved a total dismantling of many of the features which created a person's identity.
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Revelation and Rhetoric in Early Mu'tazili Writings
Program Unit: Qur’anic Studies: Methodology and Hermeneutics (IQSA)
Sheza Alqera Atiq, Harvard University
This paper traces the evolution of the literary trope haqiqa-majaz (literal vs. figurative speech) in the qur’anic commentaries of early, classical Mu‘tazili scholars circa 3rd/9th to 7th/12th century. While majaz has garnered increasing attention in Western scholarship recently, its use and role as a hermeneutical tool in Mu‘tazili works has been largely neglected particularly pre-Zamakhshari (d. 538 AH/1144 AD). Such a gap is striking given prevailing narratives in both Islamic and Western secondary scholarship that the emergence of the haqiqa-majaz dichotomy can be linked to theological concerns of anthropomorphism in emerging Mu‘tazili circles in the second and third centuries. This study will examine the extent to which majaz developed as an exegetical and rhetorical tool in Mu‘tazili commentaries, acquiring a technical meaning distinct from its early usage. A close study of the writings of figures such as al-Jahiz (d. 255 AH/868 AD), Abu Bakr al-Razi al-Jassas (d. 370 AH/981 AD), and Ibn al-Malahimi (d. 536 AH/1141 AD) shall reveal that the use of majaz as denotation of figurative or non-literal language in qur’anic verses occurred far earlier than has been suggested by scholars. Such early understandings and interest in the figurative naturally have implications for the literal as well; the paper is thus also interested in identifying moments in these works where the haqiqa-majaz coupling first begins to emerge. A key interest of this study is to consider parallels between the question of the nature of the Qur’an as a created versus uncreated entity in theological circles on the one hand, and the role of figurative language in God’s Divine Speech on the other. Such connections will invariably take us through critical moments in Islamic history such as the mihna (the Inquisition), underscoring the socio-political and historical-literary approach this project intends to take. Were initial references to haqiqa-majaz the sole purview of Mu‘tazili scholars or were they linguistic transformations to be found in broader works of Qur’anic studies? How did the emergence of this linguistic trope as a hermeneutical tool evolve during the classical period up until al-Zamakhshari in his famous qur’anic exegesis, al-Kashshaf? In answering these questions, this paper aims to shed light on a group whose literary contributions to qur’anic scholarship - quite apart from their theological treatises - are lesser known. It also hopes to contextualize the examination of literary and linguistic perspectives on the qur’anic corpus within the broader historic-political climate wherein these discussions took place.
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The Axiology of Divine Summons in Philo and Paul: A Diasporic Jewish Discourse
Program Unit: The Historical Paul
Christopher Atkins, Yale University
The case of Paul’s articulation of the ‘upward summons of God’ in Phil 3.14 is but another instance in which, as Samuel Coleridge noted in passing, Philo ‘has not been used half enough’—or so I argue in this paper. Although scholars have noted Philonic comparanda for Paul’s notion, they have neither analyzed them in any level of detail nor situated them in Philo’s wider contexts. This paper attempts to rectify the oversight and in so doing provide a model for reading Paul ‘within Judaism’ and in tandem with Philo, who, as Maren Niehoff writes, ‘is a most suitable point of comparison to Paul, because he is closest to him in terms of his dates, Jewish Diaspora background and use of the LXX’ (2020). I analyze Philo’s notion of the ‘upward summons’ in its wider literary contexts and intellectual frameworks and consider the ways in which Philo exhibits similarities and differences with Paul in Philippians. In particular, I highlight five similarities: their use of models to imitate; a radical transvaluation framed as a (re-)evaluation of earthly goods when compared with heavenly and divine goods; use of the imagery of an athletic contest; pneumatic enablement and (according to modern sensibilities) a tension between divine and human agencies; and finally, the transformation of the human in connection with a knowledge of the divine. I detail all five of these in both Philo’s conceptualization of the divine ‘upward summons’ (ἀνάκλησις) in De plantatione and Paul’s articulation of the same (ἄνω κλῆσις) in Philippians. Taken together with the fact that Philo is one of if not the only author/s contemporary with or prior to Paul who uses ἀνάκλησις to refer to God ‘summoning up’ humans—that is, the way Paul uses ἄνω κλῆσις in Phil 3—these similarities shed important light on Paul’s account of his radical re-orientation within Judaism. I argue that both Philo and Paul in Philippians comparatively re-evaluate or reconfigure central aspects of cultural and ethno-religious identity, yet neither rejects their Jewish identity. Rather, each subordinates key aspects of their ethno-religious identity to an experience of the divine, thereby transforming but not abandoning it. In articulating the telos or skopos of ‘the upward summons of God’, both Philo and Paul, diasporic Jewish kinsmen, participated in and give witness to a variable Jewish discourse about the surpassing value of a transformative experience of the divine, thereby militating against those who would divorce Paul from his first-century Jewish milieu, as well as those who would label Philippians 3 ‘anti-Jewish’.
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Back to Fronting: Common Ground as a Unifying Approach to Pre-verbal BH Constituent Order
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Ian T. Atkinson, Stellenbosch University
The study of fronting is no novelty in BH studies and the book of Genesis has been the primary object of such investigation. Unfortunately, outside of the information structure notions of topic and focus, previous treatments have only managed to compile diverse and seemingly unconnected taxonomies of semantic possibilities. In this paper I revisit fronting in Genesis and propose that the communicative principle of Common Ground holds promise for a unified approach. The distinction between categorical (topic-comment) and thetic (unified) statements will be analysed as an extension of the Common Ground model, not as a separate level of analysis, as both depend on the information status of the content of the statement. The former can be seen in the final clause of Gen. 4:2, וְקַ֕יִן הָיָ֖ה עֹבֵ֥ד אֲדָמָֽה׃, where Cain is discourse active and presented as the topic of the clause, and the latter can be seen in Gen. 6:4, הַנְּפִלִ֞ים הָי֣וּ בָאָרֶץ֮ בַּיָּמִ֣ים הָהֵם֒, where the entire clause is irretrievable from the Common Ground at the moment of utterance. These unexpected informational units are entered into the Common Ground by means of accommodation, whereby the hearer posteriorly accepts the presuppositions, the activation (or existence) of referential entities and the asserted content of the statement for the purposes of fluid and cooperative communication. Such is true if a person says to her friend, ‘Your shoe’s untied,’ without any previous discussion of the hearer’s footwear. The shoe’s status as topical is impossible and thus the entire state of affairs is profiled. It will be shown that, apart from more adequately accounting for pre-verbal clausal constituent order in BH narrative with typological evidence, the benefits of such an approach include a more robust methodology for tracing discourse thematic attention and the delineation of text-units.
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Leveling the Praying Field: Affective Materiality and Horizontal Relationships in Ancient Greek Religion
Program Unit: Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World
Ranjani Atur, University of California-Santa Barbara
In a modern western context, the relationship between god and worshipper is seen as almost exclusively vertical, a devotee approaching a dematerialized, transcendent deity. This theological orientation fails to account for the flexibility afforded to worshippers in daily religious practice. One of the primary sources of this dissonance is material. In a modern Christian perspective, we see horizontal interaction in activities like kissing icons or caring for effigies of baby Jesus. The directional conflict is more stark when we consider ancient polytheisms. Sacred images render divine beings materially and immanently present, and thus construct a horizontal plane of engagement. In this paper, I will reexamine the relationship between humans and gods in ancient Greek religion by focusing on the ways in which religious materials encouraged a more horizontal and reciprocal dynamic. Firstly, I explore how the size, tactility, and manipulability of object-deities allows status relationships between god and worshipper to be renegotiated. Secondly, I discuss the ways in which votive reliefs work to build and maintain these new relationships. Throughout, I bring in comparanda from Indian Hinduism and Meso-American Catholicism to show similar processes in different religious contexts.
My argument will engage with the recent surge in interest on affective materiality in Greek religion (e.g. Kindt 2012; Chaniotis 2011, 2012) but particularly with Maia Kotrosits’s The Lives of Objects, whose call to reevaluate the “ephemeral dimensions of life” through “what physically remains of the past” (6) I take up. The objectification of objects, or things, reinforces a false dichotomy between human subjects and inanimate objects. Such a view overlooks the fluidity of reality: humans are frequently objectified while objects take on animated qualities (24). I therefore explore the co-implication of human worshippers and object-deities by approaching both as “thing-beings,” that is, beings embodied in flesh or other material who, through their interactions, co-constitute each other’s reality. In doing so, I rely on recent trends in affect theory (e.g. Ahmed 2015; Hughes 2016; Rajagopalan 2017), which recognize the capacity of objects to act as affective archives and thereby enable individuals to define their religious self-identity horizontally and approach the gods as fellow social actors. Through this kind of examination, we can engage with the ephemeral dimensions of ancient life. The ubiquity of religious materiality in the landscape of the ancient city means that this dynamic was not only a quotidian but also a fundamental aspect of life in this spatial context, which was contoured by flows of decentered and distributed agency.
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Was Uriah More Righteous Than David? Identifying the Rhetorical Undertones in 2 Samuel 11
Program Unit: Book of Samuel: Narrative, Theology, and Interpretation
Jeffrey G. Audirsch, Leavell College
The relationship between David and Uriah is often underplayed in comparison to the adulterous acts of the Israelite king and Bathsheba. However, close scrutiny of the narrative in 2 Sam 11 reveals a Deuteronomistic critique delivered through a standard rhetorical trope of the DtrH, one that signals the imminent demise of David’s kingdom. The narrative of 2 Sam 11 begins with the indictment that David remains in Jerusalem while the armies of Israel, under the guidance of Joab, are at war. This initial indictment of David is not the only pejorative in 2 Sam 11. Often overlooked is Uriah’s response to David in 2 Sam 11:11, “Shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife?” I contend that the words of Uriah intentionally allude to the Deuteronomic laws governing the exemption clauses for Israelite warfare (Deut 20:1–8). The intertextual allusion between Deut 20:1–8 and 2 Sam 11 placed in the mouth of a foreigner is a standard rhetorical tool of the DtrH to highlight the king’s ignorance of the laws concerning warfare. Subsequent to Deut 20:1–8, the DtrH utilizes the Deuteronomic law governing the future monarch (Deut 17:14–20). The accumulation of horses, wives, and wealth have been linked to the lives of David and, more specifically, Solomon (cf. Deut 17:14–17; 1 Kgs 3–11). Yet, the rhetorical force of Deut 17:18–20 is also engaged in the background of 2 Sam 11. In vv. 18–19, the king is commanded to write a copy of the law approved by the Levitical Priests. The king is expected to read the law “all the days of his life,” which in turn would teach the king to fear the Lord (Deut 17:18–19). The final provision of this Deuteronomistic royal critique is the issue of the king’s heart. The future king is not to lift himself above his brothers (Deut 17:20). When viewed together, Deut 17:14–20 and 20:1–8 form the intertextual link with a key theme of the DtrH: David, like Achan, breaches the covenant whereas Uriah, like Rahab and the Gibeonites, show deep engagement with and reiterate the importance of Deuteronomic Torah. In other words, the DtrH puts the language of the Deuteronomic ideal in the mouth of Uriah much like others outside the covenant: Rahab (Josh 2:8–14) and the Gibeonites (Josh 9:9–15). Thus, this paper, in essence, identifies underlying connections between Deuteronomy’s rhetoric and the David and Bathsheba affair. The text of 2 Sam 11 shows David’s lack of knowledge and respect for the law he is, in the DtrH imagination, to copy and read daily. Furthermore, this paper proposes that the placement of a Deuteronomic ideal in the mouth of a foreigner in order to critique a Judean is a repeated rhetorical trope of the DtrH.
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Reflections on Polis, Town, and Village New Discoveries at El-Araj, Yodefat, and Tel Rekhesh
Program Unit: Historical Jesus
Mordechai Aviam, Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee
One of the problems of identifying Biblical Bethsaida with E-Tel as suggested by R. Arav is the description of Josephus Flavius in Antiquities 18:28 of Herod Philip establishing a polis. During the excavations at E-Tel almost no evidence of a Roman city design were identified. The identification of a Roman temple at the site is based on very little evidence, and all the rest are few village houses. Can a polis be just declared and continue to exist for a 150 years more without buildings few public structures, as suggested by the excavator? Our new excavations at El-Araj brought to light some archaeological discoveries that can refine the understanding of the meaning of a small polis. How a Galilean field town looked like in the 1st century CE? The excavations at Yodefat, together with a new season in the "fresco-house" give us another point of view. So is the case with the excavations at Tel Rekhesh which shed light for the first time on the smallest scale of Jewish settlement, a farmhouse, a private estate. Through these three examples we will try to have an overview of Jewish Galilean settlement in the first century.
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Wicked Kings in Hellenistic Judaism: A Case Study from the Book of Daniel
Program Unit: Hellenistic Judaism
Rotem Avneri Meir, University of Helsinki
The book of Daniel gives a unique local perspective on the downfall of the Seleucid Empire and of the end its rule over Judea in particular. In Daniel 11:45, the King of the North, recognizably Antiochus IV, dies in the area of Judea after wreaking havoc in the Levant, bringing an end to his kingdom. He is the only king in Daniel 11 whose death is depicted in detail. As a result, this passage has attracted considerable scholarly attention. Since the account of this king’s death does not match what we know about his final days from Classical and Cuneiform sources it is supposed to have been written in wishful expectation to it. This paper will address the question why Daniel 11:45 elaborates in such a way on the “end” of the King of the North and locates it around Judea. I will do so by situating the account of the king’s death in its immediate literary context—Daniel 11:40–45—demonstrating it is a discernable unit that predicts the end of the Seleucid kingdom and history itself. This context calls for a comparison with the only precedent for this kind of dynastic end in the Danielic tradition—the death of Belshazzar. A comparison between the King of the North and Belshazzar reveals a literary pattern in which the wicked king swiftly dies at the scene of his crime. It thus provides us with an explanation for the narration of the death of Antiochus as it appears in Daniel 11:45: it follows the pattern of Belshazzar’s death as punishment for his crime, especially given previous knowledge of his father’s—Nebuchadnezzar—misdeeds. This pattern was available for the scribe who wished to predict the death of the Seleucid king in 11:40–45. Nevertheless, the pattern’s entrenched cultural nature along with the trend to fictionalize this particular king’s demise even after the events leading to his death were known (e.g., 1 Macc 1–16, 2 Macc 9:1–28), raise the possibility that the scribe deliberately chose to conform with a meaningful literary convention over historical accuracy. I will conclude this paper with exploring the implications of this comparative historiographical reading on the historical settings and date of the final redaction of Daniel. These affect our understanding of imperial power shifts in second century BCE Judea and the way dynastic transitions were perceived by contemporary literati.
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A (Im)possible Biography of the Qur’anic First Addressee
Program Unit: The Qur’an and Late Antiquity (IQSA)
Mehdi Azaiez , Université catholique de Louvain
As is well known, the Qur'an is by no way a biography of Muhammad. As a text of exhortation in which various literary genres (narration, praise, description, polemic) are mixed, it remains an indispensable historical source, but incomplete and allusive to identify the probable contours of an exceptional prophetic career. In this context, what can we expect from a reading of the Qur'an in the (impossible) undertaking of writing a biography of Muhammad?
It will be argued here that it is possible to analyze the presence of a 'first addressee', that is, a primary addressee to whom the divine voice in the Qur'an is primarily addressed and whom Islamic tradition identifies with Muhammad. Starting from a mapping of this presence in the Qur'an as a whole, our analysis will present the distribution, forms and functions of this addressee throughout the qur'anic text (Part I). The analysis will continue with a description of the types of relationships that develop between the speaker (divine voice) and the first addressee by determining possible breaks and developments in this relationship (Part II). Finally, these last results will be the occasion to question the characteristics and the staging of the "prophetic" experience in the Qur'an (Part III).
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The Christian Erasure of the Sibyl’s Jewish Identity
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Ashley L. Bacchi, Starr King School for the Ministry
Book III of the Sibylline Oracles presents a Sibyl integrated into a Jewish axis of history as a kin to Noah, an ancestor to all those living in this post-flood world, a witness to all major Mediterranean events, the inventor of hexameter verse, and a female prophetess sent from Babylon to Greece by God, offering salvation for all that are wise enough to receive it. I have argued in my book, Uncovering Jewish Creativity in Book III of the Sibylline Oracles: Gender,
Intertextuality, and Politics, that the initial Jewish authors of Book III were conversant with the Archaic Greek as well as Roman Sibylline traditions but offered an innovative new branch of Sibylline discourse. The Christian appropriation of the Sibyl as a pseudepigraphal voice of
prophecy used this Jewish branch of Sibylline discourse as its model, but unlike the interpretatio Judaica which positioned her power as emanating from her role as the prophetess of the One True God, her role was diminished as she was slowly tokenized as a pagan proof text, an outside
witness to the coming of Jesus. Her subsequent reputation focused not on her role as a prophetess proclaiming the past, present, and future to all but rather solely as a herald of the Messiah, a particular message which expressed little concern about wider universal history. Nevertheless, she was still seen as a powerful enough persona to show the Emperor Augustus a vision of the Madonna and Child in response to his question if there would be a man more powerful than himself. The Christian appropriation of sibylline discourse presents a range of attempts to negotiate how to best draw power and authority from Jewish, Greek, and Roman traditions in
order to substantiate a supersessionist position over those very traditions. This led to the downplaying and ultimately the erasure of the Jewish Sibyl from the tradition because it did not fit the dualist model in which the Sibyls and Hebrew prophets functioned as representative voices from two different communities proclaiming the validity of the Messiah that would unite them both.
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“But Can He Fight?” Re-approaching Saul’s Characterization as Royal Warrior
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Matthew Bach, Trinity College Bristol / Aberdeen University
Accepted paper for the IBR research group on the Early Historical Books.
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Repetition with Variation in the Dialogue and Narrative of Judges
Program Unit: Joshua-Judges
Elizabeth H. P. Backfish, William Jessup University
Variations in repetition are rarely identified as the most riveting aspects of narration. However, biblical narrators often use this device to shape their characters and stories in ways that add layer and depth.
This paper looks at four types of varied or subverted repetitions within the book of Judges. The first is when a character responds with a slight variation to another character’s command, such as when Eglon commands “silence,” and his attendants respond instead by leaving (Jdg 3:19). The second type of change is when the actions of characters deviate from their own words or promises, as seen in Gideon’s revenge, which escalates far beyond his initial threat (Jdg 8). Both of these types of variations reveal significant qualities in the characters (for examples, ineptitude or recklessness).
The third variant in expected repetition is when a character repeats the words of another character, albeit with a subtle change or omission. Samson does this in his double request for the Timnite woman (Jdg 14:2-3). A fourth type of change in repetition occurs in the dialogue between two or more characters, often involving changes or omissions of important words or phrases, as with the elders’ repeated request for Jephthah to be their “commander” and then “head” (Jdg 11:6,8). Variations in repetition in these categories tend to reveal character motives.
It seems that scholarly interest in varied repetition has waned in recent decades. This paper is a small attempt at reviving that conversation.
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Like Nutritious Olives: Almsgiving and Preventive Regimen in John Chrysostom’s Writings
Program Unit: Healthcare and Disability in the Ancient World
Junghun Bae, Kosin University
This paper will investigate the psychological preventive functions of Christian charity in John Chrysostom’s thought, a fourth-century eastern church father who was called ‘a golden mouth.’ Treating this topic, it will focus on both Greco-Roman philosophical and medical therapy and John’s interpretation of biblical passages which were regarded as being supportive of almsgiving and the atonement of sins in the early Christianity.
In recent years, significant scholarly focus has been on the topic of John’s appropriation of the ancient therapy of the soul within the backgrounds of philosophy and medicine. These works demonstrated that John was a wholistic healer and sought to care for the health of the soul and body of his congregations, using traditional Christian practices, such as preaching. In them, however, relatively little attention has been devoted to John’s approach to wealth, poverty, and almsgiving. Given the fact that John repeatedly returns to the advice of generous giving, which led to the title of ‘champion of the poor,’ it is essential to explore how almsgiving, in his thought, is related to the cure of the soul.
This article will analyze mainly John’s 81st homily on John(In Johannem hom. 81). Here, almsgiving is referred as olives(ὁ τῆς ὲλαίας καρπός) that was health-giving food in ancient times. This food was also prescribed to prevent illnesses. Preventive medicine(δίαιτα) was a major branch of ancient medicine, and its main object lies in preventing diseases by suggesting the long-term management of lifestyle in relation to diet, sleep, exercise, sexual activity, and environment. John notes that just as we consume olives to make our body strong and healthy, givers also can avoid the disorder of the mind by means of cultivation of virtues, which in particular leads to strengthen the sinews(νεῦρα) of the soul. This medicalized discourse underlies John’s understanding of biblical passages. Interpreting them, he integrated both heritages of Christian and philosophical traditions to form a holistic picture of the therapy of the soul(body).
By examining closely John’s debts to the two sources in general terms, this presentation will take recent Chrisostomic studies on philosophy, medicine, and late antiquity a step further, indicating that John was a Christian philosopher/doctor.
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The Antichrists of 1 and 2 John: False Prophets, Deceit, and Qumran Sources
Program Unit: Apocalypse Now: Apocalyptic Reception and Impact throughout History
Lynne Moss Bahr, Rockhurst University
The origins of the antichrist myth in its relation to Qumran remains an underexplored topic in the study of early Christianity. With respect to antichrist references in 1 and 2 John, scholars such as Judith Lieu and John Painter have primarily focused on the nature of the tensions in the Johannine community rather than the cluster of meanings signifying the ideological content of such a term. This paper focuses on the use of the term “antichrist” as part of an eschatological slogan in 1 and 2 John that synthesizes the concepts of false prophets and themes of deceit in the last days from Qumran with the specific Christological concerns of the Johannine community, insofar as they can be discerned. As Gregory Jenks has shown, the antichrist references in 1 and 2 John do not fit the explicit idea of an end-time tyrant nor use the combat myth pattern seen in later iterations of the antichrist figure in early Christianity. However, the references in the Johannine letters illustrate an early stage of the myth that has counterparts in Mark 13:22 and 2 Peter 2:1, among other texts referring to messianic pretenders. Calling upon Jewish prophetic traditions from the Hebrew scriptures and Hellenistic period and particularly the theme of deceit as emblematic of enemies of God, 1 and 2 John use the term “antichrists” to identify those within the community who seek to deceive others. This paper examines the combination of sources used at Qumran to conceptualize the eschatological threat of false prophets and argues that the writer(s) of the Johannine letters situate the Christological controversies within the community within such a context, thus reinforcing claims for the authority of prophecy for specific understandings and teachings of Jesus within an eschatological framework. As an early attestation of a developing myth, the term “antichrist” of the Johannine letters illustrates, when read in the context of Qumran texts such as the Damascus Document and the Commentary on Habbakuk and the sources behind them, the ideological weight of epithets and their function in specific ancient communities.
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Comparative Method: The Ghost of Biblical Studies Past, Present, and Future
Program Unit: Comparative Method in Biblical Studies
Amy L. Balogh, Regis University
Why start a SBL program unit titled “Comparative Method in Biblical Studies”? Comparison informs everything a person does—from eating breakfast to becoming a biblical scholar—and there is a value-driven method to it regardless of whether one acknowledges it. In the modern academic study of the Bible, comparative method is a ghost. It has unfinished business with us and so lurks around every corner and in every corridor, waiting to be addressed for the sake of resolution. This paper addresses that ghost, or, at least, explains how it got here and what (I think) it wants from us. In so doing, I discuss the past, present, and future of the ethics of comparison and thus offer a snapshot of where our field has been, the challenges it now faces, and where it might be going with respect to this essential topic. In so doing, I share the ethical critiques of biblical and religious studies scholars who have written on the topic, as well as a few helpful tools and insights that can put us on the path toward improving comparative method in biblical studies.
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Hebrew Medieval Manuscripts of Qohelet: An Experiment of Stemmatic Analysis using Phylogenetic Methods
Program Unit: Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies
Luigi Bambaci, University of Bologna, Italy
Stemmatology is an important branch of textual criticism, since it allows for the identification of relationships between witnesses for reconstructing the transmission history of texts.
Medieval manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, however, have been rarely studied according to stemmatological criteria. It is often assumed that it is impossible to divide Hebrew manuscripts in textual groups or families, because of phenomena of generalized contamination and controlled transmission that characterize the copying process of the Hebrew Bible in the late Middle Ages. Moreover, the largely dominant one-recension theory, according to which all manuscripts would descend from the great oriental Tiberian exemplars, has made stemmatic analysis unnecessary in practice.
As a result, few attempts of stemmatic classification have been made, and Hebrew manuscripts are still treated singularly, usually quoted with the numbers given by the great eighteenth-century collations of B. Kennicott and G. B. De Rossi.
Computer-assisted stemmatology tools, and, in particular, phylogenetics methods proper of evolutionary biology, can represent a valid resource for philologists dealing with textual history. Indeed, they permit to handle large amounts of variant readings efficiently and to compute genealogical relationships according to principles that closely resemble those of Lachmann's method, the most well-known genealogical method in philology.
In this contribution we present an example of application of phylogenetic methods to the medieval tradition of the Hebrew Bible, taking as a case study the book of Qohelet according to the data provided by the above mentioned collations.
We will first illustrate how the critical apparatus of the two collations have been digitized and how the variant readings have been encoded in XML-TEI language in order to make them machine-actionable. We will then explain the assumptions standing behind the phylogenetic method chosen for the analysis, namely Maximum Parsimony criterion, and examine the results obtained from its application to the tradition of the book of Qohelet.
In conclusion, we will discuss potentialities and limitations of phylogenetic analysis in biblical textual research, trying to evaluate the concrete perspectives it offers for establishing stemmata codicum of the medieval tradition of the Hebrew Bible.
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A Critical Literary Examination of Q 38: Its Theology and Redaction History
Program Unit: Linguistic, Literary, and Thematic Perspectives on the Qur’anic Corpus (IQSA)
Daniel Bannoura, University of Notre Dame
Q Sad 38 can be divided into four primary sections: 1. The prologue of the disconnected letter sad and an oath (vv. 1-3), 2. a narration of a disputation between a mundhir (warner) and his community, which is understood to be between the prophet Muhammad and the leaders at Quraysh (vv. 4-8a); 3. A divine response to the results of the disputation that draws heavily on narratives found in the Hebrew Bible (vv. 8b-70); and 4. a pericope about the rebellion of Iblis (vv. 71-88). Prima facie the surah seems disjointed as its structure and themes appear to be haphazardly stitched together. This paper examines the content and structure of the surah in order to make sense of the process it undertook in its content and development until its final redaction in the Qur’an that we have today. The paper does this through a close analysis of both the syntax and the themes of the surah. When it comes to the syntax, the paper notes the changes in rhymed prose (saj‘) at the verse endings (fawasil) or in the middle of verses, and the enallages (iltifat) dispersed through the text. Paying close attention to the various grammatical markers helps us, at least tentatively, to understand the development of the text of the surah. As for the themes, the paper looks into the reception of the introductory disputation pericope in the Islamic tradition through its “occasions of revelation” (asbab an-nuzul) and early tafsir traditions, and attempts to connect it with the biblical narratives that immediately follow. Once a thematic connection is established between the disputation pericope and biblical material, we can attempt to reach reasonable conclusions about the process that led to the inclusion of all of this material in the surah to comprise a complete whole. This eventually leads to the finale in the Iblis pericope that connects, albeit loosely and awkwardly, with the rest of the material preceding it. At the end of the analysis the paper proposes a theory about the process of redaction that the surah went through where it developed from an original proto-surah based on the traditional understanding of the life and ministry of the prophet that was supplemented with biblical material in order to form a coherent narrative of the surah that follows the prophetic tropes found in biblical literature and elsewhere in the Qur’an.
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Paul’s Letter to the Philippians: Performance and Analysis
Program Unit: Performance Criticism of the Bible and Other Ancient Texts
Clifford Barbarick, Abilene Christian University
Paul’s Letter to the Philippians: Performance and Analysis
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According to the Image: The Christological Remolding of Human Life in Colossians 3
Program Unit: Biblical Exegesis from Eastern Orthodox Perspectives
John Barclay, University of Durham
Since Christ is the image of God (Col 1:15), the remaking of humanity 'according to the image of the creator' (Col 3:10) is thoroughly Christological in shape. This is evident both in the reordering of identity (3:11) and in the reshaping of social interaction (3:5-17), where the receipt of forgiveness and love in Christ counters the human propensity to self-defensive aggression.
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Cursed to Bless: Intention and Outcome in the Oracles of Balaam
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Joel Barker, Heritage College & Seminary
Abstract: The oracles of Balaam reflect the intersection of blessing and cursing. Although Balaam is hired to curse Israel, his actual utterances convey blessing. In this way, his intended performative speech-act is inverted. This study examines the intention and outcome of the Balaam passages in Num 22–24 through the prism of speech-act theory. It proposes that illocutionary intention of cursing Israel through the speech-acts of Balaam formulated by Balak comes into conflict with a divine illocutionary intention to bless. These opposing illocutions play out in the locutionary addresses of Balaam which have the perlocutionary effect of giving blessing rather than cursing. This paper further suggests that Balaam’s own illocutionary purposes are left deliberately ambiguous through the interplay between his employer and the divine. The contrast between the commission to curse and the actualization of blessing also turns upon the use of metaphors of sight in which the blindness of those who seek to curse is played against the clear-sightedness of the divine announcement of blessing.
This paper focuses upon the first four oracles in which Balaam’s uttered speech is placed in direct opposition to the intended speech of his employer. It focuses on the parallels established between the intentions of God and the fortunes of Israel. It reveals the biblical text’s understanding of the limits of illocutionary intention of humans seeking to manipulate the spiritual realm when such manipulation is presented as conflicting with divine intention. It also reflects on Balaam’s function as an intermediary in the manner his acceptance of Balak’s framing of his oracular activity as a curse, while seemingly not resisting the divine injunction to bless. As the oracles progress, disjunction fades through the now clear-eyed vision of the once-blind spiritualist. Exploring the Balaam oracles as a struggle between the power of cursing and blessing thus reveals the close link between words of life and death. The framing of the oracles reveals that speech accomplished by death (through animal sacrifices) and intended to bring death through curse, instead is redirected toward the announcement of life.
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The Children of Deuteronomy 6: Learning and Teaching the Ways of God
Program Unit: Children in the Biblical World
Richard Bautch, St. Edward's University
The sixth chapter of Deuteronomy features two children who in their own ways learn what is important about God’s ways. First, Israelites are told to “incise” (Garroway) or “impress” (Tigay) their religious values and beliefs upon their children (6:7). Later, one child in particular inquires into the meaning of the decrees, laws and rules that God has enjoined upon this people (6:20). Because the two references to children are aligned as part of a chiasm (vv. 4-9 = A; vv. 20-25 = A prime), they draw the reader’s attention to questions of a child’s agency, a child’s voice and a child’s ability to pose questions in the world of Deuteronomy.
The two children, however, are challenging characters inasmuch as they are unnamed and minimally developed. There is no back story to either child, nor is the reader brought to appreciate specific details about either individual. Because these children are barely visible, a robust methodology is required for this study. In fact, it is a matter of methodologies drawing from different disciplines to shine light on the composite figure of the child in Deuteronomy 6. (1) The children are “cameo appearance members,” a concept that Gina Hens-Piazza applies to biblical characters with shadowy silhouettes. In this approach, Hens-Piazza interrogates the story world and the surrounding narrative of these individuals; she investigates the role such characters play in excess of their limited appearance in the story. In a first move, this study will explore the essential nature of the contribution that the incised child and the questioning child make to the account that is unfolding in Deuteronomy 6. (2) Our second move is informed by the childist approach of Kristine Garroway, who identifies young, silent characters in biblical texts and considers the ways in which they may have been suppressed. Garroway views these children as subjects who are in the process of being encultured and engendered; as such children provide an important window on Israelite society and the values at its foundation. In Deuteronomy 6, both the incised child and the questioner represent Israelite society’s youngest generation who are learning key elements of their ethnic and cultural heritage. (3) To concentrate on the biblical text (Deut 6:7, 20-24), we will engage an emerging methodology based upon the asking of questions. Archibald van Wieringen has shown that the asking of questions is a major form of teaching and learning both in the relationships between characters in the text and in the relationship between the text-immanent author and text-immanent reader. In Deut 6:20-24, the child’s question about God’s decrees, laws and rules, gives rise to a teaching moment. A close reading of this text will show how the child’s question functions to convey a message from one character to another while contributing to the rhetorical tradition of Deuteronomy.
Our conclusion will summarize the findings of this study and briefly draw parallels between Deuteronomy 6 and Christian instructional texts that were developed in the medieval period, the Reformation and the Counter Reformation.
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“To Instruct, to Rebuke, to Correct”: 2 Timothy 3:16, Josephus against Apion 1.3, and Hellenistic Apologetic between Christian Epistolography and Jewish Historiography
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Carson Bay, University of Bern
2 Timothy 3:16 contains three Greek nouns that correspond to three verbs in Flavius Josephus’ Contra Apionem 1.3. The author of 2 Timothy states that “all scripture” is good “for teaching (πρὸς διδασκαλίαν), for rebuking (πρὸς ἐλεγμόν), for correcting (πρὸς ἐπανόρθωσιν), and for training (πρὸς παιδείαν) in righteousness” (3:16). The first three of these prepositioned nouns correspond to three verbs Josephus uses in explaining the impetus for his penning his most overtly apologetic work, the Contra Apionem: “I thought it necessary to write briefly on all these matters, to rebuke (ἐλέγξαι) those who insult us as guilty of malice and deliberate falsehood, to correct (ἐπανορθώσασθαι) the ignorance of others, and to instruct (διδάξαι) all who wish to know the truth on the subject of our antiquity. Αt first glance, the overlap seems incidental: a didactic letter to a young convert and a sprawling multicultural apologetic aimed at widespread anti-Jewish polemic are not the same kind of literature on the face of it. But I suggest that they are. In this paper I show how, when situated in their respective literary and cultural locations, the author of 2 Timothy and Josephus are doing fundamentally the same rhetorical thing in these passages: justifying their own scribal enterprises in an attempt to restructure, codify, and perpetuate their own inherited traditions.
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Underwriting Hellenistic Judaism: Second Temple History and the Reception of Hellenistic Texts in Sefer Yosippon
Program Unit: Hellenistic Judaism
Carson Bay, University of Bern
It is an interesting fact of medieval Judaism that one its earliest and most prominent pieces of historiography is a history of Second Temple Judaism. This early-10th century Hebrew work, known as Sefer Yosippon, provides a history concentrated on the period between the Maccabean revolt and the Masada episode of 73 CE. One of the most interesting aspects of this text has to do with its sources: in addition to Christian and Classical texts, it draws largely upon Latin translations of Greek Jewish texts from the Hellenistic period, including 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, 4 Maccabees, and the Jewish Antiquities of Flavius Josephus. This essay describes and explains Yosippon’s use of these Jewish-Hellenistic sources within the framework of its narrative writ large, in conversation with recent trends in scholarship on Hellenistic Judaism, on its reception in Christian late antiquity, and on Jewish historiography and medieval Jewish history.
In particular, I argue that Yosippon ‘underwrites’ Hellenistic Judaism in the sense that it doubles down upon and augments the emphasis upon Jewish nobility, virtue, and strength in texts like the Books of the Maccabees and the works of Josephus. At the same time, Yosippon ‘overwrites’ Christian versions of this same period in history, most notably in its extensive counter-history to the late-4th century Christian work called On the Destruction of Jerusalem, the work’s most prominent source. This quasi-resurrection of Hellenistic Jewish ideals in the early Middle Ages is significant on a number of fronts, and is not an obvious way for an early medieval Jew to reframe Jewish history and identity. The rabbis had famously underemphasized the later Second Temple Period, and the Maccabean and Josephan texts had largely been appropriated by Christian tradition. Indeed, even the texts which seem to correspond most closely to Yosippon in content, style, and perspective—for example the late-12th century Generations of the Ages (Dorot ‘Olam) by Abraham Ibn Daud—differ dramatically in their emphasis within and presentation of the Second Temple Period.
This paper thus defines and describes what is arguably the most important instance of the Jewish reception of Hellenistic Judaism (ever); argues for a specific and integral place of Hellenistic Judaism within the narrative rhetoric of Sefer Yosippon; and situates that reception-and-transformation within the broader contexts of Christian and Jewish historiography and thought between antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
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The Earth Wants the Temple Rebuilt Too! An Ecological Reading of Haggai
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
Scott P. Bayer, Claremont School of Theology
Scholars often explain Haggai’s pro-temple stance in terms of Yehud’s economic, political, or religious systems. However, these approaches to Haggai typify androcentric readings of Haggai, neglecting nature’s central role within the book and the ancient ideological link between temple and nature. Drawing from Norman Habel’s ecological hermeneutic, a nature-sensitive reading of Haggai recovers the Earth as a pro-temple character within Haggai, advocating for the rebuilding of the temple by supplying material for the temple and partnering with God to coerce the Yehudites to build. Earth as a pro-temple character echoes the Ancient Near Eastern ideology that links the life-giving nature of temples and nature’s prosperity. The ideology of temple and creation’s prosperity undergirds Haggai’s argument for rebuilding a temple, an ideology that is missed in androcentric readings of Haggai. This paper’s ecological reading serves as a corrective for androcentric readings and allows for the retrieval of Earth’s voice and role within the book of Haggai.
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Powered by Satans: Intertextual Resonance in the Parables of Enoch and the Apocalypse of John
Program Unit: John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern
Leslie Baynes, Missouri State University
Much scholarly labor has been devoted to tracing the use of the Hebrew scriptures in the Apocalypse of John, but the book also shares significant themes and motifs with Second Temple literature, especially 1 Enoch. This paper argues that one Enochic booklet, the Parables of Enoch, may be reflected in the Book of Revelation, particularly regarding their mutual villains: the kings and the mighty that dwell upon the earth and the satans/Satan. The two books share a specific configuration of wickedness that does not appear elsewhere in extant literature: royal persecutors are empowered by satans/Satan, all of whom who come to a fiery end. Although demonic figures are rife in Second Temple texts, the name “Satan” is not. And while Satan is no stranger to the New Testament, his function in Rev 12-13 is without parallel anywhere else other than the Parables of Enoch: he gives his power to the imperial beast that persecutes the people of God (Rev 13:2). This paper does not argue for literary dependence but seeks to extend ongoing conversations about the intertextual resonance between these two apocalypses as well as the understanding of satans/Satan through the end of the first century CE.
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"Fight the Good Fight" in 1 Tim. 1:18
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Greg Beale, Reformed Theological Seminary
The combined wording in 1 Tim. 1:18 of στρατεύω + στρατεία (a cognate accusative) can be rendered “fight the fight,” “battle the battle,” or more generally “perform military service” or “serve in a military campaign.” Apparently, no one has surveyed this combination in extra-biblical literature. The combination occurs often throughout Greco-Roman literature to express a patriotic idiom for someone whose good character and reputation is demonstrated by faithfully persevering in some kind of extended battle campaign. This is applied to Timothy to demonstrate his good Christian character and reputation over against the false teachers’ bad character.
The idiom also occurs often in a legal context to affirm the character and good reputation qualifying a person to be an officer of the court or endorsing a person’s character before the court in a legal dispute, showing him to be worthy to be considered of an innocent verdict. This occurs often in a context where the accusations are not true. Eight of the seventeen legal uses actually have reference to “witnesses” in the context (either μάρτυς or the verb form or other cognate forms). In 1 Timothy this idiom is used in a legal context (where also the μάρτυς word group is repeatedly used), which is to demonstrate and acquit Timothy’s character and reputation over and against that of the false teachers.
The redundant word combination of ἀγωνίζομαι + ἀγών (“struggle the struggle”) in 1 Tim. 6:12 and 2 Tim. 4:7 is recognized by commentators as a development of the phrase in 1 Tim. 1:18. This combination also has not been studied in the Greek world, where it is also a well-worn idiom used in the same way as the στρατεύω + στρατεία expression probably to highlight the difficulty of the fight. This is why the expression ἀγωνίζομαι + ἀγών is used synonymously, even together with the adjective “good,” with that in 1 Tim. 1:18. Some translations even translate the redundant expressions in 1 Tim. 1:18, 1 Tim. 6:12, and 2 Tim. 4:7 as “fight the good fight,” clearly seeing them as synonymous. The above Greco-Roman study of usage endorses such a synonymous understanding.
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Hebrews 2:9–13 and the Social Identity of the Children of God
Program Unit: Hebrews
Paul S. Bebout, London School of Theology
A prominent social identity marker of the members of Hebrews’ audience is that they are God's children. The author emphasizes this aspect of identity in 2:9–13. Specifically, in 2:11, the author maintains that sanctification is an instrument God uses to produce this social identity status. Jesus is the most prototypical ingroup member for the audience, and in 2:11 the author identifies him as the one who sanctifies those who thereby become identified as the children of God. This paper examines how sanctification leading to the social identity of the children of God can be explained utilizing Self-Categorization Theory, a subcategory of Social Identity Theory. Self-Categorization Theory entails relations between those within an ingroup, and in this pericope the author elucidates how Jesus relates to those he calls brothers and sisters. His identification with them in humanity and work on their behalf culminates in salvation and familial relationship. Thus, sanctification eventuates in social identity formation of individuals who realize who they are within the context of the ingroup of the family of God. This emphasis on the audience’s social identity is the primary answer to their crisis of identity as ingroup members. Elsewhere in Hebrews, the author adduces examples of faithfulness and reminds the audience of their own trust in and faithfulness to God in order to promote a salient in-Christ social identity among ingroup members.
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Iranian Visitors in the Dura Synagogue: The Significance of the Pahlavi Mural Dipinti
Program Unit: Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism
Jason BeDuhn, Northern Arizona University
On several of the surviving murals of the Synagogue at Dura, alongside of stray graffiti scratched into the paint, are twelve brief messages in ink (dipinti) apparently made as sanctioned additions to the paintings. They are all written in Pahlavi script, in Middle Persian or Parthian language, and most of them follow a common formula in which individuals bearing Iranian names and identified as “scribes” record their visit to “examine” or “approve” the paintings. Since their discovery, a number of hypotheses have been advanced to explain these enigmatic texts. This paper marshals evidence from the dipinti themselves, as well as from other information on late antique Judaism, to make the case that these visitors were Iranian Jews representing the institutional authority of their communities across the border in Sasanian Iran.
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Verba Rara Amicorum Iob 2.0: The Greek Rendering of Hebrew Non-absolute Hapax Legomena in the Speeches of Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu in LXX Job
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Bryan Beeckman, Université Catholique de Louvain
In 2011, Elke Verbeke has examined the Greek rendering of Hebrew absolute and non-absolute hapax legomena in the Septuagint (LXX) version of Job. This examination has indicated that the LXX translator of Job dealt with hapaxes in a variety of ways, i.a., omission, transliteration, consistent rendering, association with a similar-looking word, contextual exegesis, approximate translation and paraphrasing. Although Verbeke’s study has shed more light on the translation technique of the LXX translator of Job, she has only examined the Hebrew hapaxes and their Greek rendering in the speeches of Job and God. In order to come to a more nuanced image of the translation technique of LXX Job, I have recently analysed the Greek rendering of Hebrew absolute hapax legomena in the speeches of Job’s friends (HTS, forthcoming).
Since the non-absolute hapaxes and their Greek rendering in the speeches of Job’s friends are yet to be examined, this paper will take these words as its object of study. By doing so, this paper aims at obtaining an even more accurate characterisation of the translation technique of LXX Job.
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Cumulative Characterization and the Possibility of a Major Character in Acts
Program Unit: Book of Acts
Holly Beers, Westmont College
A common argument in Acts scholarship is that Luke reserves a distinctive role for the twelve apostles, though of course the place of Paul and Barnabas in that group remains debated (cf. Acts 14:4,14). In a related vein, the Lukan emphasis on Peter in the first half of Acts and then Paul in the second is the focus of many parallel studies, and perhaps rightly so. However, what a narrow focus on the apostles generally and these two main human characters can miss is how often the mission is carried forward by minor and even unnamed characters in Acts. They are also heirs of the promise of the Spirit’s decentralizing empowerment at Pentecost, and they contribute in their own ways as the gospel moves from Jerusalem to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8).
Studies in characterization typically employ a cumulative approach that follows characters throughout a narrative, but one effect of this has been the further marginalization of many minor characters, who have already lost in the competition for narrative space. This paper seeks to redress that deficiency and analyze minor characters collectively; in other words, together as a major character. In a 2017 JBL article on Lukan characterization Michal Beth Dinkler refers to the “particular habitual behaviors” of characters, stressing that different readers will come to different conclusions on what those behaviors or attributes are; in this paper I will frame the “particular habitual behaviors” of this character group as their positive response to the gospel and participation in its forward movement. In so doing I embrace the contours of New Historicism and New Formalism as articulated by Dinkler in her recent monograph Literary Theory and the New Testament (2019).
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Criticizing the Empire in Matthew: Hebrew Thought in Imperial Negotiations
Program Unit: Jesus Traditions, Gospels, and Negotiating the Roman Imperial World
Natan B. de Carvalho, Polis: The Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities
Postcolonial criticism aims at exploring the dynamics of power and rhetoric, and how these are used in their socio-political context with regard to marginalization and cultural domination. Being able to read a text such as the Bible with an emphasis on the interrelation of oppressors and oppressed ones is of particular importance for Christianity in a privileged place, such as North America. In practice, postcolonial criticism allows the reader to focus on the critiques to political powers as they relate to the people under them. In this paper, I present a postcolonial reading of selected passages in the Gospel of Matthew. This piece of first century literature was conceived in a setting surrounded by both Jewish and Graeco-Roman cultures. Traditionally, scholarship has focused more extensively on the former context at the cost of the latter. After responding to two arguments against reading Matthew in both its former and latter environments, I present a (synchronic and diachronic) comparison of the claims regarding the Empire and the Kingdom, demonstrating that Matthew is introducing his readers to the political tension created between the two kings and two reigns. Given that Matthew's primary literary focus are the Jewish writings, special attention is devoted to demonstrate when and how Matthew criticizes the Empire through Jewish themes, expectations, and writings. Moreover, I demonstrate how traditional interpretations, focusing on the interplay of the Jewish leaders and Jesus as the new leader of God's communities, are connected to imperial critiques throughout the narrative. In this paper I present interpreters with an opportunity to unify both Graeco-Roman and Jewish worlds in their reading of Matthew, which illuminates the double meaning behind Jesus's words and provides significance to contemporary conversations regarding the Kingdom of God and the current socio-political climate.
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Some Layout Tendencies for Ha’azinu (Deut 32:1–43) That Predate Maimonides
Program Unit: Masoretic Studies
Vincent Beiler, University of Cambridge
In this presentation, I will discuss several layout features for Ha’azinu, the Song of Moses, that many scribes of Masoretic codices from the 10th-12th centuries attempted to emulate. I will show that while there was a definite tendency towards a certain ideal in the physical presentation of Ha’azinu, not all scribes saw the ideal as essential in the production of their codex, or treated all aspects of the ideal equally, making various layout adjustments along the way. Aspects of what I am about to present have been treated by various people, most popularly by Goshen-Gottstein in 1960, and recently by Sarah Lind in 2013. Barthélemy, likewise, in his methodical Studies in the Text of the Old Testament, details a number of common features for Ha’azinu, the problem being that many of the manuscripts Barthélemy examined postdate Maimonides. Barthélemy does include seven manuscripts from the 10-12th centuries, but these are only the proverbial tip of the iceberg for the period in question. No one, to my knowledge, has gone through the Second Firkovitch collection or trawled Friedberg’s digitized collection to see what these manuscripts might contain which relates to Ha’azinu. In what follows, I seek to broaden our understanding of the majority tendencies for some scribal habits of Ha’azinu, by assessing codices that, from a paleographic point of view, appear to predate Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah (c. 1180).
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Corinthian Ignorance: Knowledge-Language and the Cultivation of Anxious Affects in First Corinthians
Program Unit: The Historical Paul
Brigidda Bell, University of Toronto
The Corinthian group as reflected in First Corinthians has been characterized by scholarship as full of anxieties that Paul writes to appease: anxieties about ritual impurity (1 Cor 5:1-13), about death (1 Cor 15:12-34), about social relations (7:1-24), and various other concerns of the day-to-day living of people under the new cult of Christ. But Paul also writes in ways that evoke and fan other anxieties. In a series of lines introducing the topic of spiritual gifts, Paul employs knowledge-language that points to a distinct lack amongst the Corinthians. “I do not want you to be uninformed (ἀγνοέω)” he begins. “You know (οἶδα) that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. Therefore I want you to understand (γνωρίζω)…” While framing his lines as well-intentioned interest in the Corinthians’ acquisition of true knowledge, these three lines also inform Paul’s readers of three related things: they lack knowledge, they have been wrong before, and Paul will supply them with right information. Scholars have taken much interest in Paul’s use of the knowledge-language that peppers Paul’s letters, as evidenced in edited volumes such as S. Porter and D. Yoon (eds.), Paul and Gnosis (2016). This paper, however, does not focus on how such language points to knowledge acquisition or deployment, but instead examines how it serves to produce and enable the circulation of anxious affect in its readers. While some ancient philosophical systems viewed ignorance as a necessary step on the path towards right knowledge, to Paul’s readers knowledge is presented as a gap that Paul highlights and insists he must fill. In this way, categories of knowing and language implying ignorance cultivate feelings of anxiety and unknowing in the recipients of First Corinthians.
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And He Shall Be Hallowed: The Epistemological Function of Scent in Israel’s Cultic System
Program Unit: Ritual in the Biblical World
Dan Belnap, Brigham Young University
A few years ago, I presented on the manipulation of scent in ancient Israel’s cultic system, concluding that this manipulation was one of the primary indicators for efficacious interaction between the divine and the mortal. In this role, the scents associated with both the burnt sacrifices and incense sacrifices marked the transitional, liminal nature of the cultic experience. Related to, but not a part of the same ritualized sequence of sacrifice, was the scent associated with the anointings of the priest and tabernacle, a scent that negotiated the spaces between cultic events, such as sacrifice. This paper explores further the epistemological function of scent in the cosmological framework of the Israelite cult, namely the manner in which scent, combining with the visual color scheme of entrance ways (and the priestly clothing), acted as a sensory map demarcating the liminal space/time inherent in the Israelite cultic system (scentways). As such it acted as a code by which Israel could navigate successfully and safely their interaction with the divine realm.
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The Scarab, the Sun-Disc, and Other Egyptian Symbols in the Royal Glyptics of Israel and Judah
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible, History, and Archaeology
Shirly Ben-Dor Evian, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
During the Iron IIB-C, Egyptian religious symbols were common on the local glyptic finds in Israel and Judah, appearing alongside a wide range of Egyptian figurines and cultic objects. The occurrences of winged scarabs and solar-discs on royal seals and sealings in Judah and Israel is therefore part of a larger iconographic phenomenon which focused on Egyptian symbolism. The present paper proposes to regard these occurrences as the result of Egypt’s ongoing cultural influence on the southern Levant, which although was no longer under its control, was still widely impacted by pharaonic civilization.
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Investigating Continuity and Divergence in Iron Age Stamp Seal Production in the Southern Levant
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible, History, and Archaeology
Nadia Ben-Marzouk, Tel Aviv University
The withdrawal of Egyptian power from the southern Levant marks the traditional transition to the Iron I. While many studies have focused on the changes that occurred within this new power vacuum, many administrative structures—and personnel—remained in place. The corpus of Iron Age glyptic in the southern Levant provides a wealth of information from which we can investigate the ways in which glyptic carvers either perpetuated, altered, or outright rejected previous practices, both locally and regionally. Building from previous research, this paper will examine points of continuity and divergence in stamp seal production through a series of case studies that span the beginning of the Iron Age and culminate in the Iron IIB with the rise of epigraphic seals. Proposed explanations will be provided for (dis)continuities in an attempt to situate systems of production and consumption within the larger, ever-changing social landscape.
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Memory and Orality in Biblical Texts’ Transmission: Ezra-Nehemia as a Case Study
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Aure Ben-Zvi Goldblum, New York University
One of the fascinating uses of textual criticism is uncovering the writing process in ancient times. Investigating the process itself rather than focusing on the final canonized text unearths intriguing phenomena such as the role of oral transmission in textual history. This paper will bring forward selected examples from Ezra-Nehemiah to shed light on the influence of orality in the transmission of biblical texts in Second Temple Judaism. Thus, it will contribute to the ongoing discussion about the role of memory in the transmission of the Hebrew Bible.
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Wives and Mothers: A Women’s Reading of Romans 12:9–21
Program Unit: Social Scientific Criticism of the New Testament
Susan E. Benton, Baylor University
Readings of Romans by Sylvia Keesmat and Peter Oakes have highlighted aspects of each letter that enable contemporary readers to see how the text might have been understood by early readers. For both Keesmat and Oakes, Romans 12 is a chapter that is significant in its revisioning of social ties for the Roman audience. Yet in both Keesmat’s article and Oakes’s book, the individual interpretations by their first century Roman characters step back to take a broader view of the entire epistle. Only in Oakes’s general “house church” interpretation does Romans 12 receive more detailed interpretation. Broad application of Romans’ parenetic material, rather than particular focus, is a tendency in the field of Romans studies overall: in many other works on Romans, the portions that have borne greater emphasis are the doctrinal and controversial sections between Rom 9–11, and perhaps the sections on Sin from Romans 5–7. Extra attention is given to the parenetic material in chapter 13, insofar as it affects understandings of how to interact with political powers. Yet that material is part of a larger unit from 12:1 to 15:13, and the section about civil authorities is itself governed by overarching ethics of transformation (12:1–2) and emulation of the love of Christ (12:9). An attempt to understand Rom 12:9–21 from the perspective of “people’s history” could begin to imagine how this section would have affected common people who read it and sought to apply it in first-century Rome.
By paying further attention to Romans 12:9–21 and considering contextualized readings by individual Roman Christians, there is potential to understand better how Paul’s teachings about Christian love would have been understood by members of an early Christian household. It is for that aim that this paper will 1) argue for an exegetical platform of the pericope (Rom 12: 9–21) from which to proceed, and then 2) offer a contextualized reading. For those of us reading Romans in an individualistic context in which connections are often commodified, and even close bonds are often strained by our mobile and career-focused lives, attempting to read Romans through the eyes of a multigenerational Roman household can be instructive. How would ancient families understand Paul’s explication of Christlike love in the face of typical social expectations? How would Paul’s insightful guidance address in-home tensions created by high mortality rates and frequent remarriages? How might the embedded nature of families in patronage and in Christ assemblies shape reception of Paul’s instructions? How would women and children see their own responsibilities? To explore the implications of Romans’ love ethic, I will imagine the impact of this section of Paul’s parenesis on two free women in one household: an elderly widow and a young wife. These are chosen in part to explore implications that would add to Oakes’s reading of Romans’ larger section by a model craftworker, and also to supplement Keesmat’s insights in her reading of Romans from the perspectives of an enslaved woman and a freedman.
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Coaxing Open the Closed Mouths of Lions: Daniel in the Lions’ Den as the Backdrop to Ignatius’ Epistle to the Romans
Program Unit: Jewish Christianity / Christian Judaism
Mikail Berg, Brown University
This paper seeks to connect the Christian writings of Ignatius of Antioch (Ign. Rom.) and the Jewish story of Daniel in the Lions Den (Bel and the Dragon; Dan. 6) around the narrative device of lions and divine aid. This connection is made not simply by looking at the presence of lions in each story, but by examining the literary motifs that permeate each of the works, namely: animals as judgment, the living God, the entombment of the body in lions, divine aid appointed through fellow religionists, the love of God and food, ruling in this world, and the motif of ‘word’ and ‘voice.’ If this comparison is successful, readers will not only see the various dimensions and rhetorical layers that exist in Ign. Rom., but they will also be able to see the value that this reading will have on the scholarly discussion of the ‘Parting of the Ways.’ Ignatius is often seen as a key point of divergence between Jews and Christians in antiquity. In this reading, the point of divergence is seen in Ignatius’ rhetorical framing as he transmutes the classical understanding of divine deliverance in the foreign land, namely Daniel’s rescue from the lions’ den, into divine deliverance through martyrdom in imitation of Jesus. As we examine the ‘mouths of lions,’ Daniel would find hope in the closed mouths of lions whereas Ignatius would coax the lions’ mouths open to find his hope and deliverance.
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Ptolemaic Administration in the Levant: The Case of Kedesh
Program Unit: Economics in the Biblical World
Andrea M. Berlin, Boston University
Excavations at Tel Kedesh have revealed a monumental compound at the southern tip of the lower mound, built c. 500 BCE, in the time of Achaemenid Persian rule but under the auspices of the royal house of Tyre. It was both an agricultural depot and a ceremonial facility. A large, colonnaded entry court on the east welcomed visitors from points east and south. Small luxuries – silver bracelets, a green jasper scarab, glass seals – reflect personal status and well-being.
When the Ptolemies took over at the end of the fourth century BCE, they substantially modified the building: closing off the east entrance; dismantling the columns; subdividing the entry court. They installed plastered bins to collect and measure dry goods. The ceramics reveal the inhabitants’ curtailed circumstances: of 8346 ceramic fragments, a mere 26 are of foreign origin. There are no fine table wares, no perfume bottles, no imported wine. Under the Ptolemies, Kedesh was reduced from a showplace to a work-a-day establishment, a small cog within the larger Ptolemaic world.
The effects of Ptolemaic control were felt throughout the broad region of the Galilee. The adjacent Hula Valley became King’s Land, where tenant farmers worked at small farmsteads such as Tel Anafa. In the Galilee large estates such as Beth Anath were laid out. Active Tyrian engagement receded; a palpable imperial presence replaced the sense of local autonomy. The social effects of this shift took time to play out, but eventually coalesced in the form of various movements whose seeds were planted in the third century BCE.
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The Repurposing of the King's Prayer (Ps 144:9–15) in Lamentations 4
Program Unit: Book of Psalms
Joshua Berman, Bar-Ilan University
This paper proposes a new connection between Lamentations and the Book of Psalms. While scholars have long noted the indebtedness of Lamentations to the genres of lament in Psalms, this paper demonstrates the repurposed use of the genre of the royal psalm, specifically, the king’s prayer found in Ps 144:9-15. This paper proposes a reading of Lamentations 4 that draws from theories of the sociology of trauma and social psychological studies of belief persistence. As Irene Smith Landsman notes, trauma calls into question the basic assumptions that inform our experience of ourselves, the world and the human condition, and often engenders a crisis of meaning at the deepest level. In the midst of trauma, no coherence is likely to be found. According to Jeffrey Alexander and Elizabeth Breese, into this void step culture creators, who create scripts of meaning for the traumatized community. Through symbolic actions and the composition of literature, collective trauma is socially mediated. For a decimated community, the new metanarrative around a shared story begins the process of reconstructing meaning. Lamentations 4 is such a culture script. It features a constructed dialogue between the narrator whom I take to be a pastoral mentor and the survivor community. The issue at stake here is what social psychologists refer to as the challenge of belief persistence—people’s proclivity to passionately cling to, and advocate for, beliefs or attitudes even when the evidence supporting such beliefs is fully invalidated. Belief persistence is especially prevalent in politics, such as the propensity to retain in belief in a fallen leader or regime. Some scholars see deep-seated beliefs as a source of self-identity. Resistance to belief change is therefore fundamentally ego-defensive. Others such as Dan M. Kahan see the issue primarily in sociological terms. By this account individuals have a stake in affirming beliefs that will support their social standing and connections.
Lamentations 4 addresses the problem of belief persistence among the survivor community concerning the political aspects of Zion theology. Zion theology emerged as a theological mindset crucial in the prophetic discourse of Jeremiah during the final years of the existence of the southern kingdom of Judah. Within this mindset, Jerusalem was the seat of the Lord and thus impregnable; the Davidic king was his chosen and would be granted dominion over his enemies; the palace and the temple were thought to be practically one royal complex safeguarded by the Lord. Within this philosophy the social order itself of king, prophets, priests, attained sacred status. The author of Lamentations 4 seeks to provide a model culture script that debunks this philosophy and shows a way forward. Through the dialogue between the narrator and the survivor community, all political and social aspects of Zion theology are debunked. The author achieves this with systematic thematic and linguistic reference to the king’s prayer of Ps 144:9-15.
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The Battle against the Amalekites (Exod 17:8–13) as an Allegorical Outline of an Ideal Israelite Constitution
Program Unit: Pentateuch
Christoph Berner, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
At first glance, Exod 7:8-13 appears to be an archaic battle account, which narrates how Joshua defeats the Amalekites with the help of the miracle worker Moses. However, upon a closer look the story reveals an entirely different meaning. The paper argues that Exod 17:8-13 should be interpreted as a proto-Chronistic allegory, which outlines the institutional implementation of the ideal of theocracy. Only when the Torah (Moses) is supported by the priesthood (Aaron) and the royal dynasty (Hur) will Israel prevail over its enemies (Joshua vs. the Amalekites).
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“Outsiders Within”: The Marginalization of Children in the Roman World and the Gospel of Luke
Program Unit: Children in the Biblical World
Sharon Betsworth, Oklahoma City University
Two views of children exist in Roman discourse about the youngest members of the society. On one hand, upper-class male writers often disparaged children and childhood: The child was the opposite of what the man was striving to be. On the other hand, epitaphs and other literary evidence point to the valued place of children in families and the society. Roman historian Christian Laes examines this discrepancy, referring to free Roman children as “outsiders within.” He argues that their young age and lack of sexual productivity marked children as outsiders in the ancient society which valued the free adult male and procreation. Children were also thought to not possess reason. This “outsider” status as well as the precarious nature of life in the ancient world left all children - free, citizen, non-citizen, and enslaved - in a marginalized position. Infants were susceptible to abandonment or infanticide; birth to ten years old or so was a time of high mortality; and many children lost their parents to death before they were beyond childhood years. However, as Laes asserts: “Children were important to people from all strata of society. Male aristocratic children would one day come to occupy positions of power and responsibility, while children of the lower classes would one day be crucial to the economic survival of the family.” This paper will discuss the marginalization of children in the Roman Empire in relationship to the depiction of children in the Gospel of Luke. My discussion will focus upon Luke 1:26-38; 7:1-10; 11-17; 18:15-17. I will examine issues of children’s legal status including enslavement, adoption, and exposure; orphaned children; and infant mortality and suggest how Luke might be speaking to these broader social issues through his treatment of children in the Gospel. This analysis will reveal that the author of the Gospel of Luke extends the “theology of reversal” evident for other marginalized members of the society, such as women and the poor, to children, providing them a place of belonging within the Jesus community.
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The War Laws in Deuteronomy
Program Unit: Book of Deuteronomy
Martijn Beukenhorst, Université Catholique de Louvain
Several laws in the Deuteronomic core, 12:1–26:16, are concerned with warfare. This article gives a thorough analysis of these laws, first by comparing them to other biblical passages and then to other Ancient Near Eastern regulations. War laws seem to be rather absent from Ancient Near Eastern regulations, although the references to armies and soldiers in them show that armies were very much part of everyday life. These comparisons show that the presentation of the Deuteronomic war laws is highly unusual, especially as present in a set of regulations. The contents of the war laws, on the other hand, do seem to reflect general tendencies in Ancient Near Eastern war practices, contrary to common belief.
Hence, in order to explain the presence of the war laws in Deuteronomy and interpret them correctly, the framework of Deuteronomy needs to be taken into account.
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Jews as a “Warlike and Rebellious People”: The Intensification of Anti-Jewish Sentiments in the Ancient Esther Traditions
Program Unit: Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature
Helge Bezold, Universität Basel
This paper will demonstrate that the study of the deutero-canonical Esther material sheds valuable light on the evolution of anti-Jewish sentiments within ancient Jewish literature. In comparing the variant readings of the charges against the Jews in the Hebrew and the two Greek versions of Esther, it will explore how the book’s textual history brings to light an intensification of the phenomenon of Judeophobia. While significant scholarly attention has been given to the study of Haman’s anti-Jewish charges in the Masoretic text, the striking differences regarding these aspects in the two Greek versions have not received detailed scholarly treatment. This arguably reflects the issue of the complex relationship between the Masoretic text, the Septuagint, the “Alpha-text” as well as the material of the Greek Additions. However, the particular focus on the evolution of the variants in the charges against the Jewish people can in fact be a promising way to trace Esther’s literary history: While in its earliest form, Haman accuses the Jews of living in disobedience to imperial law, the Septuagint Additions mention a royal edict in which the king confirms Haman’s plan, but also calls the Jews a “hostile people” (δυσμενῆ λαόν Add. B 4). This tendency of intensification finds its climax in the Alpha-text of Esth 3:8, where it is Haman, who ascribes to the Jews an openly aggressive nature, calling them “a warlike and rebellious people” (λαὸς πολέμου καὶ ἀπειθής). These observations have broader implications for how we can trace the evolution of anti-Jewish sentiments in antiquity. As will be shown, the tendency of the intensification of the anti-Jewish charges seems to correlate with the historical phenomenon of growing Judeophobia in Greco-Roman literature (cf., e.g., Gager/Bar-Kochva/Stern).
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And Eve
Program Unit: Syriac Studies
Penelope Biddy, Abilene Christian University
Eve is an undeniably pivotal figure in Syriac Christianity, yet she is rarely presented as a single entity. Instead, she is normally paired, presented in comparison with another figure, such as Adam, or perhaps even more often, Mary. Moreover, Eve occupies persistently ambiguous space in Syriac Christian thought. She is treated as both an equal and as a subordinate to Adam, joined with him and distinct from him, condemned for her sin and also redeemed from it. In this paper, I argue that it is this intrinsic relationality and ambiguity that makes Eve, even more so than Adam, paradigmatic of humanity in the Syriac worldview. I will examine Jacob of Sarug’s Hexaemeron and Ephrem’s Hymns on Paradise and Hymns on Nativity to analyze what implications the complexities of Eve’s character in these portrayals have for Syriac views of salvation and theological anthropology.
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Letting Go of “Holding Fast”: The Meaning of μή μου ἅπτου in John 20:17 Revisited
Program Unit: Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds
Reimund Bieringer, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Since the beginning of the 20th century there has been a growing tendency in Western exegesis and biblical translation to render μή μου ἅπτου in John 20:17 as “Do not hold me fast”, “Do not hold onto me”, “Do not cling to me”. Earlier exegesis and translations unanimously understood μή μου ἅπτου as “Do not touch me” (cf. noli me tangere). The shift from a general prohibition of touch to a prohibition of a specific type of touching (holding or clinging) is usually defended by semantic and grammatical arguments. In this paper we shall demonstrate the problematic aspects of both translations based on a semantic and a contextual study. Studying the use of ἅπτομαι in its historical context and taking into account the Johannine literary context we shall propose a third type of translation which is more in line with what recently (though mistakenly) has been called “social distancing”.
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Relating Seals from the Southern Levant and Gender Archaeology: Theoretical and Practical Considerations
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible, History, and Archaeology
Bruno Biermann, Universität Bern - Université de Berne
How many of the thousands of seals from the Southern Levant can be related to gendered persons and gender performances? What if stamp seals from the southern Levant belonged mostly persons with a female gender? For how many stamp seals could this be proven? These thoughts demonstrate the elusiveness of gender regarding our knowledge about glyptics from the southern Levant. I propose that stamp seals are a unique field for gender issues due to the intersection of material culture and human bodies. Their high numbers, wide dissemination, and common accessibility to persons of various social status and origin renders seals ideal for such an approach.
Gender is performed by engendered bodies, whose bodies in turn are shaped by such performances. This is not only the case for the body, but also for material culture related to the body. Therefore, both aspects can be present in the archaeological record. Consequently, some excavations in the Southern Levant increasingly employ bioarcheological methods systematically, enabling more extensive assumptions about societies but also sex and gender constructions of individuals. Based on the reports from the Ashkelon 1985–2006 excavations, I will undertake a case study of stamp seals from Ashkelon’s cemeteries from the Middle to Late Bronze Age. Interesting finds include the naked goddess on a seal which was found with a female sexed skeleton as well as a scarab probably belonging to the Omega group.
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Just a Number? Anna’s Age as a Component of Her Characterization
Program Unit: Gospel of Luke
Heidi Biermann, Duke University
In the wake of Conzelmann’s argument that Luke divides time into three periods—the period of Israel, the period of Jesus’s ministry, and the period since the ascension—debate continues about the relationship between Israel and the church in Luke-Acts. This debate has particular ramifications for Luke’s infancy narrative. Are the characters in the infancy narrative relegated to the era before Jesus, or do they play a greater role in the Lukan narrative? The matter of Anna’s age is a seemingly minor exegetical issue that sheds light on this question. The ambiguous language detailing Anna’s age has resulted in a question in scholarship about whether Anna is eighty-four years old or whether she has been a widow for eighty-four years (Luke 2:37). Previous studies give little attention to any broader exegetical significance of her age, though a few scholars, going beyond the question of whether Anna is eighty-four years old or older, have argued for a more symbolic understanding of Anna’s age. After all, eighty-four is seven times twelve—both symbolically important numbers for Israel. Continuing this conversation about Anna’s age, this paper argues that when viewed symbolically, the number eighty-four suggests that Anna embodies both Israel and the future church: just as seven and twelve are key numbers in Israel’s story, they also appear in the story of the church, such as through the seven deacons (Acts 6:1–6) and the twelve apostles (Luke 6:13–16). Thus, Anna’s age, together with other aspects of her characterization, demonstrates that Anna functions as a hinge between Israel’s story and the story of the coming church. This interpretation of Anna’s age has significance not only for understanding Anna’s role as a character, but also for the relationship between Israel and the church in Luke-Acts. Anna’s transitional role may further demonstrate that other characters in the infancy narrative have continued significance throughout Luke’s narrative. Thus, Anna demonstrates that Luke finds continuity between Israel and the church and between the infancy narrative and the broader story of Luke-Acts.
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The Sign of Jonah as a Call for Anti-Prejudice
Program Unit: Latter-day Saints and the Bible
Michael J. Biggerstaff, The Ohio State University
This paper proposes Jesus’ sign of Jonah (Matt 12:38-42; Luke 11:29-32) can be profitably interpreted as a call for anti-prejudice. I will draw heavily upon the interpretation of the book of Jonah as a satire criticizing those who thought God’s mercy and compassion belonged solely to the Israelites, and to no other nation. The pericope within the Gospels of Matthew and Luke warrant this extended connection to the book of Jonah for two reasons. First, they evoke the entirety of the story of Jonah (which I will show). Second, they include the non-Israelite Queen of the South, who does not appear in the book of Jonah. By including her, I argue the Gospels are emphasizing the non-Israelite role of the Ninevites in the story of Jonah. In the book of Jonah, the foreigners (sailors and Ninevites) were the means whereby the author(s) demonstrated the universalism of God’s mercy and compassion. The literary figure of Jonah, on the other hand, whom the Gospels of Matthew and Luke link to their Christian audience, was the means whereby the author(s) of Jonah demonstrated the fallacy of prejudice against non-Israelites. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke portray Jesus as making the same point through this pericope. I will further suggest this anti-prejudice interpretation has at least two echoes elsewhere in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke: the Canaanite woman (Matt 15:21-28) and the Parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15:1-7). Together, these stories suggest at least some early Christian efforts at social justice through anti-prejudice.
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Murder, Madness, Mending, Mission, Mates, Mars Hill, and Mob Justice: The Characterization of Paul as a New Orestes in the Canonical Acts of the Apostles
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
Mark G. Bilby, California State University - Fullerton
While myth critics have thoroughly explored the influence of Euripides’ Bacchae on the canonical Acts, the potential influence of his Orestes (in tandem with his twin Iphigenia plays), as well as Aeschylus’ Oresteia has gone overlooked. Here we outline the sagas of Orestes and the Paul of Acts in parallel: guilty of murder, subjected to religious madness, mended to health by a friend, sent on a divine mission, accompanied by faithful travel-mates, making a speech of self-defense on the Areopagus, and narrowly escaping mob execution at a major center of Artemis worship. Besides these parallel plot-lines, we detail numerous ways in which the Pauline narrative exhibits hallmark literary and thematic features of Greek drama and novels, such as the transformation of the hero's character, the contrast of folly and wisdom, the negotiation of Greek and non-Greek identity, the inevitability of the divine will as mused by the narrator, and deus ex machina pivot points and resolutions. Finally, we seek to divine the purpose of such mythical characterization: providing meaningful cultural analogues to scaffold readerly understanding; referencing commonplace cultural iconography; engaging in entertainment characteristic of novelistic fiction; engendering Roman sympathy for Jews committed to pacifism; repositioning Jewish aniconism as a form of Greek philosophy; embracing the philhellenic policies of Hadrian; and forming a literary-mythological foundation for Pauline hero cult. NB for evaluators: Anna Lefteratou is not an SBL member but she will co-author this presentation and may co-present, depending on future commitments.
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Introducing Linked Open Data Living Informational Books
Program Unit: Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies
Mark G. Bilby, California State University - Fullerton
In a recent article, Claire Clivaz surveys the rise of VREs (Virtual Research Environments) that allow for scientific hypothesis-driven, iterative, and collaborative research in the Humanities. In this presentation, we propose a new kind of VRE, the Linked Open Data Living Informational Book or LODLIB, essentially a scientific hypothesis-driven iterative digital codex. LODLIBs follow the structure of scientific articles (introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion), leverage international Linked Open Data standards (unique and interconnected DOIs), rely on non-commercial Open Science repositories, include internal data dictionaries and lexicographical resources, embed datasets and code within the digital book, invite global open peer-review and collaboration, and allow for cycles of continuous improvement characteristic of software and systems development. Essentially, the LODLIB reimagines the codex as human- and machine-readable software, bringing together research and publishing, the Sciences and the Humanities. The LODLIB format inverts the power- and economic relationships between academic authors and publishers, opens up academic discourse up to the global public, allows for rich analytics about readership and citations, and has the potential to make monographs and compilations go viral in online environments. The conclusion will relate the story of the presenter’s prototyping of the LODLIB genre in to propose and realize a new, scientific solution to Q and the Synoptic Problem.
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White Heaven, Black Hell: The Emergence of Whiteness in Early Christian Apocalytpicism
Program Unit: Wisdom and Apocalypticism
Yonatan Binyam, University of California, Los Angeles
Multiple academic disciplines have seen a surge of interest in historicizing the race concept. This scholarship includes attempts to locate “race” and/or “racist” social structures in premodern contexts like the medieval period (Eliav-Feldon et al., 2009) and the ancient Mediterranean world (Isaac, 2006; McCoskey, 2012). In addition, several works have specifically sought to unwind the tangled histories of race and Christianity (Buell, 2005; Heng, 2018; Keel, 2018). Whiteness is arguably the most important of the elements that constitute the race concept, since it pervades so many of the conceptual, historical, discursive, sociological and psychological facets of race. While works such as (Yancy, 2009) and (Heng, 2018) have taken the first steps to tracing the genealogy of whiteness, they fail to take into account the significance of the early Christian period. In this paper, I propose to demonstrate the emergence of constitutive elements of whiteness in early Christian apocalypticism. Recent works on race and “racecraft” in Classical antiquity provide a fruitful framework to analyze the ways in which early Christians adapt sociologically through apocalyptic modes of being in the world, while in the process formulating identities of the reprobate and demonic other. Pre-Constantine Christian apocalytpicism spurs the emergence of new corporal and corporate identities, which are forged in the heat of eschatological fears and hopes. In order to shed light on this episode of early Christian ethno-racial reasoning, I highlight the apocalyptic dimensions of martyrdom and apologetic texts of the early Christian period. I then propose the utility of locating these examples of identity formation within the long and multiform descent of elements of whiteness that animate white Christian identities in the modern period.
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Disaster and Disinformation: Reading Jeremiah during a Pandemic
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
Shelley Birdsong, North Central College
The Book of Jeremiah is laden with threats of and responses to war and disaster. As the literal (physical) war unfolds, so does a psychological (metaphysical) one between fact and falsehood, truth and lies. On one side is the prophet Jeremiah who warns Judah of the coming “sword, famine, and pestilence.” On the other is a group of prophets who pronounce “peace, peace” (Jer 6:14, 8:11). Each faction has its own “facts,” which are both manufactured and consumed by their own constituencies. Both parties proclaim the other “liar” and “deceiver.” People take sides, and the political and social divisions within the nation widen, the government stalemates, and those most affected are ultimately the people of the land. Thousands of years later, we find ourselves in a similar reality. Disaster has struck. Millions are left dead, and thousands have been robbed of their sense of security. Like the ancient Judahites, our realities have been disrupted, and we search in this liminal reality between “the before times” and “the after times” for a truth to steady us.
In this paper, I will begin by unpacking these meaningful intertextual similarities between the periods of disaster in Judah in the 580s and the current pandemic in America. Thereafter, I will draw upon trauma theory, social science, and psychological studies in order to make three claims. One, disaster or threat of disaster can not only induce trauma for individuals but also create a “truth vacuum” in society, much like the ones in ancient Judah and contemporary America. Two, these vacuums prompt competing powers, including religious powers, to lay claim to “the facts” regarding the disaster, and this battle between “true and false prophets” causes confusion, fear, and unrest. Three, such environments, i.e. those rife with disinformation and chaos, have the potential to compound the psychological harm of recent trauma victims if they trigger additional existential questions regarding one’s reality or meaning. Finally, I will fold all of these elements together in order to suggest that Americans (or other disaster/trauma victims) might be able to reread Jeremiah with a deeper sense of empathy for the “psychologically dislocated” exiles of the 580s and to learn how to lament from them in this time of liminality as we await a post-Covid world.
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Yhwh's Wrath and the "Rebellious Ones": Isaiah 66 and Later Rabbinic Literature
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Josiah S. Bisbee, Brown University
Isaiah 66:24 is a well-known passage in the Hebrew Bible, considered foundational for the development of later descriptions of Gehenna as an abode of torment, where the rebellious suffer in worms and fire for all eternity. Evidence for these developments are found in texts, such as Ben Sira (Sir 7:17) and Judith (16:17), as well as later texts such as Pseudo-Philo (LAB 63:4-5) and the Gospel of Mark (9:43, 48). And while such descriptions do indeed describe Gehenna as a place of eternal punishment, the nature of the punishment described in Isa. 66 is not entirely clear. In fact, separate supplementary layers in Isa. 66 display evidence that there were different opinions regarding the fate of the rebellious. For instance, on the one hand Isa. 66:17 seems to describe a complete, and final judgment, whereas Isa. 66:24 describes an eternal, ongoing punishment. Furthermore, the identity of those who receive this punishment is not entirely clear, whether Judeans, non-Judeans, or a combination of both. Subsequently, such confusion leads to a number of different opinions regarding the recipients of and the nature of Yhwh’s wrath even in later rabbinic literature. For instance b. ‘Erub. 19a:4-8 understands Isa. 66:24 as a reference to non-Judeans, while b. Sanh. 99b:4-15 includes Judeans, albeit of a certain stripe, among those who have “no place in the world to come.” Furthermore, m. ῾Ed. 2:10 describes the punishment of Gehenna as lasting only twelve months, while other texts, such as b. Pesach. 54a, describe the flames of Gehenna as eternal. In an attempt to map out all these differences, section one of this paper will begin by providing a brief description of the different layers of supplementation in Isa. 66, showcasing how they reflect variegated opinions on the identity of the punished and how long their punishment lasts. Section two will then explore how these different viewpoints manifest in later interpretations of Isa. 66:24 in the Mishnah, Tosefta and Talmuds; ultimately, demonstrating that such debates continued on, and remained inconclusive in Rabbinic circles, far into the late antique period.
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Xanthos the Lycian Priest: Enslaved Religious Preference in Mediterranean Antiquity
Program Unit: Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Jonah Bissell, University of Edinburgh
Early Christianity through its literary remains purports to have appealed especially to slaves. Such texts, for one, depict the early church to have attracted slaves through status dissolution (e.g. Gal. 3:28/1 Cor. 12:13/Col. 3:11). For this to have worked, however, slaves must have lacked any degree of social autonomy, but as we will see, this was not always the case. Such texts also depict the church as inclusive of enslaved members (e.g. Eph. 6:5-8; Col. 3:22-25; 1 Tim. 6:1-2). However, in large part, slaves in antiquity lacked control of their own bodies and were thus often unable to meet Christianity’s radical sexual standards. Such texts even depict the church as preferable to indigenous ‘pagan’ religion (e.g. Acts 17:22-34; 1 Cor. 12:2; etc.). However, in a set of inscriptions from 2nd century (CE) Greece (IG II[2] 1365-6), we meet Xanthos, an ancient slave who could have realistically joined the church. However, as the inscriptions show, Xanthos was not a Christian. The example of IG II[2] 1365-6 generates a constellation of related questions: Were slaves in antiquity drawn to Christianity? Could slaves even be so drawn? If so, could they have maintained membership in the early church, given the radical sexual ethics of the early Christian movement? In this paper, I contend that the early church was generally not congenial to (the majority of) ancient slaves. Toward this end, I examine two inscriptions from southern Greece (IG II[2] 1365-6), noting in brief what they reveal about the lived experience of ancient slaves. I, then, examine several Christian texts (1 Cor. 7:21-23; Gal. 3:28/1 Cor. 12:13/Col. 3:11) which portray the early church as attractive to slaves. I, then, return to Xanthos, comparing the preferability of local Christ-associations with indigenous ‘pagan’ cults (in this case, the Laurian cult of Mēn Tyrannos). I conclude the paper by suggesting a more nuanced picture of enslaved religious preference in Mediterranean antiquity.
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1 Timothy and the Confession Inscriptions of Asia Minor
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Brad Bitner, Westminster Seminary California
The so-called confession inscriptions (Beichtinschriften) from Asia Minor offer an illuminating differential context for certain lexical, rhetorical and theological features of 1 Timothy. Recent work on the performative aspects of these texts from the regions around Ephesus should inform our interpretation of, inter alia, 1 Tim 2:5-6; 3:14-16. By comparison and contrast, these inscriptions highlight overlooked elements of the ways in which acclamation, confession, theology and Christology interact with and support the paraenesis of 1 Timothy.
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Of Brambles of Briars: Ecocritical Readings in Isaiah and Neo-Assyrian Royal Inscriptions
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Øyvind Bjøru, University of Texas at Austin
This paper examines the imagery of wilderness as alterity and the liminal spaces where humans negotiate the relationship with nature in First Isaiah and the corpus of Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions through an ecocritical lense. While punishment is largely a divine prerogative in Isaiah, a subversive concept of ecological catastrophe on its own terms challenges the predominant perspectives in the text. The ecocritical reading brings to the fore the discursive impetus in Isaiah that reintegrates humans as a species within a larger biotic system where beings are not ranked by relative value. The disproportionate and dangerous excesses of nature are cast as weather phenomena, insects swarming, plagues, and the landscape attacking and changing from the "domestic picturesque" to the "scenic sublime" and outright "wilderness" along the continuum of ecological space developed by Peter Barry.
Whereas Isaiah sees cultured space receding in the face of a nature that is not necessarily intrinsically divine, the Neo-Assyrian imperial project mounts a discourse that seeks to neutralize and domesticate the threatening wild. The propagandistic descriptions of how king and army navigate and appropriate challenging spaces employ what Joseph Meeker has called the comedic mode of ecology, and we can trace the competing strategies of othering certain spaces while absorbing them into the sphere where the empire claims suzerainty.
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Justification as the Restoration of Participation in Divine Glory in Romans 2-3
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Ben C. Blackwell, Houston Baptist University
Justification as the Restoration of Participation in Divine Glory in Romans 2-3
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Lemnos in the South Pacific: Competition, Collaboration, and Homo Necans
Program Unit: Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Sandra Blakely, Emory University
In Homo Necans, Burkert enrolls the women of Lemnos among his case studies for festivals of dissolution and renewal, New Year’s festivals in which a tripart rhythm of anticipatory renunciation, a savage act, and pleasurable gratification reflect the transition into civic life of the age-old experience of the hunter. Wilamowitz had seen the festival as a cultural memory of 7th century BC colonial encounters (1931: 231), Bachofen as a recollection of primordial matriarchy (1861). Burkert grounded the violence of the women in the conflation of hunting, homicide and sacrifice that tied a local Greek festival into larger human cultural types (1983: 190-196). His project was implicitly comparative, explicitly structural, and overtly engaged with evolutionary models. He acknowledged that the rapid development of arguments in the social sciences could render it obsolete even by 1983 (1983: xiii). The post-structuralist movement commenced in the late 1960s; the Boasnian critique of evolutionary anthropology was already underway in the first half of the 20th century. Shepard argued as early as 1973 that early man, rather than a ‘killer ape’, emerges as a ‘tender carnivore’, and that the act of hunting is approached with empathy and amicable reciprocity. More recent publications in ecology and anthropology support this hypothesis: the equation of hunting, murder, and ritual sacrifice holds up neither in anthropological nor ecological studies of early man. The symbolic logic of ritual practices, indeed, is often focused on the restoration of the earth’s resources, a pattern which encourages an ecological perspective on ritual bloodletting.
This paper revisits Burkert’s Lemnian Women through these updated critical lenses, using two case studies from the South Pacific. The water politics of East Timor offer comparanda for ancestors in the landscape who enable cooperation and mediation of past violence with present renewal, resonant with the invocations of Sintians and Kabeiroi in Lemnian tradition (Palmer 2015). The Subak systems of Bali enable a temple-centered response to competition for critical water resources, integrating the goddess Dewi Danu into collaborative counsels (Lansing 2019). These recommend a model for the Lemnian rites that foregrounds the message of ecological renewal in the form of the island’s fires - telluric in reputation, domestic, industrial and mobile in the rites. These examples suggest the resilience of Burkert’s inspiration to engage with the human sciences. His frequent expressions of caution about his hypotheses signal his readers that definitive answers to the nature of man were not his goal; the interdisciplinary project, rather, allows the study of the past to harvest fresh insights precisely as the human sciences themselves evolve.
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The Book of Daniel at the Boundary of Biblical Aramaic and Qumran Aramaic
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Amanda M. Davis Bledsoe, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
In this paper, I offer a study of the Aramaic parts of the Qumran manuscripts of the Book of Daniel. I begin with a brief introduction to the relevant manuscripts, and then provide an overview of the significant variant readings between the Qumran Manuscripts themselves as well as between these and the Masoretic Text of Daniel. I particularly focus on the evident linguistic and grammatical differences in the manuscripts, namely issues of phonology, orthography, morphology, and syntax. Finally, I look at two sections (Dan 5:12-19; 7:26-28) of overlap between 4Q112 and 4Q113, the two best-preserved Qumran Daniel manuscripts, and which provide an especially intriguing example of scribal preference (interference?) in the copying process in antiquity. These two manuscripts display several shared readings which are distinctive from MT, and it has even been suggested that one may have been directly copied from the other. However, these manuscripts also evidence very different Aramaic linguistic features, with 4Q113 including certain elements which are believed to be unique to Qumran Aramaic and which are lacking from 4Q112. This raises several questions as to the boundary between Biblical Aramaic and Qumran Aramaic as it relates to the biblical Qumran scrolls, as well as to the potential for biblical manuscripts having been copied alongside other Qumran Aramaic manuscripts rather than in a separate (Jerusalem or temple) environment as has sometimes been claimed.
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The Book of Daniel and Scribes and Scrolls at Qumran
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Amanda M. Davis Bledsoe, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
The work of Sidney White Crawford has indelibly influenced the field of Early Judaism and the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In her new book, she takes up the “traditional” view in identifying the authors of the Scrolls and the inhabitants of the site of Khirbet Qumran as Essenes (the “Qumran-Essene hypothesis”). She does this, however, with much nuance, taking into account statistical analyses for the dating of caves alongside a renewed examination of the archaeological features of the site and caves and reconsideration of the literary sources describing the Essenes. Along the way, she raises many questions which continue to puzzle scholars, namely the relationship between the site of Khirbet Qumran and the caves, and also of the individual caves to one another, concluding that both the caves and the site “were used by one and the same sectarian Jewish community” (p. 310). While White Crawford spends a great deal of time looking at the “sectarian” texts as a defining feature of the Essene community, my paper extends this examination to the biblical materials, using the Qumran Daniel manuscripts as a case study for examining this theory of the interconnectedness of the caves and the site. This work, preserved in eight manuscripts discovered in three different caves, has often been argued to have greatly impacted the ideology of the “sectarian” community, and thus offers a good locus for recalibrating the discussion. This paper seeks to answer two important questions. First, how do the different Qumran manuscripts of Daniel relate to one another? Do these reflect a single tradition or could they have originated in different communities and served different purposes? Second, how do the Qumran manuscripts of Daniel relate to the broader Qumran (especially sectarian) literature? Here I combine an analysis of the paleographical dates of the manuscripts with study of their physical/material and linguistic features. Particularly intriguing in this regard are certain linguistic features, which have been identified as characteristic of “Qumran Aramaic” (and different from all other forms of Aramaic), and which are also found in at least one of the Daniel manuscripts. All of this offers both support as well as some challenges for White Crawford’s theory of the connectivity of the caves and the site as well as a possible connection with a particular scribal “school” or group (perhaps to be located at the site).
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Dressing (Dis)honorably: Esther and the Irony of Attire and Honor
Program Unit: Feminist Hermeneutics of the Bible
Seth A. Bledsoe, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
This paper takes as its starting point the occasions of “dressing/undressing” and the lexeme yqr mutually informative rhetorical features that contribute to the elaborate irony that permeates the novella Esther, particularly as it relates to gender and social position. As many interpreters have noted already, Esther is full of felicitous phrases and sequences that defy strict linearity, adding a complexity to the royal drama that works to a humorous effect. While interpreters have paid some attention to the function of the dressing/undressing scenes in Esther, I will offer a further nuance to way in which these scenes both contribute to the overall irony (and humor) of the story as well as reinforce the narrative’s playful critique of authority and hierarchy, by asking questions, such as, ‘Who dresses whom?’ and ‘Who refuses (the command) to dress?’ This is clear when we consider not only the oft-cited parallels between Vashti and Esther, but also when we consider both women in their respective “dressing” behaviors relative to their male counterparts. The story begins with the oft-noted scene of Queen Vashti refusing to “undress” for the king, which, in turn, is said to have implications for how women might behave relative to their husbands across the empire. A “problem” promptly resolved by decree and subsequent “undressing” of countless young women (including Esther) from across the empire. Later, we find a strikingly similar, albeit inversed, situation. Mordecai has just “undressed” himself when Esther commands him to “dress”, which he then refuses. The gendered distinction in such “dressing” exchanges is flattened, though, in chapter 6 in the comical scene of Haman’s hubristic misunderstanding about whom the king wishes to “dress” and thus “honor.” This brings us to the second feature that further links the undressing scenes, though it has not received due attention, namely the word yqr. A careful reading of the dressing scenes in Esther illustrates how this lexeme serves as a stylistic lynchpin for the narrative’s unmistakable irony in relation to honor and status in gender relations. This is evident if one attends to the underappreciated polyvalence of the term: in addition to its noted positive meaning “precious” or “honored,” the lexeme can also connote the quality of being “difficult” or “burden(some)”. Rereading yqr as “difficult” can add to the irony of these dressing scenes. For example, many have pointed out the confluence of dramatic and situational irony of chapter 6, but to my knowledge no one has pointed out third layer of verbal irony when Haman asks himself “For whom would the king like to makes things wonderful/difficult more than me?” (6:6). Analyzing these two literary features, one underappreciated and one overlooked, further adds to our appreciation of an ever-intriguing and undeniably entertaining drama about the ironically swift and unexpected elasticity of clothing, status, and honor.
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Shunning Shame in Paul: The Emotion of Shame Overturned in Rom 1:16 and Phil 1:20
Program Unit: Bible and Emotion
Isaac Blois, Biola University
Paul opens Romans by staking his emotional wellbeing on the success of his gospel about Christ. Far from being a reason for shame, his proclamation of a crucified lord and messiah stands as the apostle’s highest honor. Not only has the Christ-event reframed the apostle’s thinking, it has also realigned his emotions, recalibrating his experience of shame. Hockey has proposed, writing on emotions in 1 Peter, that “the absence of shame sits in a larger matrix of value” in that believers find new “alignment with God’s values and norms.” The present paper argues that Paul depicts a similar realignment of values at two key moments in his epistolary writings: in his disavowal of shame for the gospel at Rom 1:16, and in his disavowal of the shame of imprisonment at Phil 1:20. In both epistolary moments it is the prospect of positive evaluation before the divine court of approval that counteracts the shamefulness associated with either situation.
In both Romans and Philippians, Paul’s engagement with the Scriptural tradition of the Isaianic servant furnishes him with the emotional discourse of shame being overturned and replaced with honor. Whereas Jesus is primarily the one who participates in this prerogative of the Isaianic servant’s reversal, Paul views his own ministry as sharing in this servant-ministry, thereby allowing him to confidently expect a similar reversal of shame. This apostolic participation in the honorific reversal promised to Isaiah’s servant comes to the fore in Paul’s letters, where Paul reframes his pending Roman trial as an opportunity for glorification rather than as a cause for shame. In so doing, the apostle echoes language from Isa 50:7, where the servant undergoes a shameful discipline at the hands of YHWH, yet holds fast to a confidence in ultimate vindication and a reversal of honorific fortunes from the God whom he faithfully serves. Paul picks up this language when he writes to the Philippian believers, “I know…that I will in no way be put to shame” (Phil 1:20), as he does also when writing to the Roman believers asserting that “I am not ashamed of the gospel” (Rom 1:16). This paper argues that Paul’s association with Isaiah’s servant furnishes the apostle with a pattern of shame overturned that enables him to envision a glorious ministry among his gentile audience rather than the shameful associations which would have attached to his imprisonment.
To support this claim, I will interact with biblical scholarship on the shame of the innocent sufferer in the Hebrew Scriptures (Klopfenstein, Janowski), connecting this to the burgeoning scholarship on the emotion of shame in the New Testament (Vorster, Elliott, Hockey, Lau) as well as in the ancient world (Kaster, Konstan, Barton). I will then bring this Scriptural depiction of shame into conversation with those working on Paul’s intertextual use of Isaiah (Wilk, Wagner, Gignilliat, McAuley), showing that it is the apostle’s Isaianic frame of reference which controls his construal of shame and its reversal in these two letters.
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A Ptolemaic Petition of a “Judeo-Egyptian” (Ἰουδαιοαιγύπτιος)?
Program Unit: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Lincoln H. Blumell, Brigham Young University
While recently cataloging a public collection of Greek and Roman papyri in southern Japan we came across a Ptolemaic petition of the late third century BCE. While the precise contours of the petition are difficult to determine given that it is quite fragmentary, the piece is nonetheless remarkable because of a reading it appears to attest on the first line. Directly after the name of the petitioner where the ethnic was frequently provided the individual appears to self-identify as a “Judeo-Egyptian” using the previously unattested compound ethic Ἰουδαιοαιγύπτιος. Given the use of this hapax legomonenon combined with the fact that this is the earliest petition submitted by an individual bearing an ethnic with ioudaios makes it very significant. Therefore, in this presentation we will provide an edition of this papyrus with a special emphasis on elucidating the context and significance of a Ἰουδαιοαιγύπτιος in Ptolemaic Egypt.
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Ethical Strategies in Haggai-Malachi: The Impact of Shifting Genre on Moral Formation
Program Unit: Rhetoric of Religious Antiquity
Mark J. Boda, McMaster Divinity College
This study draws on insights from new form criticism and genre analysis to track the way rhetorical strategies are used for ethical purposes in the Haggai-Malachi corpus of the Twelve. This will show that the contribution of prophetic books to moral formation extends beyond the direct appeals of the imperative to more indirect and subtle strategies for moral formation.
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Suffering and Supererogation: The Use of Torah in Nehemiah 5 and Ruth
Program Unit: Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah
Abigail Bodeau, Baylor University
The biblical tradition clearly requires care for the poor and marginalized in society, although applying those traditions to instances of suffering and poverty requires an element of interpretation of the legal codes themselves. In this paper, I argue that Nehemiah in Neh 5 and Boaz in the book of Ruth demonstrate a similar hermeneutic when they interpret the relevant Torah regulations in order to address the instances of economic suffering they are presented with. Further, in their responses both Nehemiah and Boaz go above and beyond the requirements outlined in the Torah to ensure the well-being of those suffering in their community. In Neh 5, Nehemiah indicts the nobles and officials using the language of the Torah’s prohibition of lending and slavery regulations. However, his response in returning the land and foregoing his governor’s salary move beyond the requirements of Torah to attempt to remedy the poverty of his community. His actions have the Torah regulations in their line of sight, but do not perfectly correspond with said regulations. Thus, Nehemiah demonstrates that his primary concern is with alleviating the suffering of those crying out to him, rather than building a society based on Torah requirements. In doing so, he creatively engages with the relevant economic regulations in Torah, interpreting them in such a way to address the poor who come to him.
Boaz demonstrates a similar approach to Torah and suffering in his treatment of Ruth and Naomi. While Ruth is a Moabitess, Boaz consistently draws her into Israelite society, offering her protections under Torah offered to Israelites, but not foreigners. In his encounter with ploni almoni at the city gate, Boaz further conflates land redemption with levirate marriage in order to ensure Ruth’s marriage, and its accompanying security for Ruth and Naomi. Thus, like Nehemiah, Boaz goes beyond his obligations under Torah law, which in the case of Ruth extend only to allow her to glean from the edges of the field, in order to create a permanent solution to Ruth and Naomi’s predicament. While commentators often highlight the differences between Ezra-Nehemiah and Ruth’s treatment of foreign women, this paper demonstrates that Nehemiah and Boaz appear to treat the suffering of the Judean community similarly, as both men interpret the biblical traditions to protect the poor in their community. Thus, neither Nehemiah nor Boaz take the Torah regulations as their checklist to guide their engagement with society. Instead, both men orient their actions towards alleviating the suffering presented to them, going above and beyond the specific Torah requirements to care for those suffering in their community.
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Adonijah in 1 Kgs 1:5–10, Kirta’s Son Yaṣṣubu, and "Ninurta and the Stones": Rebellion against the King as a Cursed Enterprise
Program Unit: Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature
Daniel Bodi, La Sorbonne - University of Paris 4
The paper explores Adonijah’s coup d’état in light of two ancient Near Eastern mythological texts: The Ugaritic Kirta Epic (KTU 1.16) and the Sumerian Epic “Ninurta and the Stones” (Lugale-e). The 13th century BCE Kirta Epic provides a literary topos on the weak, sick, and old king whose rule is challenged by his young son on account of the former’s physical decline. Tablet C, describes Kirta’s weakness, as he seems close to death. El sends a winged being, Šaʿtiqatu, to heal him. Her name means ‘She who causes to pass on’. She drives away the sickness by restoring his appetite for food, and beautiful Ḥurraya prepares him a fattened sheep for meal that restores his strength. However, the King Kirta finds out that his oldest son Yaṣṣubu attempted to usurp his power. In a long internal dialogue, Yaṣṣubu first ruminates how to justify his rebellion then repeats his monologue verbatim, citing Kirta’s failure as a military leader against raiders, his inability to judge the cause of the widow, the orphan, and of the oppressed people. Kirta failed in his royal duty to maintain order. King Kirta abhors the idea of having his power usurped, and curses his rebellious son Yaṣṣubu: “May Ḥôrānu break your head, Aṯtartu ‘name’ of Baʿlu your skull. You will surely fall” (KTU 1.16 vi.54-58). The rebellion against the king especially when the latter was ill was seen as a sacrilege that provokes a curse. It is a dynastic provision aimed in discouraging coup d’état and rebellion of the sons against the reigning king.
The second text, “Ninurta and the Stones” is a Sumerian epic of 728 lines, attested in bilingual and Akkadian texts in over 200 tablets dating from the Old Babylonian down to the Hellenistic times. Adonijah’s choice of place for the sacrifices and a banquet “at the Stone of the Snake/Dragon” (ʾeben hazzōḥelet) by the side of the ‘Fuller’s Source” (ʿên rōgēl), might have a) military b) mythological, and b) economic significance. W. Heimpel classifies the epic Lugal-e under the ‘Dragon slayer motif’ (RlA 8: 562 fig 9.A). These three aspects are explored in light of the heroic epic of Ninurta who served as the model for the figure of Nimrod in Gen 10:8, the rebel king par excellence. The rabbinic tradition explains the name Nimrod as a 1c.pl. G-stem from √mrd meaning “we shall rebel.” Since these connections rely on the intermediary of Aramaic from the Targums and involve interpretative techniques known as “Babylonian hermeneutics,” at the root of Midrashic exegesis, the allusions to Adonijah and Ninurta/Nimrod as the rebels were most probably elaborated by Deuteronomistic scribes in the Babylonian exile. While Adonijah might have identified himself with the positive aspects of the Ninurta/Nimrod tradition like “great hunter”, victorious hero (qurrādu) and warrior, as well as famous chariot hunts of Assyrian kings, the Deuteronomistic redactors identified him with insurgence, rebellion, and revolt.
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Creation of the Aramaic Story and Proverbs of Aḥiqar as a Literalization of a Sumero-Akkadian Proverb
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Daniel Bodi, La Sorbonne - University of Paris 4
I argue that the story and proverbs of Aḥiqar are a product of the literalization of a Sumero-Akkadian saying. Both the name Aḥiqar and the story of Aḥiqar are literary constructs. The main plot of the “disgrace and rehabilitation of a minister,” and the motif of the "ungrateful nephew", were already blended in the Sumero-Akkadian proverbs. In (BWL ii 54-63), the reference to the ingrate (ruggu) person or a villain points to the first of the two motives in Aḥiqar, that of the “ungrateful nephew” Nādin. The second half of the saying refers to the “disgrace and rehabilitation of a wise vizier” (ummânu), reflecting the career of Aḥiqar. It shows that the Aramaic story of Aḥiqar represents a secondarily elaborated account from an original Sumero-Akkadian proverb. A similar manner of creating a longer composition from an original short proverb is found in the Sumerian folktale of “The Old Man and the Young Girl,” mentioned on a small school tablet (BIN II 59) with a phrase which is a summary of the whole story: ab.ba ki.sikil.tur-ra nam.dam.šè ba-an-tuku "an old man took a young girl as wife." The phrase represents the essential idea of the story in a nutshell. We are dealing with a well-known topos, used in a school setting. It also suggests the possibility that the entire folktale was composed out of a common saying. The phenomenon is associated with the production of Aramaic literature. Parallels are found in the 5th century BCE Aramaic Sheikh Fadl inscription, being a literary elaboration of an Egyptian Demotic composition known as the “Inaros Epic,” as well as the literary creation of the biblical stories of “Daniel in the lions’ den”, (Dan 6) and of “Daniel’s friends in a fiery furnace” (Dan 3). The latter are explained as Aramaic elaborations of a story from an originally Akkadian metaphor and expression respectively. The metaphor of a god muzzling the lions’ mouth appears in Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, a MB composition. The metaphor of ‘the lion’s pit’ used in the NA composition, known as the ‘Forlorn Scholar’, refers to the circle of scholars at the court from which Urad-Gula has been ousted. With their slander and hostility, they have turned into lions, eager to devour him. The biblical author inherited the motif of the lions’ pit from the Babylonian tradition, turning the metaphor into a literal description. Both in Aḥiqar and in Daniel the transformation of a proverb with literalization of an ancient metaphor into a story would have been done by a scribe. The Aḥiqar Aramaic papyri were probably used in a school setting at Elephantine with a triple purpose: For education of young men, especially those who aspired to civil office, to teach them Aramaic, as well as essential wisdom for survival, and to inculcate obedience and respect for the king. The Elephantine curriculum used a “school manual” with a telling title “My Precious Brother” (aḫī-aqar), a metaphor also used for the date palm producing staple food in Mesopotamia, essential for survival.
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To Pee or Not to Pee? The Influence of Platonic Philosophy on the Concept of Divine Embodiment in the Testament of Abraham
Program Unit: Religion and Philosophy in Antiquity
Bryan Carter Bogue, Brewton-Parker College
Does God have a body? This question has enjoyed increased scholarly attention in recent years. The question, however, needs clarification. Is the discussion primarily philosophical/theological or historical? In other words, do the discussions revolve around who/what God really is, or are they focused instead on what some ancient community believed about its deity (or deities)? Since it is impossible to demonstrate the very existence of deities, much less whether a deity or group of deities have bodies, I prefer to focus on the following set of questions instead: Did early Jewish/nascent Christian communities believe that divine beings (their chief deity included) had bodies? Did this belief develop diachronically? If so, when, why, where, and among which social groups? A full examination of all relevant texts is impossible here, but one short story that exists in two recensions—The Testament of Abraham—is highly instructive for this conversation. Recension A (also called the Long Recension) repeatedly uses the term “incorporeal” (ἀσώματος) to describe the archangel Michael and the rest of the heavenly spirits. Additionally, Michael does not eat, drink, or sleep in recension A, though he does all three in recension B (also called the Short Recension). Instead, Michael fakes having to urinate so that he can leave Abraham and meet with God in heaven. This is part of Michael’s ruse because, of course, heavenly spirits do not really need to urinate. In recension B, on the other hand, Michael has no problem eating, drinking, and sleeping in Abraham’s house, and the word “incorporeal” is never used to describe him. Additionally, he does not fake having to pee but is taken up to heaven in the twinkling of an eye at sunset to worship God with the rest of the angels (B is silent on Michael’s urinary tract). This short story provides us with a unique vantage point from which to examine the concept of divine embodiment because the two recensions preserve different understandings of the divine. In A, divine beings are decidedly incorporeal, but in B they have bodies that are very much like those of their mortal counterparts. In this paper I argue that Platonic philosophical notions of the divine have exerted considerable influence over the theology of recension A, while B preserves more traditional notions of divine corporeality. This argument has implications for the relative dating and probable provenance of both recensions. Additionally, it demonstrates that the “problem” of divine embodiment was anything but settled in the first centuries CE among Jewish (and probably also Christian) religious communities.
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The Biblical Practice of Tearing Clothes as a Means of Traumatic Memory Inhibition
Program Unit: Psychology and Biblical Studies
Bryan Carter Bogue, Brewton-Parker College
Scholarly discussions surrounding the biblical practice of tearing clothes have focused on what the action was meant to convey to the reader or to bystanders (e.g., intense grief/mourning), but little has been discovered about the possible benefit of the practice for the actor. Why did people express grief in this way? What factors may have given rise to this practice? And does this action do anything to benefit the actor? Modern scientific studies on memory may shed light on these questions. It has been demonstrated conclusively that memories—especially those that are particularly emotional or traumatic—can be triggered by certain context-dependent cues such as odors, words, images, objects, and sounds. In this paper, I apply psychologist Dorthe Berntsen’s findings regarding involuntary autobiographical memories to biblical stories in which a character tears his or her clothing in response to some traumatic event. Specifically, Berntsen has demonstrated that most involuntary autobiographical memories are activated by cues from the everyday environment of the individual (clothing being one such example). She has also determined that personal events with a substantial impact on one’s emotional life—such as the death of a close person—may increase one’s sensitivity to these memory cues. Based on these psychological findings, it is my contention that the ancient practice of tearing clothing supplied for the actor at least an unintentional benefit of suppressing a traumatic memory by destroying a likely and potent memory cue: the clothing he or she was wearing at the moment of the traumatic memory.
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The Translation Technique of the Septuagint of the Book of Ruth: In Search of Its Characterisation through the Analysis of the Greek Rendering of the Hebrew Hapax Legomena
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Beatrice Bonanno, Université Catholique de Louvain
In the content- and context-related approach, one of the criteria used to evaluate the translation technique of Septuagint (LXX) translators consists in analysing how Hebrew hapax legomena have been rendered into Greek. On this topic, several studies have been conducted revealing a more accurate characterisation of the LXX translators’ translation technique and often modifying and nuancing the portraits of the Greek translators. However, none of these studies focused on the Greek rendering of the Hebrew hapax legomena in the LXX of the book of Ruth.
Therefore, this paper will, at first, identify and isolate the Hebrew hapax legomena in the book of Ruth. Afterwards, they will be presented in their narrative context, since this might play a decisive role in the way the LXX translator handles them. Subsequently, their enigmatic Hebrew meanings and their Greek rendering will be examined and evaluated.
The aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, to offer a more nuanced characterisation of the translation technique of the Greek translator of the LXX-Ruth, and, on the other, to gain a clearer understanding of the nuances, innovations, and/or specificities of the LXX text.
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God's Enslaved: Usefulness, Loyalty, and Property in the Shepherd of Hermas
Program Unit: Slavery, Resistance, and Freedom
Chance Bonar, Harvard University
In the discussion of early Christianity and language of enslavement, the Shepherd of Hermas is often overlooked as a source for understanding how early Christians conceived of themselves as “God’s enslaved” (οἱ δοῦλοι τοῦ θεοῦ). As part of a larger project that argues that language of enslavement is central to the Shepherd’s model for virtuous believers and conception of a “proper” relationship between humans and God, this paper focuses on the Shepherd’s characterization of God’s enslaved. In particular, I focus on three characteristics: usefulness, loyalty, and property. In the midst of the Shepherd’s visionary experiences is the central depiction of salvation and alignment with God’s will––the tower, a building constructed by the very bodies of these enslaved believers that are transformed into stones. The Shepherd consistently discusses how God’s enslaved are expected to be “useful for construction of the tower,” and how those who are “useless” are thrown out. I compare the Shepherd’s rhetoric of the utility of enslaved people to Pseudo-Aristotle’s Economics, the Life of Aesop, and other Roman-era literature on utility. Likewise, I contextualize the Shepherd’s concern for the “faith” (πίστις) that God’s enslaved express, and suggest that it is better translated as “loyalty” or “trustworthiness” in light of how enslaved people in Valerius Maximus’s Words and Deeds are expected to do anything for their enslaver up to the point of death. Finally, I demonstrate that the Shepherd characterizes God’s enslaved as property that can be exchanged, purchased, and sold. I compare God’s enslaved to documentary sales of enslaved people and the paramone inscriptions at Delphi in which enslaved people were sold to Apollo in order to contextualize the objectification and commodification of enslaved people. While it is common to read “God’s enslaved”––both in the Shepherd and other New Testament and early Christian literature––as merely metaphorical or titular, language associated with enslavement permeates the Shepherd and may be a fruitful avenue for interpreting its moral vision for Hermas’s readers. Not unlike other Christian literature, the Shepherd buys into the perspective and language of the enslaver in its characterization of God’s enslaved as bodies that are ideally useful (for the enslaver’s will), loyal (to their enslaver God), and property (of God and God’s angelic proxies).
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Visiting the Sick: Sir 7:35 and Its Biblical and Non-Biblical Background
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Eberhard Bons, University of Strasbourg
Visiting the sick is one of the works of mercy mentioned in Matthew 25:36, alongside with other exemples, e.g. giving to eat and to drink. Most of these specific works of mercy appear in the Hebrew Bible, e.g. Isaiah 58:7. However, this is not the case for visiting the sick, an idea attested only in the Greek text of Sirach 7:35 but not in the corresponding text in Ms A. This raises the question of whether the idea of visiting the sick occurs elsewhere, namely in Jewish Hellenistic literature or in texts of non Jewish origin, e.g. Greek literature. The aim of this paper is to give an answer to this question.
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Born Again Again: Theories of Conception Underlying Birth Metaphors in Theodore of Mopsuestia's Homilies
Program Unit: Healthcare and Disability in the Ancient World
Adam Booth, Duke University
Theodore of Mopsuestia talks about baptism in terms of birth. This is a metaphor with biblical precedent, not at all uncommon in his fourth century Antiochene setting. What is unusual, though, is how he develops this metaphor. His homilies include several different extensions of this metaphor, so this paper will utilize blended space metaphor theory to understand how they function together. Sometimes, Christ is a lactating mother, who feeds the newborn Christians with his own body and blood in the Eucharist. At other times, baptism corresponds to conception, and Christians are as yet unborn, spending their lives being reshaped by Christ in whose womb they dwell. At other times still, Christ is left out of the image, and the baptismal waters provide a brief womb for the reformation of the neophyte. This paper seeks to understand what kind of theory of conception underlies these differing extensions of the basic birth metaphor and what that means for understanding Theodore's soteriology.
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Sibylline Destruction and the Production of Sibylline Books
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Francis Borchardt, NLA University College
Loss follows the Sibyl wherever she goes. Despite the fact that sibylline oracles have maintained a constant presence in the imaginations of scholars from at least the fourth century BCE onward, the sibyl carries with her a precarious legacy. Throughout her many appearances as a character in Graeco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian narrative, the sibyl is often unable to reliably transmit her divine speech to others. All along the way the sibyl and her oracles run into trouble. Her prophecies are burned. Her oracles are poorly recorded. Her speech is forgotten. She is unable to write for herself She has her contributions hidden. People lose track of her manuscripts. and sometimes the Sibyl participates in the destruction of her own writings. This idea of sibylline loss carries through a wide variety sources from the first century BCE until at least the 6th century CE.
This study argues that the persistent story of loss is a productive fiction for sibylline oracles, that drives the composition of the sibyls verses and ultimately the assembly of the anthologies we know as the Sibylline Oracles. In conversation with the category of "Fiction" as theorized by Bruno Latour this paper makes the case that one of the primary ways in which the Sibyl’s oracles are realized is through the stories about them. It then lays out that two crucial aspects of these stories are that the Sibyl's speech is both extremely valuable and just out of reach. The study then asserts that the fictional realization of lost and hidden books of extreme value leads various figures throughout antiquity and beyond to materialize oracles, or part thereof, to fill the gap created by the fiction. This leads to the production and discovery of scattered sibylline verses, individual sibylline books, the first and second late antique anthologies of oracles, and ultimately the modern book circulated under the title Sibylline Oracles. At each step these materializations of the sibyl's oracles are both dispatched by the fiction and participate in its realization by "discovering" sibylline verses once thought to be lost. The end result is that the Sibylline Oracles have (at least) two ontologies, one as fiction, and one as material object.
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We Must Go East: Metro Last Light and Metro Exodus in Relation to Genesis and Exodus
Program Unit: Bible and Film
Frank G. Bosman, Tilburg University
Metro Last Light (2013) and Metro Exodus (2019), respectively the second and third installment of the ongoing Metro digital games series, developed by 4A Games and published by Deep Silver, have a very complex, deconstructive intertextual relationship with the biblical books of Genesis and Exodus. Among more implicit and subtle references, the trailer of Last Light was named after the first, while the title of Exodus refers to the second.
This horror game series takes place in the thirties of the 21st century, after a (perceived, but later revealed not to be) global nuclear war, that ravished the face of the earth. In Moscow, where the first two installments take place, some people have found refuge in the metro tunnels (hence the name of the series). In Last Light, a group of survivors secure their collective survival by preventing an all-out war between the underground fractions. In Exodus, the same group travels eastwards on a train they call ‘the Aurora’ to find a new home far away from the captivity of the underground live. The games operate an implicit morality system, that is, the game measures the moral choices the player are offered, without them knowing that or when they are evaluated. This moral evaluation influences the narrative ending of the game significantly.
In this presentation, I wish to synthesize these different intertextual relations between the books of Exodus and Genesis at the one hand and the narratives of the two games at the other hand, on the level of the performance of the textual characters, and of the communication towards the text-immanent reader/player, in order to demonstrate how both text groups re-interpret each other resulting in a deeper understanding of both.
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Reimagining Ancient Judaism: Diversity and Locality in Early Amulets
Program Unit: Hellenistic Judaism
Sara Boston, Boston University
Recent studies by scholars such as Ross Kraemer, Seth Schwartz, and Karen Stern have built a conception of late antique Jewish diaspora life that was highly diverse and deeply rooted in local Greco-Roman material culture. However, we are left knowing little about the religious lives of diaspora Jews. For example, what texts were they familiar with, and in which languages? What prayers might they have said? What stories would they have told? Material finds such as amulets can begin to answer these questions, and further research into their evidence is warranted. Amulets provide numerous interpretive challenges, but close attention to their features offers a fuller picture of what Jewish religious life may have looked like in antiquity. To begin engaging in a conversation about the evidence from amulets, I have selected three amulets from Roy Kotansky’s Greek Magical Amulets that provide insight into the realms of liturgical practice, biblical stories, and textual transmission. These three amulets will operate as case studies to explore how further analysis of amulets can illuminate the textual, liturgical, and narrative traditions that characterize local Jewish diaspora practice.
These amulets from the Kotansky collection draw on traditional stories, texts, motifs, and prayers from Jewish scripture, but evidence traditions quite different from one another. The first, P. Coloniensia XXII/1, no. 2, was found in Wales and dates to the late 1st or early 2nd century. This amulet is replete with Hebrew prayers and scriptural quotations, some transliterated and some translated into Greek, and provides evidence for liturgical languages as well as common phrases used in worship. The second amulet, P. Coloniensia XXII/1, no. 32, was found in Sicily and dated to the late 2nd or early 3rd century. This amulet describes itself as the amulet Moses used for protection at Sinai, repeatedly emphasizing its connection to Moses and its protective power. To assure this protective agency, the amulet articulates that it should be carried in purity and handed down over generations. Further, this amulet uses a quotation from an unknown Greek version of Deuteronomy, revealing diversity of biblical texts in the world of amulet scribes. The third, P. Coloniensia XXII/1 no. 33, was found in Sicily and dates to the 3rd or 4th century. Its text draws from angel names and pleas for the protection of Judah, who bears the holy law, from Artemis. These three amulets begin to illuminate the lives of the Jews who wore them and the circulation of Jewish ideas in antiquity. They show phrases and stories that would have been meaningful to those who carried them and demonstrate the localized nature of Jewish life and practice. The evidence for circulation of Hebrew prayers, Greek texts, and Moses-stories illustrates the need to further consider the close relationship between the texts of amulets and the religious lives of the Jews who wore them.
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Competing Rationalities: Timaeus 41a–d between Julian the Apostate and Cyril of Alexandria
Program Unit: Religion and Philosophy in Antiquity
Brad Boswell, Duke University
Intellectual historians have long pointed out that, Enlightenment-era pretensions notwithstanding, human reasoning is a traditioned phenomenon. Canons of reason, that is, are always tied to historically contingent communities; there is no non-contextual “pure reason.” This fact introduces complications for scholars of late antique religion and philosophy, especially those who work at the intersection of different religious and philosophical traditions.
This paper is a case study in competing rationalities at the intersection of Christianity and Neoplatonism. Its focal text is Cyril of Alexandria’s 'Against Julian,' an understudied and untranslated treatise whose star has been rising since the publication of a major critical edition in 2016-17. In 'Against Julian,' Cyril, a fifth-century Christian bishop and intellectual, responds to the anti-Christian treatise 'Against the Galileans' of Emperor Julian “the Apostate,” the aspiring fourth-century philosopher-king and convert to Iamblichan Neoplatonism. I give a close reading to a short passage of 'Against Julian' to show how an argument that appears to proceed from “the nature of the matter itself” (ἡ αὐτοῦ τοῦ πράγματος φύσις), as Cyril says at one point, is in fact an argument grounded in uniquely Christian rationality.
In frs. 9-10 of 'Against the Galileans,' Julian draws on the prominent speech of the demiurge to the lower gods in Plato’s 'Timaeus' 41a-d to explain ontological diversity in the cosmos. He suggests that his Neoplatonist position explains this diversity to much greater satisfaction than can any Christian cosmogony based on Moses. Unsurprisingly, Cyril objects on numerous grounds, some of which (like appeals to Scripture) are explicitly Christian. But unlike such instances with clearly confessional grounding, in 'Against Julian' 2.45–46 Cyril advances an argument against Julian that appears strictly philosophical. He writes as if any reasonably intelligent person should be persuaded by his argument. Yet I argue that Cyril finds Julian’s position inadequate by uniquely Christian standards. Cyril employs vocabulary and patterns of reasoning that emerged from the second century debates over the doctrine of creation from nothing and the fourth century Trinitarian debates. Specifically, he faults Julian for speaking nonsensically about the ontological status of the lower gods: Julian treats them, Cyril charges, as simultaneously “γενητοι/originated” and “ἀγενητοι/unoriginated.” I argue that the rationality undergirding Cyril’s accusation can be seen as uniquely Christian in two ways: in the actual criteria that he uses to evaluate Julian’s argument, and in the amount of creative interpretative energy he has to exert on 'Against the Galileans' to extricate entailments which are judicable by these criteria.
After this close reading, I briefly conclude with general reflections on what this argument between Cyril and Julian might suggest about their intellectual conflict more broadly. In his response Cyril may have been “talking past” Julian in one sense—failing to advance a philosophical argument based on shared criteria for judgment. But I suggest that a key feature of Cyril’s strategy was to amass a bundle of such sometimes-incompossible arguments, the aggregate effect of which amounted to a coherent project to demonstrate the rational superiority of his tradition over Julian’s.
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Drying Vegetation as Reality and Metaphor in the Prophets
Program Unit: Nature Imagery and Conceptions of Nature in the Bible
David A. Bosworth, Catholic University of America
The paper will examine all references to drying vegetation in the Hebrew Bible located through searches on verbs of drying (‘bl, ybsh, hrb, nbl, ‘ml, nsht, mll, shdp), with particular attention to the latter prophets. Prophetic references to drying vegetation focus on human emotional responsiveness to plant desiccation (e.g., mourning and shame in Jer 14:1-7 and Joel 1:5-14) that may be understood through research on biophilia, or human emotional engagements with nature. Biblical writers also use drying vegetation as a metaphor for human mortality (e.g., Isa 1:30; 28:1-6; 40:6-8, 22-24) and emotional exhaustion (Isa 37:27; Jer 15:9). The paper will describe the literal and metaphorical uses of drying vegetation in light of human biophilic connections with nature, with particular focus on the prophets. From the evidence, it appears that the earth does not mourn (e.g., in Isa 24:4, 7; Hos 4:1-3, etc.), but the mourning meaning of ‘bl may have developed from the biophilic relationships that motivated the use of drying vegetation as a source domain in metaphors for human emotion. Writers describe desiccated landscapes as ashamed compared to flourishing green landscapes, which may be described as joyful or prideful.
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David's Emotional Range: The Psalms and Samuel
Program Unit: Book of Samuel: Narrative, Theology, and Interpretation
David A. Bosworth, Catholic University of America
The paper will briefly describe a theory of prayer as emotional co-regulation with a deity and apply this theory to David’s relationship with Yhwh as described in the twelve psalms associated by superscriptions with an episode from David’s life as narrated in Samuel (Psalms 3; 18; 34; 51; 52; 54; 56; 57; 59; 60; 63; 142 [Ps 7 has no clear correspondence in Samuel]). What emotions predominate in these psalms and do they correlate with the narrative description? What do these psalms add to the narrative? What does the narrative association add to the psalm? How do David and God relate to one another emotionally in the text of the psalms and the related narrative context? The project requires an overall view of David’s relationship with God in 1–2 Samuel as well as the specific episodes related to the particular psalms.
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Herod’s Architectural Policy in Idumea as a Means to Complete the Judaization of the Idumeans?
Program Unit: Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World
Jonathan Bourgel, Université Laval
During the first years of his reign (37-4 BCE), Herod's power in Idumea, the place of origin of his family, was threatened by a certain aristocrat named Costobar, who wanted to restore the ancient Idumean religion and detach Idumea from the kingdom of Judea. Indeed, several decades earlier, in about 111 B.C.E., Idumea had been conquered by the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus, and its inhabitants were compelled to convert to Judaism. The activity of Costobar proved most dangerous to Herod, for it could have led to the dismantling of his kingdom.
This paper proposes that Herod’s architectural activity in Idumea was pursued in reaction to the separatist aspirations of Costobar, and was part of a more general policy aiming at completing the Judaization of the Idumeans. In this respect, the memorials of Hebron (Haram al Khalil), including the supposed tombs of the Israelite patriarchs and matriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Leah, and Rebekah), and that of Mamre (Haram Ramet al-Khalil), dedicated to Abraham, are of great importance. Although Josephus does not ascribe the construction of these two open-air precincts to Herod, there is compelling archaeological evidence that these are genuine Herodian buildings, such as the fact that they share striking common features with the Herodian precinct of the Jerusalem temple. Herod’s decision to monumentalize these two Idumean Abrahamic memorials suggests that he sought to emphasize the patriarchal traditions common to both Idumeans and Jews and thus, their supposed common ancestry. A further fact supporting the proposition that Herod strove to anchor the Jewish character of Idumea is that in contradistinction to his action in the pagan areas of his kingdom, Herod did not reconstruct the destroyed Hellenistic cities of Idumea (Marisa and Adora).
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Miraculous Mis(conception): Mary’s Reproductive Choice
Program Unit: Jesus Traditions, Gospels, and Negotiating the Roman Imperial World
Anna M. V. Bowden, Albion College
If Mary is betrothed to be married, why is she surprised by the messenger’s news that she will bear a child? What is the source of Mary’s fear and hesitation? Why does she refer to herself as a slave in both her response to the messenger and in the so-called “Magnificat?” In this paper I explore Mary’s reproductive choice by reading Luke’s annunciation scene (1:26-38) and the Magnificat (1:46-55) from the social location of a woman who does not want to bear children. Interpretive focus has centered on the conception itself – the who, what, when, where, and why. While some, like Jane Schaberg, have considered her choice in the sexual act causing her conception, a focus on her reproductive choice is lacking. Did Mary even want a baby?
This task of this paper is three-fold. First, it names women who do not desire pregnancy atexousai – a future participle with its connotations of purpose and intent. This paper also creates space for atexousai within feminist hermeneutics by expanding what it means to “read as women” to include not only mothers and childless women, but also women who choose to forgo reproduction all together. I intentionally bring my own experience as an atexousa to the text as a way of exposing cultural presuppositions and interpretive assumptions concerning Mary’s reproductive choice. Second, this paper assumes that women who choose not to bear children are not a modern phenomenon but are present throughout history. Therefore, in addition to my own experience, this paper brings forward examples of atexousai in ancient literature, providing historical context from which to interpret Mary’s objections to her pregnancy in Luke’s gospel. Third, having set forth my social location as an atexousa and provided a historical context, I re-read Luke’s account of the annunciation rethinking Mary’s objections to the messenger and her identification as a slave (1:38, 48). I argue that Mary’s response and ultimate objections to the messenger demonstrate her reproductive choice – she does not want to have a baby. Mary is an atexousa, but Mary is also a reproductive retainer. As Jennifer Glancy notes in her study on slavery in early Christianity, sexual reproduction was a reality for female salves. Their value increased based on their ability to procreate, to increase stock. I argue that by calling herself a slave of God, Mary alludes to her lack of choice in reproduction and the use of her body as a reproductive vessel. She is merely a womb subject to her Lord’s procreative purposes. In sum, the miraculous birth is just one, big egregious (mis)conception.
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“God’s Trombone”: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Use of Pauline Literature in Resistance and Protest
Program Unit: Bible in America
Lisa Bowens, Princeton Theological Seminary
This proposed paper for the Bible and the Civil Rights Movement focuses on Martin Luther King, Jr. and his use of the Apostle Paul in his sermons and speeches. This paper will demonstrate that King uses Paul to critique segregation, its underlying notion of black inferiority, and to declare that condoning segregationist policies conforms to the ways of the world, not to the ways of God. This paper will also argue that Paul’s “body” imagery enables King to highlight the importance and value of black bodies and thereby to focus upon significant aspects of a Pauline body hermeneutic. Furthermore, along with understanding “that the gospel of Christianity is one that seeks social change religiously and morally,” King also understands that people are coworkers with God and partner with God to bring about the manifestation of these changes on earth. Quoting Pauline language of being coworkers with God, King argues that justice and liberation are never only a human enterprise nor solely a divine endeavor. This paper will argue that King believes that the Divine and human work in concert to bring about change and that this need for divine and human collaboration becomes extremely clear in King’s employment of Paul’s letters.
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Urban Transformations: The Changing Role of Jerusalem in Isa 1
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Samuel L Boyd, University of Colorado Boulder
The argumentation in the first chapter of Isaiah addresses the corruption of Israel through an examination of the sins related to the land, the people, and the representative city of the nation. This third topic, called the "faithful city" (קריה נאמנה) in Isa 1:21, occupies the attention of the prophet for much of Isa 1:21-31, which serves as the culmination of Isaiah's diatribe in the opening chapter of the book. In this paper, I explore the role of the title קריה נאמנה in Isa 1:21-31 as well as its overtones elsewhere in the book of Isaiah. First, I argue that an examination of the title is crucial for understanding the rhetoric of the poem in Isa 1:21-31 of a formerly ideal city returned to its state of glory. Second, I explore the connections between this oracle and other aspects of First Isaiah. Finally, I examine the relationship of this passage to Assyrian imperial rhetoric and the events of Sennacherib's invasion in 701 BCE.
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Marriage as a Status Marker in the Ancient Mediterranean World: The Evidence of Inscriptions
Program Unit: Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism
John Boyles, Abilene Christian University
Both formative Christianity and formative Judaism show some concern for marital status among community leaders. Perhaps most robustly, the Pauline strand of formative Christianity witnesses to marital status as an important status and leadership marker. In the Pastoral Epistles, a certain marital status is a qualification marker for leadership, whereas texts such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla witness to marital status as a qualification for baptism and close association with the apostle (e.g. 1 Timothy 3:2, 5:9-11 and Acts Paul 25, 40 c.f. 1 Cor 7). The Synoptic Tradition hints at such concerns both in the teachings of Jesus and in the example of the Twelve (e.g. Mk 10:28-31//Mt 19:27-30//Lk 18:28-30). The Didache provides another data point, as leaders could be expected to embody the teachings from the Two Ways section most robustly (Did 1:4, 2:2 cf. Did 11:8, 15:1). Marital status also served as a qualification and/or status marker in various Jewish contexts across the first few centuries CE (e.g. m. Sanh. 2:1 c.f. b. Sanh. 2a, Contempl., Prob. 77, CIJ I 166, and CIJ I 333). In both Christian and Jewish contexts, at times one is to be married, at other times to be a virgin or celibate. Sometimes it matters who one marries, particularly whether or not a potential spouse has been married before. Sometimes the discussion concerns leaders, but at other times expectations are for the general population. When the general population is in view, it is reasonable to assume leaders would be expected not only to hold the same standard, but to be more rigorous and exacting in their maintenance of the standard. The particular nuances of marital status among these groups are best understood within the broad ancient Mediterranean context of associations.
This paper contextualizes these Jewish and Christian gestures at the value and virtue of a specific marital status within the broad world of the ancient Mediterranean, with particular attention to the wealth of data provided by inscriptions. A survey of inscriptional data from associations during the 2nd and 1st c. BCE and the first few centuries CE provides a basis for understanding Christian and Jewish sources. As public-facing and enduring features of ancient life, inscriptions participate in a particular form of rhetoric. First, the paper explores how ancient associations presented their leaders in terms of marital status, with particular concern for how the public would view such a presentation. Then, the paper turns to 1st and 2nd c. CE Christian and Jewish sources to describe and analyze the ways these sources are both conjunctive and distinctive in their own concerns around marital status, with a particular focus on the marital status of leaders. In this way, the paper explores how marital state as a marker of status and qualification began to take on particularly religious and moral dimensions in Christian and Jewish contexts during this period.
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Troubling Tafsir bi’l-Ra’y: Sayyid Haydar Amuli’s Negotiation of Hermeneutic Authority Between Twelver Shi‘ism and Sufism
Program Unit: Qur’anic Studies: Methodology and Hermeneutics (IQSA)
Nicholas Boylston, Seattle University
This paper forms part of a larger study of the methodology of qur’anic interpretation of the 14th century Twelver Shi‘i-Sufi, Sayyid Haydar Amuli (d. after 787/1385), whose Tafsir al-muhit al-a‘zam, makes use of tafsir/ta’wil to integrate the Twelver Shi‘i juridico-theological with the Sufi metaphysics of Ibn ‘Arabi and his interpreters. In this paper, I focus on how contesting the status of tafsir bi’l-ra’y allows Amuli to negotiate the relative authority of Twelver Shi‘i and Sufi exegetical precedents in his composition of the tafsīr and ta’wil sections of his work. Crucially, Amuli sets up his hermeneutic project by drawing on the exegetical methodology of his forebear in Twelver Shi‘i exegesis, al-Tabrisi (d. 548/1154). Amuli presents his work as a continuity of al-Tabrisi, paraphrasing key sections on methodology from the latter’s Majma‘ al-bayan. As such, Amuli affirms the latter’s understanding of the meaning and validity of both tafsir and ta’wil with two fundamental differences. Firstly, for Amuli, al-Tabrisi’s classification of types of exegesis is incomplete: al-Tabrisi’s conception of ta’wil only represents a subcategory of this method, namely “ta’wil according to masters of the outward sciences” (ta’wil arbab al-zahir). To this he adds “ta’wil according to the people of the inward” (ta’wil ahl al-batin). Secondly, al-Tabrisi’s hermeneutical methodology rests on a historically significant argument for the validity of tafsir bi’l-ra’y (“interpretation through individual opinion/reason”), which allows him to include the distinctive theological positions of Mu‘tazili-influenced Twelver kalam as a valid component of qur’anic exegesis, a position that Amuli rejects, leading him to reaffirm a strong boundary between tafsir and ta’wil. Amuli’s disagreements with al-Tabrisi’s exegetical methods shed crucial light on his own project to use qur’anic exegesis to harmonize the Twelver Shi‘i and Akbarian Sufi intellectual traditions. I argue that this harmonization is best seen as a dynamic negotiation of the domains of authority of these two traditions. The Twelver Shi‘i exegetical tradition, embodied for Amuli by al-Tabrisi, is strongly affirmed: it has the final say in nearly all matters of tafsīr, which Amuli sees as being fundamentally a project of naql or tafsir bi’l-ma’thur (interpretation of the Qur’an through Qur’an and Hadith), and it also plays a role in interpreting the mutashabihat, which for Amuli refers most directly to the interpretation of qur’anic anthropomorphism and the question of human free will. Yet, at the same time the authority of Twelver Shi‘i exegesis is limited: it has no role to play in the “ta’wil according to the people of the inward”, a practice reserved for “those steadfast in knowledge” (al-rasikhun fi’l-‘ilm, see Q al-’Imran 3:7), which for Amuli means the Household of the Muhammad and those Sufis who have inherited their understanding of tawhid, and thus implicitly excludes interpreters such as al-Tabrisi.
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Who Will Tell Earth’s Story? Trauma and Resilience in Joel
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
Laurie J. Braaten, Judson University (Elgin, Illinois)
The book of Joel attests the collective trauma experienced by Earth community in post-exilic Yehud. Fundamental assumptions about the goodness of God, divine care for Earth, and Yhwh’s protection and blessing of the covenant people have been repeatedly challenged and are eroding. The human community itself is divided between those who are suffering traumatic setbacks, and those who have been more or less perpetrators of trauma against other humans and Earth. The locust attack is the final blow to an already traumatized Earth who is suffering under this fragmented human community. Joel offers Earth community a movement toward recovery through commanding God’s people to tell and retell Earth community’s experience, and by calling Earth community to lament through ritual mourning. The community responds to both of Joel’s pleas. Humans mourn with and for a groaning Earth, and engage in repeated attempts to make sense of Earth community’s trauma through integrating their experiences into variations of the day of Yhwh tradition. Indeed, the final text of Joel is essentially an account of the resilience of a traumatized intergenerational community as they strive to reintegrate their experiences into their collective narratives, sometimes in highly symbolic ways. Yet as Earth community is moving toward recovery, Joel also reveals how current and past national wounds resurface. Consequently, the narrative resorts to traditional prophetic announcements of divine judgment against enemies as an assurance of continued divine presence and protection for Yhwh’s people and Land. As a result, Joel’s closing chapter does not bode well for the broader Earth community, and later readers are compelled to retell Earth’s story by moving beyond the book’s ending in search of Earth friendly alternatives.
This paper will reconstruct the setting in Yehud by a comparative methodology, including the use of an agrarian approach supplemented with archeological data. It will employ ecological hermeneutics and trauma theory to gain an appreciation for and understanding of the Earth community dynamics reflected in the text.
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The Gospel of Judas and the Making of a Demiurge
Program Unit: Inventing Christianity: Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, and Martyrs
David Brakke, Ohio State University
In her magisterial Marcion and the Making of a Heretic, Judith Lieu productively contextualized Marcion’s views on the creator of this world within the efforts of first- and second-century Jews and Christians to engage with, on the one hand, philosophical traditions, especially Platonism, and on the other hand, the characteristics of the creator in the Bible. She suggests that it was primarily scriptural imagery rather than philosophical concerns that shaped Marcion’s account of the demiurge (p. 337). Gnostic literature appears as a significant point of comparison in Lieu’s analysis, especially the Apocryphon of John. The Gospel of Judas, which is even more securely dated than the Apocryphon to the middle of the second century, provides significant additional evidence for the development of Christian ideas about the creator, especially their roots in Jewish apocalyptic eschatology and its stories of rebellious angels. It suggests that a gnostic account of the demiurge’s origin that did not involve a divine error existed as early as if not earlier than the familiar story of wisdom’s mistaken thought. The range of demiurgical thought in Marcion’s world was even wider than we have thought.
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Wise Paths and the Boundaries of Metaphor in Wisdom Literature
Program Unit: Metaphor in the Bible and Cognate Literature
Emily Branton, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Biblical Wisdom literature creates a map of the social landscape. It traces paths of wisdom and folly; righteousness and wickedness; well-lit paths leading straight home, and crooked paths that lead to the dwellings of dangerous companions. These are conventionally recognized as metaphors, by means of which abstract concepts like virtue or wickedness are mapped onto a material “source” domain in service of the moral or cognitive formation of the student. Wisdom literature itself does not lay claim to the project of moral formation, however. Instead, it addresses itself to the bodies and behaviors of its students. If we impose an anachronistic dichotomization of the human self onto the imagination of these texts, we obscure some of the major claims developed in Proverbs 1-9 and other Wisdom texts: that the qualities of these paths are physically marked, and that our embodied stances and our movements through the physical-relational landscape lead us to good ends, or to bad ones. Far from processes of reflection or cognition; biblical wisdom instruction seeks to direct the eyes, the ears, the hands, the feet, and the mouths of its students.
This hypothesis generates a methodological challenge: How might a cognitive metaphor theorist engage with a non-binary theory of self? On one hand, cognitive linguistics takes for granted the embodied formation of thought and the deep physical and experiential substrates of the conceptual landscape. On the other hand, the boundaries between metaphorical and non-metaphorical references are still assigned based on the ontological categories of the theorist. Thus, even cognitive-linguistically oriented readers identify instructions about the body and movement as metaphorical, where the text may not entirely intend them as such.
I propose that engaging with a wider theoretical construction of embodiment on the foundations of Mauss, Merleau-Ponty, et al, helps identify and redescribe the attention to body and habitus within wisdom literature, and this in turn allows us to articulate different boundaries and contours of metaphor within these texts. Rather than seeing the “paths of wisdom” as a metaphorical source representing entirely cognitive moral decision-making, we should more properly recognize the instructions on wise walking functions as a kind of metaphorical synecdoche, establishing an experientially-rooted framework which both includes the physical instructions of Wisdom literature, and which encompasses forms of training extending beyond individual body parts to include the integrated self.
This suggests a broader methodological imperative for theorists of metaphor: we must remain attentive to the possibility of ontological disjunction between different readers (or writers and readers) of a given text. Boundaries between concrete reference and metaphor (whether conceptual or literary metaphor) are sometimes subjective. A close reading of metaphorical references within a given text, if it aspires to make claims about an historical interpretation, must therefore include a self-aware account of the reader’s own ontological presuppositions about the nature of the self, and the boundaries between the physical/material world and body, and the cognitive/abstract domain of the mind.
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Jesus and Addiction to Origins (Remarks)
Program Unit: Redescribing Christian Origins
Willi Braun, University of Alberta
Dr. Braun responds to those who have offered comment on his recent work.
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The Ptolemaic Empire and the Jewish Scribal Imaginary
Program Unit: Economics in the Biblical World
Brennan W. Breed, Columbia Theological Seminary
Over the course of the third century BCE, the Ptolemaic Empire developed new economic strategies that were unevenly implemented throughout their own territory and their possessions. In the administrative district of Syria and Phoenicia, which included Judah, local scribes encountered new concepts and were tasked with establishing new practices that were characterized by speculation, comprehensive calculation, and optimal value creation through incremental improvement. These new economic policies required local scribes to communicate and enforce them, along with the speculative conceptual framework that undergirded them. Jews living in the southern Levant were not as culturally hellenized as inhabitants of Alexandria, Maresha, or the Phoenician coastland, but nevertheless, their social and economic relations were clearly shaped by their participation in the empire’s novel economic and bureaucratic institutions and ideology. While the material culture of Judah seems to have changed little in the transition from Persian to Ptolemaic eras, an explosion of Jewish forms of knowledge, genres of literature, and scribal culture attests to a remarkable period of intellectual and cultural transformation. These include the emergence of apocalyptic literature, the first appropriation of Babylonian science, the development of a detailed angelology and demonology, the rise of self-consciously speculative ontology, and scriptural libraries. In this paper, I argue that the Ptolemaic administration of the southern Levant generated the potential for these intellectual developments among Jews and others through greater cultural interaction, changes in bureaucratic procedure, a monetized economy, and new forms of administrative oversight. Literary texts produced by Jews living within these conditions, including both early apocalyptic literature and Ecclesiastes, reflect not only new knowledge but also newfound degrees of speculative thought and new subjective experiences.
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Materializing Labor at Oxyrhynchus
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Lydia Bremer-McCollum, Harvard University
I situate the financial and material circuitry of the labor projects at Oxyrhynchus/al-Bahnasā, arguing that the material conditions of work and dust need to be understood as part of the materialization of the Oxyrhynchan papyri. This paper offers a material-discursive analysis of the excavation notes and published archive of Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt as well as analyze some of the photographic record of the late 19th century excavation and extraction of papyrological remains at the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus. To help me think through these questions, I converse with Frantz Fanon and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and seek to contextualize the imperialist colonial field of late-19th century British excavations at Oxyrhynchus. In doing so, I suggest that attention to the racializing material-discursive field is a necessary part of understanding the materiality of these artifacts. I further argue that this imperial contextualization and framing needs to be understood as part of what frames and forms the “archive”—as desirous locus of origins and imperial presence, a colonial materializing presence that creates the material im/possibilities and systems of valuation of what comes up out of the arid sands of Egypt.
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Arthur Darby Nock and the Religious Changes in the Pre-Constantinian Period
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
Jan Bremmer, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
In my paper I want to confront Nock's ideas about pre-Constantinian relgion with that of recent insights
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Animals in the Temple of Isis at Pompeii
Program Unit: Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Frederick E. Brenk, Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome
The extant frescoes from the Temple of Isis at Pompeii depict an incredible number of animals (67, plus 5 hybrids), all in a non-Egyptian style (on animals, see Johnston 2016, Kindt, 2017, 2019, 2020b, Kearns 2020, McInerny 2020; on the frescoes, Barrett 2018, Cantilena 1992, Moorman 2007, 2011, Sampaolo 1992, 1998, Swetnam-Burland, 2012, 2015, 2018; on interpreting material remains, see Moser and Knust 2017, Van Andringa, 2018).The frescoes reveal a clearly planned strategy for an introduction to the Egyptian sacred animals. Depictions of animal worship, however, are missing (on animal worship, see Smelik and Hemelrijk 1984, Kessler 2003, Fitzenreiter, 2003, Brenk 2018). Many animals are clearly designated as sacred by lotus crowns (6), others by their context (9). Several were sacred in Egypt but are in a naturalistic setting (9) (on Egyptian sacred animals see, Gilhus 2006, Teeter 2011, Kindt 2020b). Other animals have ambiguous representations (4), and some animals, for instance, a peacock, may substitute for another, e.g., a phoenix (3) The Portico, Ekklesiasterion, and Sacrarium, seem to represent different areas of inclusion and exclusion within which to introduce the animals (on inclusion, see Feldman 2014). Only two hybrid gods, except for two small sphinxes and a satyr are represented, an officiant wearing a very realistic mask of the jackal Anubis, the second, Io portrayed with small cow horns in two very important central panels representing her transformations (see Swetnam-Burland 2015, McInerny 2020). Possible theriomorphic representations are two ambiguous birds, one for Osiris, the other for Isis (on theriomorphic and hybrid gods, see Aston 2008, Kearns 2020).
In the Sacrarium several animals appear together in a sacred context or along with scenes of Isis (“The Finding of Osiris” and “Isis and Osiris Enthroned”) Here the Isis myth probably was explained to the initiates, along with the promise of a blessed afterlife (on the myths see Bommas, 2012). Several techniques were used in the other rooms to create familiarity with the animals, sometimes ambiguously. In the Portico, for instance, the sacred animals are not clearly designated as sacred, and are small (magpies, cat), and a lioness no bigger than a cat. Some appear among fantasy architecture, or in small naturalistic depictions. In a “peopled frieze” (Ekklesiasterion), only the Apis Bull wears a crown, and familiar non-sacred animals appear among the sacred. In the large side panels of the Ekklesiasterion, only 5 animals appear, three cattle, a kingfisher, and an ibis, all in naturalistic settings.
The objective seems to be clear, a gradual introduction to, and familiarity with, the sacred animals. In the Sacrarium, the most sacred and exclusive area in the Temple, their nature, the gods they were associated with, and the rites and myths which accompanied them were probably explained. The frescoes were forerunners of later ones in Synagogues and Christian churches, which aimed to instruct the faithful. The animal depictions also raise theoretical questions, such as addressed in Kindt’s Animals in Ancient Greek Religion (2020), especially that of the manifestation of gods in human, animal, and hybrid forms.
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John and Ezekiel: Everything Starts with a Quote
Program Unit: John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern
Clarissa Breu, Universität Wien
John and Ezekiel. Everything starts with a quote
The book of Revelation is made of a cluster of various allusions to OT
prophetic texts. Especially John’s vocation in Rev 1 and 10 is close to
Ezekiel’s vocation in Ez 1–3.
In my comparative analysis of these two passages, I will show how John’s
vocation as a quote of Ezekiel’s vocation does not express an author’s
intention, but offers a performative enactment of an inconceivable
reality. For this purpose, I will juxtapose John’s quotational technique
with Jacques Derrida’s notion of grafting. This botanical metaphor
offers a new approach to the relation of Revelation to its pretext and
thus to the quotational relation between OT and NT texts. In his theory
of grafting Derrida states: “Everything starts with a quote”. If
prophetic literature is always a reaction on something prior to itself,
thus a quote, notions of originality and intertextuality can be seen in
a new light
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Female Gestures: Gender Performance in Luke 7:36–50 and 8:43–48
Program Unit: Gospel of Luke
Clarissa Breu, Universität Wien
The two female characters in Luke 7:36–50 and 8:43–48 are connected on the narrative level. Both passages end with Jesus’ words: “Your faith has saved you; go in peace”; both deal with the transmission of divine forces upon women who touch Jesus.
In my presentation, this narrative connection will be analyzed within the theoretical framework of Judith Butler’s gender performance. Gender performance is not the expression of a given behavior, but a citational act. This performative approach will be connected to a field that has not yet been explored within Biblical Studies: a theory of gesture and touching (cf. Barad: On Touching; Butler: Geste). According to Butler gestures do not express a reality that is independent of them, but they “constitute a reality” by “rendering social laws explicit”. According to Barad, touching reveals an alterity within the self.
In my paper, I will analyze the two women’s gestures of touching within their sociocultural background in order to ask how they perform gender.
Loose hair and weeping, e.g., were mainly female gestures in the Greco-Roman world. They belonged to the field of ecstatic, emotional and uncontrolled behavior, whereas male gestures should perform self-control and rationality. The anointing of feet was frowned upon if performed by men. Bodily porosity – like hemorrhaging – was connected to women and a notion of disease caused by the penetration of the body by evil forces in the Greco-Roman world. The hemorrhaging woman is “leaking”, thus “porose” and typical female (cf. Moss: Man with the Flow).
In valuing the woman’s gestures in Luke 7, Jesus reverses the opposition of purity vs. impurity. The woman’s “impurity” enables her to commit a purifying act. A closer look at comparable sources from the Greco-Roman (and Judean) context shows that not only the purity/impurity opposition is challenged by this passage, but also the opposition between human/divine, healer/healed and man/woman. With its socio-historical background in mind, the passage in Luke 7 can be interpreted as a transmission of divine (cleansing) force with a focus on Jesus’ mediality. The woman is not simply a silenced object, but she knows how to “use” Jesus’ force. The mediality of the woman’s gestures in Luke 7 makes her and Jesus mediums: She cleanses his feet and in return his effective word cleanses her sins. The woman makes Jesus a means of her wish to obtain forgiveness of her sins.
The same applies to the woman in Luke 8. She also transmits divine force upon herself as she draws away dýnamis from Jesus (cf. 8:46) thus stressing the porosity of his body.
The faith that saved the women can be described as their audacity to touch “the other”, to touch the inhuman force within the human Jesus and thus submit to the “infinite alterity” within themselves. The women reveal that also Jesus’ subjectivity is transitional and thus offer a new point of view on Lucan Christology.
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Who Let the Demons In? Possession, Indwelling, and Mark’s Demons
Program Unit: Gospel of Mark
WITHDRAWN: Scott K Brevard, Loyola University Chicago
Jesus’ encounter with the Gerasene Demoniac (5:1–20) is a significant episode in the narrative of Mark. Treatments of this pericope have noted a number of interesting features that enhance our understanding of the Gospel, such as intertextual echoes, theological motifs, and narrative significations. However, one area that invites further investigation is the nature of unclean spirits/demons in the socio-cultural world of the author. What exactly is an unclean spirit/demon? What kind of threat(s) do these beings present to humans? And, perhaps most importantly, how does the portrayal of demons—here and elsewhere in Mark—relate to alternative views in antiquity? This study examines the details of this fascinating and bizarre exorcism in order to gain insight into how Second Temple Jews and early Christians constructed their views of the spiritual realm and its relationship to human anthropology. By appealing to the broader Near Eastern and Greco-Roman world(s), this study investigates the ways in which the Markan narrative is both similar to and different from other views of unclean spirits and demons. This study argues that the demonology expressed in the Gerasene Demoniac pericope and elsewhere in the Gospel of Mark provides a rare window on a cultural innovation in demonology that would become foundational for later Christian understandings of the spiritual world. In particular, the basic notion of internal possessors (ἔχω + δαιμόνιον; δαιμονίζομαι), rather than external attacking forces (ὀχλέω, πνίγω, etc.), as well as the concept of multiple indwelling can be seen as alternative and innovative ways of understanding the spiritual realm’s effects on humans.
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Editorial Fatigue in Isaiah 36–39: An Additional Argument for the Priority of 2 Kings 18–20
Program Unit: Israelite Prophetic Literature
Eric Brewer, Baylor University
The near verbatim agreement between Isa. 36-39 and 2 Kgs 18-20 has long invited speculation on the relationship between these passages. Most scholars theorize Isaian dependence on Kings or mutual dependence on a third source, but a minority has argued that Isa. 36-39 is one of the Deuteronomic Historian’s sources for 2 Kgs 18-20. This minority position has most recently been revived in Dan’el Kahn’s 2020 monograph, Sennacherib’s Campaign against Judah. This paper will respond to Kahn’s argument as it concerns the relationship between Isa. 36-39 and 2 Kgs 18-20 while also using the concept of editorial fatigue to make a novel argument for Isaiah’s dependence on 2 Kgs 18-20 or a very similar text. Kahn argues for the dependence of 2 Kgs 18-20 on Isa. 36-39 on the basis of (1) the theological positions of the texts and (2) the presence of continuity errors in Isa. 36-39. Kahn’s reading of the theology of Isa. 36-39, however, fails to take sufficient account of the use of the literary device of speech in character, rendering this aspect of Kahn’s argument invalid. Far more central to Kahn’s argument is the identification of continuity errors that are present in the Isaian text but not in 2 Kings. Kahn explains these as attempts by the Deuteronomistic Historian to smooth over stitches in the Isaianic text, but the concept of editorial fatigue offers another, more plausible explanation. Editorial fatigue refers to a phenomenon in which an author working from an earlier source begins by adapting their source somewhat freely but is then unable to sustain the implications of their changes, often inadvertently producing logical contradictions or other continuity errors not present in the earlier source. Recognition of this phenomenon has played an important role in scholarship on the redactional relationships between the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), but, until now, it has not appeared in discussions of the relationship between Isa. 36-39 and 2 Kgs 18-20. This paper will propose three instances of editorial fatigue in Isa. 36-39: (1) in the Rabshekah’s misrepresentation of Hezekiah’s cultic reforms in Isa. 36:7, (2) in the use of the plural “lackies” to refer to the singular Rabshekah in Isa. 37:6, and (3) in the unsignaled shift in speakers in Isa. 38:6-7. For each case I will explain both why it can be understood as an instance of editorial fatigue on the part of the Isaian redactor and why this provides a more plausible explanation of the data than does Kahn’s theory of harmonization on the part of the Deuteronomic Historian. Based on this identification of editorial fatigue in Isa. 36-39, we can conclude that Isa. 36-39 depends directly on 2 Kgs 18-20 or on a text which 2 Kgs has taken up virtually verbatim.
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Sayings and Narrative: Revisiting the History of the Synoptic Tradition
Program Unit: Synoptic Gospels
Todd Brewer, Independent Scholar, Managing Editor for Mbird.com
The Jesus tradition did not evolve in a linear fashion from sayings to narrative, but the coextensive and dynamic interplay of both. The hypothesis of the growth of the Jesus tradition from sayings to narrative, formulated in Rudolf Bultmann’s “History of the Synoptic Tradition”, hinges upon his examination of the apophthegm form and a judgment that the sayings of Jesus were later clothed in narrative by the later tradition. This view has proven to be persuasive, but its foundations are unstable precisely because the evidence of the Gospel of Thomas has been quarantined from the development of the synoptic tradition as an alternate trajectory. In this paper I will reexamine the apophthegms of the Gospel of Thomas to propose an alternate hypothesis on the progression of the Jesus tradition. Given its “sayings” interpretive approach, Thomas has no redactional interest in narrative, but it nevertheless finds narrative features to be essential to understanding some of Jesus’ teachings. Thomasine apophthegms testify to the indispensability of narrative elements in the Jesus tradition alongside the early circulation of Jesus' sayings, regardless of whether one dates Thomas “early” or “late” relative to the synoptics. The resultant picture modifies the interpretation of the synoptic gospels and understandings of their pre-history.
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“The Voice of a God” (Acts 12:22): A Critique of the Herodian Ruler Cult? Archaeological Insights into the Portrayal of Herod Agrippa’s Death
Program Unit: Book of Acts
Laurie Brink, Catholic Theological Union
The tomb of Herod the Great, discovered by Ehud Netzer at the Herodium in 2007, offered an architectural but unread final testament of the Judean ruler, until a comparison of contemporaneous burial complexes by Jodi Magness provided a possible translation key. The mausoleum’s design, echoing that of Alexander the Great and of Augustus, stood as a witness to Herod’s claim to divinity. This interpretation of the archaeology may offer an interesting insight to the odd episode in Acts 12:19b-23 in which Herod’s grandson, is acclaimed a god. In this paper, the interpretation of the archaeology serves as a starting point for a reexamination of the narrative of Herod Agrippa’s death as recounted in Josephus and Acts 12.
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Creative and Collaborative Learning in Introductory Theology Classes: Letting Go of Models That Invite Cheating and Taking Up Models of Creative Integration
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Amanda Brobst-Renaud, Valparaiso University
With the recent upsets across college campuses—especially among faith-based private liberal arts colleges—from COVID-19 to dwindling budgets, assessment strategies and their availability have become more difficult. While some colleges and individual professors have opted to utilize lockdown browsers during assessments, recent articles reveal that students can decipher workarounds for lockdown browsers and call into question the ethics of what is now a multi-million dollar enterprise. Furthermore, student feelings of invasion and the concomitant “class experience” deteriorates as a result. While open-book and open-note tests might provide some paths forward for professors to avoid the stress and labor of identifying students who cheat, I argue that changing the way we view both formative and summative assessments can provide ways forward not only in assessment but in pedagogy. Through inviting my students to think creatively about the topics we engage in class in their formative assessments and designing collaborative summative assessments, my classroom promotes access and enjoyment of assignments for both the students and for me.
Tasked with covering the history of the Christian traditions, I often struggled to introduce and entice students to engage these conversations. Students who identified with the Christian tradition often engaged their own confirmation biases in papers; students who did not identify with the tradition felt lost and as if they did not have a voice in class. I realized that what I wanted students to take away from my class did not match the traditional paper-writing or test-taking assignments. Instead, I wanted to offer students an invitation to engage the world of the Bible and historical figures and place this world in conversation with their own in creative and compelling ways. For example, instead of writing a paper on Jesus as a first-century Jewish man, students write Jesus blog entries. Instead of engaging the narratives of Christian martyrs in a paper format, I task students with trolling their ideological opponents. Instead of an examination for the first biblical unit, students go through digital escape rooms in teams. These assignments, in comparison with papers, were most often a delight to grade and frequently left me laughing at their ingenuity and humor; who doesn’t want to laugh as they grade?
The growth in creativity and application that these activities have enticed in my students have led me to believe that assessing student learning on the formative and summative levels does not have to be a chore for the students to produce or for the professor to grade. At the same time, creative approaches to the classroom have led to a more inclusive classroom and more equitable outcomes.
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In Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary of Homo Necans
Program Unit: Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Jeffrey Brodd, California State University - Sacramento
A reflection on the trajectories of the theoretical frameworks established nearly fifty years ago in Burkert’s seminal Homo Necans in light of the presentations of our panelists.
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Matthew within Judaism: What Are We Framing and How?
Program Unit: Matthew
George Brooke, University of Manchester
Matthew within Judaism: What Are We Framing and How?
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Material Evidence of St Paul and His Legacy at Roman Corinth
Program Unit: Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World
Amelia R. Brown, University of Queensland
Biblical scholars have long been bedeviled by the relative paucity, and controversial nature, of material evidence for Paul’s era, and legacy, at the site of Roman Corinth. However, recent excavations and new interpretations increasingly show what archaeology can (and cannot) tell us about the Early Christian Church at Roman Corinth. This paper presents key artefacts and monuments from the middle of the first century, and contrasts them with the more abundant evidence for Paul’s legacy among Christians at Roman Corinth in the second and third centuries.
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Job and the Conflict of Biblical Traditions: Retribution and Righteous Suffering
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Ken Brown, Whitworth University
It is now widely acknowledged that the book of Job interacts with a broad range of Israelite literature that came to be incorporated into the Jewish Bible, including not only other so-called wisdom literature, but also pentateuchal traditions, prophetic literature and psalms. But do these parallels and allusions form any larger patterns within the book? This paper will consider the divergent ways in which different parts of Job juxtapose and coordinate two seemingly contradictory traditions: the retribution theology embraced by texts like Deuteronomy, Proverbs and certain psalms and prophetic texts, and the righteous suffering of God’s servants emphasized in texts such as Jeremiah, Deutero-Isaiah and the lament psalms. Whereas the dialogues present these traditions as fundamentally at odds, the overall framing of the book seems to resolve the tension through the person of Job himself, who becomes the (unwitting) model for both righteous suffering and retributive justice, despite his own vigorous protestations to the contrary.
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Dialogue, Deuteronomy, and the Psalms
Program Unit: Book of Psalms
William P. Brown, Columbia Theological Seminary
This paper will review Patrick Miller’s interest in setting the Psalms in conversation with other biblical books, paving the way for a dialogical hermeneutics that is sorely needed in biblical scholarship and among communities of faith today.
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Love and Eunuchs: Esther and Ishtar as Queer Queens
Program Unit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible
Esther Brownsmith, MF Norwegian School of Theology
Many scholars note the uncanny similarity between the biblical names Esther and Mordecai and the Mesopotamian deities Ishtar and Marduk — but the connection often stops there. Yet the story of Esther takes place in a court setting populated by eunuchs and concubines, while Ishtar was famously attended by gender-transgressive priests. Moreover, Esther herself dons "feminine drag" during her elaborate transformation from good Jewish girl to sexually alluring queen-to-be, and her dual political loyalties are mirrored by this ambiguity in gender performance. Does Esther — like the eunuchs surrounding her, and like Ishtar — embody gender fluidity? And if so, how does that shape our understanding of the relationship between the characters of Esther and Ishtar, and of the author who chose such an evocative name for a Jewish heroine? This paper will address these questions and explore how queer theory can explain the literary development of this carnivalesque text.
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Judging the Significance of Single Occurrence Non-orthographic Qur'an Manuscript Variants
Program Unit: The Qur’an: Manuscripts and Textual Criticism (IQSA)
Daniel Alan Brubaker, Independent
Early Qur’an manuscripts contain many rasm variants and physical corrections. A subset of these may easily be attributed to orthographic developments, and another group may certainly be attributed to scribal error. The former will be, for the most part, easily discerned, and it is sometimes possible to discern the latter is the case as well. The existence of other manuscripts or fragments that follow either the standard rasm or a known variant at the same verse, with probable time of production contemporary or prior to the subject, provides one piece of evidence in support of the single occurrence non-orthographic manuscript variant being a mere scribal error. However, there is sometimes reason to suppose that there is more to the picture. In this paper, I present and discuss instances of single-occurrence corrections and variants, drawn from a variety of Qur’an fragments from the 1st to 3rd centuries A.H., whose particular features suggest to me that they should not be dismissed too quickly as mere instances of scribal error.
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Remarks on the Textual Tradition оf the Slavonic Commented Palea
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Alessandro M. Bruni, Ca' Foscari University of Venice
[*The abstract will be submitted at a later stage]
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Politics and Domestic Violence in 1 Corinthians 4:14–21
Program Unit: Paul and Politics
Christina L. Bryant, Brite Divinity School (TCU)
Although the Bible has the power to transform, resist, and liberate, many biblical texts, including Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, legitimate and perpetuate hierarchy, oppression, violence, and discrimination against those deemed most vulnerable by society. My work seeks to provide a more comprehensive treatment of the relationship between Paul, politics, and domestic violence, by examining how Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians promotes violence in the ancient household and the early Christian church. In this paper, I focus specifically on 1 Corinthians 4:14-21. In this passage, Paul refers to himself as πάτερ and the Corinthian community as τέκνα, thereby constructing the Corinthian church as a rhetorical household. Paul then uses this metaphor of the Roman household to then establish his authority and control, threatening the Corinthian community with violence if they choose not to submit and obey. My paper argues that Paul’s threat to “beat with a stick” depends upon the community’s experiences of domestic violence in order to be rhetorically successful. Furthermore, I suggest that this threat is particularly problematic given the practice of beating not only children but also wives and slaves as a method of domestic coercion and control. Pairing the language of familial affection and loyalty with the threat of physical violence and withholding “love and a gentle spirit,” Paul seeks to model in the Corinthian ἐκκλησία the ideal of an orderly, stable Roman household in which harmony is achieved through violence. Paul’s constructions of the ἐκκλησία as a replication of the Roman household and his call to “imitation” create a space where domestic violence, coercive control, and exploitation are normative. Finally, I briefly consider the implications of Paul’s violent rhetoric for the contemporary church.
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Towards a Pneumatological Reading of Gal. 6:14–16
Program Unit: SBL International Meeting Presentations
Grant Buchanan, University of Divinity
This paper explores the connection between Paul’s language in Galatians 6:14–16 and his argument in Galatians as a whole. The use of stoicheō in 6:16, especially in connection to ‘this rule’ (tō kanon), and the enigmatic ‘the Israel of God’ continues to promote lively debate. 6:16 has traditionally been interpreted Christologically, given the explicit reference to the cross in 6:14. But a number of features suggest this is unduly narrow. In 6:11–18 Paul draws together much of what he has argued previously into a brief yet pointed polemic against those who have presented ‘another gospel’ (Gal. 1:6), in contrast to his own gospel of freedom. Paul’s gospel of freedom is one of transformed identity, inaugurated by and centered around Christ, but also defined by the Spirit (3:2, 14; 4:7; 5:16–25). In light of this new identity, grounded in the kainē ktisis (Gal. 6:15), the Galatians are challenged to follow Paul’s example, boasting only in the cross of Christ (Gal. 6:14). In contrast to life within the old cosmos, the delineating social markers of circumcision and uncircumcision are no longer valid expressions or rules within this new creation life. Rather, new creation life is paradoxically one of willing enslavement to others grounded in the fruit of the Spirit. Paul challenges the Galatian believers that those who follow this rule and walk in the ‘new creation’ life and act accordingly, will show themselves to be the true Israel of God. Given that the previous use of stoicheō linked with the Spirit in 5:16–25, I propose that Gal. 6:14–16 reflects not just a Christologically determined ideal for Paul’s argument but may also include pneumatological undertones. If so, this provides the opportunity to consider pneumatological implications within Gal. 6:11–18, and especially 6:14–16.
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Restoring "Jesus" in Jude 5: A Reception Historical Perspective
Program Unit: Biblical Exegesis from Eastern Orthodox Perspectives
Bogdan G. Bucur, Duquesne University
One of the significant changes introduced in the latest critical edition of the New Testament (NA 28/ GNT 5) is the rendering of Jude 5 as Ἰησοῦς λαὸν ἐκ γῆς Αἰγύπτου σώσας τὸ δεύτερον τοὺς μὴ πιστεύσαντας ἀπώλεσεν. Since no new textual evidence has emerged to impose this change, it appears that the determining factor was a different weighing of the existing witnesses. Indeed, previous editions had opted for the reading Κύριος on the basis of explicit theological reasoning: according to Metzger's Textual Commentary, even though the strict application of text-critical principles would have required the adoption of Ἰησοῦς, “a majority of the Committee was of the opinion that the reading was difficult to the point of impossibility.” My presentation will consider the problem of Jude 5 from a reception-historical perspective, showing that the notion of Jesus leading Israel out of Egypt was perfectly acceptable to Christians of the early centuries, and that later hymnographic expressions of doctrinal orthodoxy reflect its quasi-normative status. These observations raise questions about the kind of theological bias that has kept the reading Ἰησοῦς in the footnotes for so many decades, and, more broadly, about the unfortunate effects of maintaining the academic fiefdoms of New Testament Studies, the Study of Christian Origins, and Early Christian Studies.
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Childless Heroes and Barren Women: How the Biblical Stories of Childlessness Transform an Ancient Near Eastern Motif
Program Unit: Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature
Pauline Paris Buisch, University of Notre Dame
The story of the initially childless individual who becomes a parent is not unique to the Hebrew Bible. Versions of the story appear in Ugaritic, Akkadian, Egyptian, and Hittite literature. The purpose of this paper is to identify the meaningfulness of the recurring biblical character of the childless woman by situating the biblical stories of childlessness in this ancient Near Eastern context as variations of the widespread childless hero motif. In order to do so, this paper first analyzes the extra-biblical stories of childlessness in order to demonstrate that the childless hero motif was utilized widely and across linguistic and cultural barriers in very similar ways. The story of a childless king who becomes a happy father is consistently used to introduce a family drama that tragically ends in the death or betrayal of the divinely granted son. Not merely a neutral trope, the motif was used to introduce irony and increase tragedy in the larger narrative of which it is a part.
Understanding the childless hero motif to have functioned as a poignant literary device in the extra-biblical literary texts, we are then poised to examine the biblical iterations of the story and to identify the ways in which the shared tale was appropriated and transformed in the biblical narratives. What we will find is that three primary features distinguish the biblical stories of childlessness. The first and most striking difference is that the biblical stories of childlessness focus not on the man but on the woman. It is her experience of childlessness and her miraculous transition to motherhood that is in the narrative foreground. The second biblical transformation is that the son of the once-childless woman enjoys a special relationship with the deity. While the son of the extra-biblical versions is simply portrayed as the product of an answered prayer and with no special relationship to the deity himself, the son of the biblical stories enjoys divine favor and is specially chosen for a specific role. The third transformation is that the son is destined to survive. Unlike the son of the extra-biblical tales whose story ends in tragedy, the chosen child of the biblical narratives will face a death threat from which he will emerge triumphant.
The biblical stories therefore transform the tale of the childless hero into a powerful theological device. The notice that a couple, or individual, is without a child does not serve to enhance the narrative interest by heightening the tragedy of the story to come. Instead, the story of childlessness as it occurs in the Hebrew Bible serves to indicate that the child born despite all odds is in fact specially chosen by the deity and therefore destined to survive. It is this theological message that becomes attached to the character of the childless woman, making her a favorite character among the biblical authors, who cast her as the mother of patriarchs, judges, prophets, and kings.
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Archangels in Drag: Disguise, Tears, and Recognition in the Testament of Abraham
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
Rebecca Bultman, University of Virginia
Allow me to set the scene – God’s angelic Commander-in-Chief, Michael, is tasked with job of notifying Abraham of his impending death and is sent to earth. In order to aid him in his mission, the archistrategos dons a disguise as a normal human man visiting the aged patriarch’s home in search of hospitality. While Michael visits Abraham he does what any ordinary human might do, partakes of hospitality, meets the rest of the family, and pretends like he has to urinate to get out of an awkward moment at dinner. Michael takes his role as a human so seriously, that when the time comes to break the news to his benevolent host, the archangel cannot bear to complete his task and instead breaks down into tears. In fact, he is so overcome with human emotion that the blubbering & anxious angel is unable to complete his divine mission.
The motif of disguise and recognition is not uncommon in ancient Jewish and Christian literature. Yet the scene described here, from the Testament of Abraham, is unique in its depiction of the disguised Michael as deeply emotional. And while many commentators have noted the humorous effects of Michael’s paradoxical characterization, the angel’s donning of an emotional disguise in addition to his physical subterfuge has been largely overlooked in scholarship.
In this paper, I examine the role of emotion in the employment of disguise and recognition in the Testament of Abraham. By extending Max Whittaker’s framework of divine recognition stories to the Testament, I consider the use and meaning of the archangel Michael’s emotional breakdown. I will consider not only how Michael’s succumbing to human emotion aids his human disguise, but, paradoxically, how his exaggerated performance of “humanity” betrays his true being as something otherworldly. By overlooking, or rather actively ignoring, the telltale tokens of Michael’s true identity – the angel’s tears turn into precious stones – Abraham is able to delay his own recognition of the stranger and thus, able to put off hearing of his imminent death. In this presentation, I will also compare the use of crying as an aid to disguise to a comparable literary depiction of otherworldly tears from the Life of Adam & Eve, wherein the Satan disguises as an angel through crying. By pulling these threads together, my paper will provide a fresh look at a humorous narrative work and describe what happens when angels do drag.
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Kingdom, God, and Christology in the Disputed Paulines: Engaging a Linguistic Development in Early Christianity
Program Unit: SBL International Meeting Presentations
Brian W. Bunnell, Furman University
The expression “kingdom of God” appears six times in the undisputed letters of Paul (1 Thess 2:12; Gal 5:21; 1 Cor 4:20; 6:9–10; 15:50) and three times in the letters that are disputed (2 Thess 1:5; Col 4:11; Eph 5:5). Of these nine occurrences, only Ephesians 5:5 adds an additional modifier so that the expression is expanded to read “in the kingdom of Christ and God.” The addition of the term “Christ” to the expression is consistent with a phenomenon that occurs in the disputed letters where the term “kingdom” becomes modified by other terms such as “Lord,” or “Christ” (or a pronoun whose antecedent is “Lord” or “Christ”) rather than or in addition to the term “God” (Col 1:13; 2 Tim 4:1; 2 Tim 4:18). Thus, the disputed Paulines provide four instances where the standard expression “kingdom of God” is either adapted or dispensed in order to reframe Paul’s basileia language as a Christological assertion. But why and to what end? This paper explores each of these texts (Eph 5:5; Col 1:13; 2 Tim 4:1; 2 Tim 4:18) to demonstrate the exegetical value that the addition of Christological language provides to each discourse. Through an analysis of each text, I demonstrate that in each case the linguistic modification betrays a development toward the veneration of Jesus that functions as a mechanism for coming to terms with the non-event of the kingdom of God. By linking basileia and vocabulary that depicts a revered Jesus, the disputed Paulines allow the expectation of the imminent kingdom to be mediated through the veneration of Jesus in their present. Thus, this analysis provides a contribution to understanding these disputed Pauline texts specifically and the context of early Christianity more broadly.
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Orthographical Priority for Interpreting Homophones in New Testament Manuscripts
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Alan Bunning, Center for New Testament Restoration
Words appearing in New Testament manuscripts were spelled phonetically by scribes, often resulting in a number of different spellings for the same word. This is normally not a problem when there is only one plausible choice regarding its meaning in context. But when one word is a homophone of another word, it raises a number of different problems including whether a word should be considered a textual variant or not. This is especially problematic with several different verb conjugations which sounded the same during the Koine period. Such words are often ambiguous and cannot be resolved by the context alone. And if these words are interpreted according to the classical spelling conventions, many sentences would not make any sense. The orthographical priority approach introduces a systematic method for classifying such words which can be consistently applied to New Testament manuscripts.
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The Universal Apparatus
Program Unit: Nida Institute
Alan Bunning, Center for New Testament Restoration
Many who are concerned about textual variants are often limited to the information provided in the apparatuses of their critical texts. Such information is usually incomplete as they only show about ten percent of the variants while the vast majority are completely ignored. And for the variants that are shown, only a limited list of witnesses is displayed that varies from book to book. And on top of that, sometimes they contain errors! The Universal Apparatus (UA) was created to address these problems by providing the first complete apparatus to be generated for all witnesses across all variants in a corpus. The UA is computer-generated from original source data to minimize the possibility of introducing errors. The UA provides some additional advantages in that it is a lot simpler to use and understand for there is only one set of substitution symbols, and it is portable so that the same apparatus can work with any critical text. It also offers the feature of indicating which readings are supported by the other major critical texts which is often just as much of a curiosity.
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The Law, the Elements, and the New Creation: Rethinking the Jewish Background of τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου in Galatians 4
Program Unit: Pauline Epistles
Katherine H. Burgett, Duke University
What Paul means by τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου in Gal 4:3 and 4:9 is a subject of perennial debate. This paper assumes for the sake of argument that Paul uses the phrase to refer to the four classical elements that comprise the physical world: earth, water, air, and fire. Most scholars who argue that Paul uses στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου this way also argue that the phrase carries a negative connotation among the Galatians, their “agitators,” and Paul. In this reading, the newly Christian Galatians remember with embarrassment their history of worshiping nature’s elements, the agitators echo a common Second Temple Jewish apologetic that condemns Gentiles for worshiping the created elements instead of their Creator, and Paul shocks them all by insisting that the Law does not relieve the problem of element-worship; it exacerbates it! This negative understanding of the elements is drawn mainly from two Second Temple Jewish thinkers: Philo and the author of Wisdom of Solomon, both of whom do condemn outright idolatry of the elements. But this reading ignores the many times Philo and Wisdom of Solomon portray the four elements positively as God’s servants, used both to reward those who follow God’s commands and to punish the lawless. Philo and Wisdom of Solomon are clear: no one should worship the elements as idols. But there is a great deal of distance between idolatry and disregard or rejection. Philo and Wisdom of Solomon encourage a healthy respect for the elements as instruments of a good and powerful God.
Taking into account this fuller evidence from Philo and Wisdom of Solomon, this paper asks readers of Galatians to imagine a different conversation about the Law and the elements among the Galatians, their agitators, and Paul. It is entirely possible to imagine that the agitators in Galatia are not just teaching the Galatians to renounce their previous idolatry of the elements—-they have, after all, already turned to Christ!—-but instructing them about a more elementary connection between the Law and the elements and encouraging them to adopt Law-observance so that their everyday dealings with nature’s elements might go well. If so, I argue, Paul’s intervention into the conversation is not to redraw this line between the Law and the elements, but to insist that the coming of Christ has brought about a new creation (6:16) in which God no longer subjects humanity to the joint guardianship of the Law and the elements.
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What Has Apocrypha to Do with Hagiographa? A Reconsideration of the “Editing” of Apocryphal Acts
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Tony Burke, York University
The five ancient apocryphal acts (Peter, Paul, John, Andrew, and Thomas) appear in a variety of forms in the manuscript tradition: sometimes abbreviated, occasionally expanded, but most often, truncated, reduced only to the account of the apostle’s demise. It has become common to think of the acts as victims of orthodoxy’s dislike for the texts’ advocacy of universal asceticism and for their somewhat unorthodox Christology, presented typically in the apostles’ sermons and prayers. As a result, the apocryphal acts were mutilated and thereby transformed into hagiographical martyrdoms. But that is not the complete story. For one, the survival of the entire Acts of Thomas indicates that some copyists, at least, found little offensive in that text. And other acts composed, perhaps, as replacements of the ancient acts, contain many of the same themes as their predecessors. Given that apocryphal texts were copied and read in monasteries, it is difficult to maintain the position that the teachings and activities of their protagonists would be unwelcome. The prevailing theories reflect more what previous scholars imagined would be problematic about the ancient texts and are influenced by an artificial distinction between the proclivities of apocrypha and the interests of hagiographa. This paper focuses on the evidence, with an examination of the various manuscript contexts for the transmission of the ancient acts—whether as complete texts, as martyrdoms only, or separated into independently circulating stories—and a reconsideration of why these texts faced such struggles to survive.
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Non-Biblical Material in the Leicester Codex
Program Unit: New Testament Textual Criticism
Matthew Burks, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary
On folios 159v to 161v in the Leicester Codex (GA69), several non-biblical tracts of material are found. Dan Wallace noted on his website, CSNTM.org, that a second hand composed the material from 160v to 161v. In another area of the codex, William Hatch noted a potential second hand at the end of Romans. These comments from previous scholars beg the question of the entire non-Biblical material found in the Leicester Codex: did the original scribe transcribe all of the material found from 159v to 161v? In between the Biblical material of the Pauline Corpus and Acts, several “patristic tracts” are found. J. R. Harris labeled this material as “An Explanation of the Creed and the Seven Councils” (159v-160r), “Lives of the Apostles” (160v-161r), and “Limits of the Patriarchates” (161v). These various tracts are also found in other New Testament manuscripts. Furthermore, a prologue to Hebrews can be found on folio 150r. This paper will discuss the potential of the non-Biblical material being written by a second hand. The paper will further discuss the potential origins of the non-Biblical from 159v to 161v, a paleographical analysis of the non-Biblical material compared to the Biblical material found in the Leicester Codex, as well as a codicological analysis to suggest whether the material was originally bound with the other parts of the codex. This paper argues that only one scribe transcribed and assembled the Leicester Codex.
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Women and (Family) Debt at Ugarit: New Textual Evidence
Program Unit: Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy
Andrew Burlingame, University of Chicago
The roles played and risks taken by women within the Ugaritian economy have been recognized and discussed in a number of previous studies, but newly published administrative documents and ongoing work on the small body of Ugaritic juridical texts shed further light on this topic. The new evidence gathered and presented here serves both to illustrate the financial liability women could face in association with their husbands’ activities (through family debt) and to augment our understanding of the administrative and legal recourses available to women to protect themselves from such liability. This evidence is in turn considered in relation to the ambiguity it introduces for the evaluation of several possible examples of women acting as economic agents at Ugarit.
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Reassessing Paul’s Apocalyptic Politeia in 1 Cor 15:20–28: Reorganization of the Cosmic Polis or the Death of the Gods?
Program Unit: Pauline Epistles
David A. Burnett, Marquette University
Among contemporary scholarly approaches to the questions surrounding how we should understand the relationship between Paul and “apocalyptic,” Emma Wasserman’s recent work stands out. In her latest book, Apocalypse as Holy War: Divine Politics and Polemics in the Letters of Paul, Wasserman offers a “critical reframing” of the relevant apocalyptic literature as it relates to what we find in Paul as “myths concerned with politics in the divine world.” This construal is juxtaposed with the “folk-definitions” coming from most interpreters of Christian apocalypticism that understand “apocalypse” or apocalyptic literature as “most fundamentally concerned with a great battle between good and evil.” Wasserman contends that Paul’s politeia in 1 Cor 15:20–28, as in other relevant apocalyptic literature, intends to “suppress the possibility of conflict and competition in the divine world,” suggesting the writers “continue to assume the world functions as a single political hierarchy,” simply undergoing “reorganization.” This thesis is situated in opposition to the more popular “dualistic” portrayals of the relevant literature that carry “notions of a worldwide reckoning,” or envisioning a “radical reversal that upends the existing world order,” which she sees as “inflected with a specifically Christian sense.”
While I am in agreement with Wasserman that Paul’s so-called principalities and powers in 1 Cor 15:24 should be taken as a reference to the gods of the gentiles, in this study, I will offer a critical reconstruction that problematizes the interpretive dichotomy proposed between the “radical reversal of the existing world order,” and more generic “myths concerned with politics in the divine world.” I will argue that Paul’s description of the imminent judgment of the gods of nations in 1 Cor 15:20–28 is rooted in a Jewish apocalyptic interpretation of the narrative of Psalm 82, envisioning the coming death of the gods like human beings, construed as the fall of “rulers,” all set to take place at the “arising” of the divine figure to judge the whole earth, resulting in the inheritance of all the nations. A cognate apocalyptic employment of Psalm 82, the “god” figure there being construed as a divine intermediary, can be found in 11Q13 (11QMelch). This proposal by no means arises out of normative Christian interpretations of apocalyptic, but rather situates Paul squarely amidst Jewish apocalyptic traditions that envisioned the coming death of the gods, resulting in the inheritance of the world.
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“Then at My Feet a Multitude of Stars Fell Down”: The Divine Plenipotentiary Function of Abrahamic Tradition in the Exagoge 68–89
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
David A. Burnett, Marquette University
Scholars have acknowledged the presence of Abrahamic tradition and its early Jewish reception in the Exagoge 68–89 (e.g. Jacobsen, 1983; Lafranchi, 2006). How then does the employment of this tradition function for the author of the Exagoge? I will argue these traditions serve to portray Moses as a divine plenipotentiary figure in fulfillment of the promise to Abraham in early Jewish tradition. Moses’ numbering of the stars draws on the Abrahamic promise in Genesis 15, the stars here appearing as armed ranks before him, thus assuming the role of the God of Israel, the divine potentate and marshal of the celestial armies (cf. Ps 147:4; Job 25:3; Isa 40:26). In the interpretation of Moses’ dream (83–89), he is told he will “rule and govern men.” Early Jewish interpretations of the astral promise made to Abraham highlight a connection between his seed becoming as the stars qualitatively (e.g. Philo, Her. 86–87; QG 4.181) and the rule of nations and men (e.g. LXX Sir 44:21; Apoc. Abr. 20:3–5; cf. Gen. Rab. 44.4, 12). This connection is rooted in the conception of the gods/angels of the nations as celestial bodies (i.e. Deut 4:19; 32:8–9). I will further argue that this conceptualization of Moses as divine plenipotentiary and the imagery of a celestial census is a reflection of Second Temple interpretations of Moses’ ascent of the cosmic mountain through the lens of Abrahamic traditions. Thus, the ascent of the cosmic mountain is here understood as the fulfillment of the astral promises made to Abraham, the seed of Abraham becoming as the celestial bodies, experiencing angelomorphic or divine transformation, exalted over the nations of the earth, led by their plenipotentiary, portrayed in Abrahamic fashion as the divine potentate and marshal of the celestial armies, i.e. the seed of Abraham.
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The Amman Theatre Statue and the Ammonite Royal Ancestor Cult
Program Unit: Israelite Religion in Its Ancient Context
Joel S. Burnett, Baylor University
Religious evidence for Israel and Judah’s neighbors east of the Jordan includes an extensive collection of Iron Age stone statuary from Amman.This presentation addresses the dating, iconography, and function of the Amman Theatre Statue, an Iron Age stone sculpture discovered in secondary archaeological context in front of the Amman Roman Theatre in 2010. Comparative art-historical analysis and geoscientific testing (XRF analysis) confirm that the colossal basalt figure of a standing male belongs to an extensive corpus of Iron Age stone statuary from Amman, even while adding something new in terms of its scale and material. Attention to the archaeology of Iron Age Amman Citadel (Jabal al-Qal‘a) and its surroundings, and to archaeological and epigraphic contexts of comparative examples of Syro-Anatolian statuary indicates cultural connections between the Iron Age northern and southern Levant and, specifically, an Ammonite royal ancestor cult.
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Philo of Alexandria’s Transformation of the Stoic Doctrine of Providence
Program Unit: Philo of Alexandria
Dylan M. Burns, Universiteit van Amsterdam
A central stumbling-block in the study of Philo’s discussions of divine care (πρόνοια, “providence”; ἐπιμέλεια, “care, attention”) across his sprawling corpus is his appropriation of two Greek philosophical traditions that both maintain the existence of providence, but differ as to how it works: Platonism and Stoicism. This paper will focus on Philo’s treatment and transformation of Stoic teaching about providence, particularly as regards the issue of care for particulars and arguments concerning theodicy. Special attention will be paid to how Philo’s own immediate context as a prominent Alexandrian Jew played a decisive role in his development of his questions and goals concerning the doctrine of providence.
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Robert Bresson’s Unfinished Genesis: A Biblical Aesthetics of the Ellipsis
Program Unit: Reading, Theory, and the Bible
Sean Burt, North Dakota State University
This presentation is a reading of a film that was never made. French filmmaker Robert Bresson (1901-1999), created several films steeped in biblical and theological themes (e.g., Diary of a Country Priest [1951], The Trial of Joan of Arc [1962], Au Hazard Balthasar [1966], L’Argent [1983]). Few directors have created with such a distinctive style, a style that has been named “spiritual” and “transcendental” by Susan Sontag and Paul Schrader, respectively. Bresson’s films often employ non-actors to deliver lines without emotion and, in place of psychological verisimilitude, focus instead on the expressive trace: a hand passing a note, a sheet drifting in the wind, a donkey in a field, the backswing of a murderer’s axe. His method sought to use the distinctive medium of cinema to uncover the emergent, or, in his words, the “wonderful chances, those that act with precision.” Or, as he elsewhere writes, film’s “poetry … penetrates unaided through the joins (ellipses).” For years of his life, Bresson planned an film adaptation of the Primeval History (Gen 1–11), but this project never materialized. This presentation is an attempt to anticipate and to contemplate Bresson’s Genèse, to imagine what Bresson may have seen in this biblical text. Informed by Bresson’s aphoristic treatise Notes on the Cinematograph and interview material, as well as images from his extant films, this project in part be an experimental gesture toward reconstructing a Bressonian Genesis. Additionally, it will explore the question of how reading Bresson can inform a reading of Genesis 1–11. In one sense, Bresson’s rejection of narrative “depth” bears some similarity to the readings of Genesis done by mid-late 20th-century formalist interpreters of biblical literature such as Erich Auerbach and Meir Sternberg. Yet, those interpreters also insisted that biblical narrative pushes readers to contemplate the unsaid in very specific, even “tyrannical,” ways. By way of contrast, Bresson’s art creates a tight formal experience in order to enable the new and emergent to come forth. His orientation toward the chance, or ellipses, through which poetry emerges bears a resemblance to an affective aesthetics of the trace or surplus (as in the work of Ernst Bloch and José Esteban Muñoz). Accordingly, it is perhaps a more generative lens through which to view the potentialities latent in a text so simultaneously tightly constructed and unruly as Gen 1–11.
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By Any Means Necessary, All Israel Will Be Saved: Paul’s Creative Use of the LXX in Jewett’s Commentary on Romans
Program Unit: Scripture and Paul
Keith Burton, AdventHealth University
The Paul in Jewett’s Romans Commentary is a careful researcher who adapts scripture for his own rhetorical purposes. He views the LXX as a malleable source whose words can be creatively adjusted to advance his message of ecclesial reconciliation. Ironically, this approach to the LXX parallels the Pauline concept of the “Israel of God” that challenges Jews to embrace a flexibility that accommodates “Gentile” believers.
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Sexual Violence in Classic Gnostic Literature and Ovid
Program Unit: Bible, Myth, and Myth Theory
Austin Busch, SUNY Brockport
This paper focuses on the Classic Gnostic myth of Eve’s violation by Yaldabaoth (cf. Reality of the Rulers 89.17ff.) and related episodes from Classic Gnostic writings as variants of the Greco-Roman myth-type of a god raping a nymph. A key comparandum would be the Ovidian account of Apollo and Daphne (though other parallels are relevant), as both violations are emblematized in a dehumanizing transformation of the victim into a tree. The commonality evinces conscious assimilation of Genesis to that myth type, with the revisionary tactic functioning at both a narrative and theological level to reduce tension between Greco-Roman literary and religious culture and the Jewish religious traditions Christian teachers invoked to define themselves. It represents an under-studied element of that acknowledged strategy of Gnostic revisionary biblical interpretation, with implications for understanding Gnostic conceptions of patriarchal authority, sexuality, and so on—especially when the discrete revision is viewed as a mundane reflection of the aeonic “sexual violation” other elements of the Gnostic myth writ large feature. Focus on the parallel potentially opens new avenues to Gnostic myth—or at least avenues that have not yet been fully explored. In particular, it invites application of the same sophisticated theoretical apparatus classicists at least since Amy Richlin have applied to Ovid’s accounts of mythological sexual violence.
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Remembering the Spirit in the Wilderness: Nehemiah 9 and Isaiah 63:15–64
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Aubrey Buster, Wheaton College (Illinois)
Accepted paper for the IBR research group on Isaiah and Intertextuality.
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Contributions of Functional Linguistic Theory to Linguistics and Its Application for Biblical Hebrew/Koine Greek
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Randall Buth, Institute for Biblical Languages and Translation
Accepted paper for the IBR research group on Linguistics and the Biblical Text.
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"In His Sacred Supper": Augustine's Interpretation of John 6 in Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion
Program Unit: History of Interpretation
Geoffrey Butler, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto
Sustained engagement with the Church Fathers does not typically come to mind when considering contemporary evangelical biblical interpretation or theological reflection, and the sacraments are no exception. Compared with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, which place much emphasis on continuity with the ancient church, evangelicals with liturgical inclinations may feel that their sacramentality lacks sufficient historical depth. Gordon Smith, for example, laments that his “evangelical heritage typically assumed that one had to choose: evangelical meant that you rejected the sacramentalism of not only the Catholic Church but any Protestant church that even seemed to hint at the possibility that the sacramental rites were a means of grace.” The same might be said of much of their exegesis, which sometimes fails to take into account the full range of wisdom offered by the Great tradition of Christian biblical exegesis.
Yet, given that the reformers themselves were avid patristics students, it seems that evangelical Protestants have as much claim to the Church Fathers as any branch of Christendom. John Calvin, for example, consistently drew upon his patristic forerunners in his commentaries, tracts, and sermons in order to ground his theology within the broader tradition of the church. This paper will focus specifically on Augustine of Hippo’s interpretation of John 6, and Calvin’s subsequent use of Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John in those portions of his Institutes of the Christian Religion that address the Lord’s Supper. It will hold up Calvin as a potential model for contemporary evangelical engagement with the Fathers, demonstrating that Protestants too have good reason to see themselves as their descendants on the sacrament of the Eucharist. This will be done first by surveying Augustine’s own interpretation of the text in his sermons on John, then considering how Calvin made subsequent use of Augustine’s exegesis in his own interpretation.
It will also consider how Calvin and Augustine, both typically viewed with much reverence in the evangelical world, relied substantially upon John 6 in their theologies of the Lord’s Supper – despite Calvin’s own hesitation at some junctures – a significant point considering that the text attracts relatively little attention compared to, say, 1 Corinthians 11 within contemporary evangelical theologies of the Eucharist. By discussing how both individuals interpreted the passage, this paper would also seek to encourage further engagement with the history of interpretation of this particular text among evangelical Protestants for the purposes of constructive theology – especially in the area of sacramentality. In particular, Augustine and Calvin’s mutual insistence that personal faith is necessary to obtain the benefits offered in the Supper offers considerable promise to help further this conversation within a movement that so cherishes personal faith and experience, yet would do well to grant greater focus to the witness of the historic Christian tradition.
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No More Hebrew Slaves: Slavery and Indentured Servitude in D and H
Program Unit: Pentateuch
Jay Caballero, University of Texas at Austin
In the paper I presented at SBL 2019, I argued that the author of D assumed that the Covenant Code only envisioned sex slavery for females. In revising the Covenant Code’s slavery provisions, D eliminated lifetime sex slavery for females and provided that they could only be debt slaves, like their male counterparts, who must be released after 6 years of servitude. To balance this, D provided that sex slavery could be practiced against foreign women taken prisoner in battle. Maintaining that theme this year, I propose to continue evaluating the Torah’s trajectory on slavery for the Hebrews from D to the Holiness Code, specifically the provisions regarding slavery and indenture in Lev 25:35-55. I will argue that the HC focuses on the motivation clause of Deut 15:15, “ you will remember that you were a slave in Egypt,” and develops this as the foundation for his laws on servitude. In doing so, the author of the HC opines that, since the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt purchased by Yahweh, they are now slaves to Yahweh. Consequently, they cannot be slaves to anyone else, including one another. As a result, the HC must develop a new system to deal with those Hebrews who become impoverished and cannot support themselves. That new system consists of treating the impoverished Hebrew as a wage earner, שָׂכִ֥יר, rather than as a slave. In keeping with D, though, the HC makes a further change to balance the change in the poor’s man status. The wage earner no longer goes free in the 7th year, as he did in Deut 15; now, unless he is redeemed or pays back his debt, he will go out in the 50th year. In this way, the author of the Holiness Code recognizes that D has set a trajectory toward a more humane treatment of all Hebrews and he augments this by eliminating slavery altogether, for Hebrews.
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Monied Women in Phrygia
Program Unit: Numismatic Evidence and Biblical Interpretation
Alan Cadwallader, Charles Sturt University
Asian coinage of the imperial period is replete with legends flagging sponsorship by men keen to promote their citizenship, official positions and authorization. This general pattern is little different in Phrygia, except for a one hundred year window when a number of women adorn civic bronze coins with their names. This paper proposes to identify these women and examine the coins that were struck under their sponsorship. A number of methodological questions will be addressed:
1. How is the status and initiative of these women to be assessed within the city in/for which their coins were minted, especially given the older presumption that they were mere adjuncts to their elite husbands?
2. What currency values can be assigned to their coins and how might these provide clues as to their own negotiation of the civic and political realities of the day?
3. Given the working hypothesis that sponsors of coins chose the iconography (and epigraphy) of coins, how might we discern and evaluate the identity-projection present on the coins minted by these women?
4. How might we approach the relationship between text and image on these coins, especially with the addition of official or semi-official positions held by women in the legends?
5. How are implications to be drawn from this focused sphere of female benefaction to the wider dynamics in cities and in other civic groups (including Christ-followers) in Phrygia in the first and second centuries CE.
Particular reference will be made to the coins of Pedia Sekounda of Eukarpeia (especially Hermes’ “penny”) and Claudia Eugenetoriane of Kolossai (especially the widow’s goddess, Demeter).
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“By His Word Alone”: Defending Jesus against the Charge of Magic in Late Antiquity
Program Unit: Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity
Jared Calaway, Illinois College
In a previous paper, I argued that the redaction of Jesus’ miracles in the synoptic gospels reflects an attempt to defend Jesus against the charge of magic through shifting quoting what Jesus said in his words of power to reporting that he spoke words of power, deemphasizing any physical manipulations, cutting out Aramaic phrasing, and emphasizing the faith of the receiver of the miracle. This paper seeks to explore how ancient Christian sources from the second century onward including extra-canonical gospels as well as Christian apologists and polemicists sought to continue to alter the characterization of Jesus’ miracles in order to further defend him against the continued charge of magic levelled by opponents. Predominant among these strategies is to de-emphasize any physical manipulations in Jesus’ healings and emphasize that he performed them “by his word alone.”
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Rachel, Laban, and J: A Polytheistic Reading of the Text
Program Unit: Genesis
Rebekah Call, Claremont Graduate University
This study provides an alternate reading of Laban’s and Rachel’s allegiance to deity. Both characters show a complex relationship with deity and underscore a clear polytheistic thread in the narrative. Through a close philological and contextual reading of the Hebrew text, this paper argues that both Laban and Rachel are devotees of gods other than J, and that this devotion ultimately leads to Rachel’s demise. With regards to Laban, the key elements in proving this are analyses of the words teraphim and nahash, the examination of Laban’s relationship to J, and the vow he makes with Jacob. As for Rachel, the main factors rely upon the investigation of her theft of Laban’s teraphim, the phrase “wrestlings of gods” (naftulei elohim) in her competition with Leah, and her death in J’s territory along with the erection upon her tomb of the matzebah that is not dedicated to J. Based on contextual and philological evidence from these passages, this paper challenges customary readings by demonstrating that taken as a whole, the text is filled with markers supporting the premise that both Laban and Rachel are worshippers of other deities.
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Both in Heaven and on Earth: The Multivalent Theodicies of "Neither Heaven nor Earth" and Job
Program Unit: Bible and Film
Teresa J. Calpino, Loyola University of Chicago
One of the hardest subjects to teach is why human beings suffer. Discussions of the topic tend to be dialectical. On the one hand, writers blame human action for all suffering. This approach either leaves God out of the conversation in order to preserve God’s goodness, or it denies any supernatural dimension in the experience of evil. On the other hand, an equally powerful, if less academic, trajectory lays the blame for suffering on Satan or some other metaphysical being who attempts to thwarts God’s providence. Neither of these suggestions fully accounts for the human experience of suffering, which seems to encompass both realms.
The French film “Neither Heaven nor Earth” (Ni le Ciel ni la Terre, 2015) is a film that can be used to examine this tension. It is set in Afghanistan’s Wakhan Valley on the border with Pakistan. In the last months of their mission, a platoon of French soldiers patrols the valley for remaining Taliban insurgents and lives in strained relationship with the villagers. What seems initially like a war movie that will either glorify or vilify the soldiers and their mission ends up doing neither. The platoon experiences a series of vanishings that they struggle to explain. Is there a perfectly rational explanation for the disappearances, or is there a malignant force at work in the valley? The director, Clément Cogitore articulated his vision in a 2016 interview, “We read the world through a rationalist grid, and 80 to 90 percent of physical phenomena enter this grid. The world, for the most part, functions in a rational way. But there is a window of 10 percent that does not enter this grid. And so beliefs take charge of this remaining part.” Cogitore points out the ultimate failure of all religious attempts to cope with inexplicable suffering.
In addition, the film’s chaplain character quotes the book of Job several times. This explicit use of Job points to how the film mirrors Job’s multivalent theodicy. Namely, what do our actions have to do with human suffering? Is there always a meaning to our suffering? If we endure suffering, can God be a just and loving deity? Both “Neither Heaven nor Earth” and Job take the physical and metaphysical explanations of suffering seriously but instead of seeing them as a dialectic, both attempt to bring the dimensions together and understand them as all bound up in the same messy human experience.
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Moses' Theodramatic Preaching in Deuteronomy
Program Unit: Homiletics and Biblical Studies
Phillip Camp, Lipscomb University
In recent decades the concept of "theodrama," seeing the biblical narrative as a Divine play or drama in a series of acts laying out God's redemptive purposes in creation, has become a way of theologically explaining and exploring the biblical narrative. Of particular interest in the discussions of theodrama is how the biblical narrative incorporates and guides Christians in their role in this Divine drama. In her recent book, Preaching God's Grand Drama: A Biblical-Theological Approach (Baker Academic, 2019), Ahmi Lee has applied the concept of theodrama to homiletics.
In this paper, I draw on Lee's theological-homiletical framework to explore how the preaching of Moses in Deuteronomy anticipates or illustrates the theodramatic preaching she advocates. That is, Moses' speeches in Deuteronomy provide a precursor and example of what a theodramatic homiletic can look like. Some scholars have identified the speeches of Moses in Deuteronomy as akin to sermons by Moses to the new generation of Israelites, who are preparing to enter the Promised Land. From the perspective of the full Christian canon, the drama as it appears in Deuteronomy consists of only the first few "acts" of the whole theodrama. Still, within Deuteronomy one can discern a similar dramatic structure in which this new generation stands on the edge of the Promised Land with a call to live as God's people in the land. The "script" that guides their "faithful improvisation" for their place in the drama includes what God has done in the past (the promises to the ancestors, the exodus, and the giving of the torah at Horeb) and the anticipation of God's actions in their future, both in terms of their rebellion and restoration. In addition, God's larger intentions for Israel in God's redemptive plan becomes evident.
As Lee describes her homiletical appropriation of theodrama, she does so in ways that clearly resonate with the speeches of Moses in Deuteronomy. Adjusting for Israel as the audience of Moses' preaching, Moses' sermons move Israel "to participate in the reality" of being God's chosen people, reorients their view of reality, and shapes them as performers in God's drama (pp. 125-138). Lee also notes four perspectives in theodramatic preaching (pp. 150-167) that are evident in Moses' preaching in Deuteronomy: "retrospection" (what God has done for God's people); "introspection"(what God is doing now among God's people); "extrospection" (what God is doing in the world around God's people); and "prospection" (what God will do).
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Pros Hebraious: Reading and Writing a Pauline Letter to Jews
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Warren Campbell, University of Notre Dame
The Letter to the Hebrews is the forgotten Pauline pseudepigraphon of ancient Christianity. We know that despite anonymity and a disputed authorial status throughout the first and second centuries, Hebrews ascended into the corpus Paulinum (P46, P.Mil.Vogl. V, Codex H 015, etc) and was read as Pauline letter written to Jews by Christian philosophical intellectuals in second-century Alexandria and third-century Caesarea. Rarely, however, do we explore the ways in which Hebrews was appropriated and configured as Pauline through reading practices and material production, not to mention the critical relationship between these two modes of appropriation. This paper explores that critical relationship, focusing on Origen’s readerly appropriation of Hebrews and the paratextual system structuring the Pauline corpus known as the Euthalian apparatus. To be sure, scholars have measured the Origenian influence upon Euthalius since the 18th century, focused primarily on Origen as a philological influence (Wettstein, 1752). Further, marks of Eusebian influence on Euthalius are clearly observable, especially the narratives preserved in the Historia ecclesiastica concerning the origin of Hebrews attributed to Clement of Alexandria (and the earlier and mysterious Pantaenus). However, I suggest that it is Origen’s reading of Hebrews 8:5 as a definitive Pauline statement regarding the purpose of Jewish law and the nature of Jewish reading practices, both of which are a ‘shadow’ of a heavenly reality (Heb. 8:5), which structures the Euthalian configuration of Paul, Jews, and the Law throughout the apparatus. The Euthalian hypotheses to Romans, Galatians, and Philippians (not to mention Hebrews itself) utilize Origen’s interpretive lens to describe Paul’s aims in these letters. While this paper offers a more specific description of the Origenian influence upon Euthalius, particularly how reading Paul influences the writing of Paul, it equally draws attention to the ongoing relation of pseudepigraphy, materiality, and Pauline legends at work within the varied history of Paulinism.
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Jesus’s Defense Strategies in Mark’s Trial and Flogging Scenes (15:1–20)
Program Unit: Mark Passion Narrative
William Sanger Campbell, College of St. Scholastica
This culturally cued literary study of Mark’s trial and flogging scenes (15:1-20) argues that Jesus does not passively acquiesce in the injustice that is perpetrated against him, as is the usual view of commentators on these narratives. Instead, Jesus alternately engages in and resists the judicial proceedings in which he becomes embroiled. Initially, he welcomes and participates in the proceedings before Pilate, just as he had before the Jewish council. He disengages, however, when the prosecution dissolves into a series of false allegations established by perjured testimony. The flogging that Jesus undergoes does not render him unable to carry the cross to Golgotha—he simply refuses to do it.
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The Tale of the Poor Man of Nippur between Mesopotamian and Biblical Wisdom
Program Unit: SBL International Meeting Presentations
Giorgio Paolo Campi, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna
Since Gurney’s first edition (1956) of the tablets, the tale of the Poor Man of Nippur (1500 BCE ca.) has often been categorised as an example of an alleged Mesopotamian humorous literary genre. And yet, this position is untenable or at least flimsy for many reasons. The Poor Man seems to include several tópoi and stylistic traits which are typical in Ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature, such as the motif of the righteous man suffering and mourning, the absence of God/the gods, the presence of numerical patterns and the almost identical iterations of some scenarios. These features immediately come to light when comparing the Poor Man with the Mesopotamian Lamentation genre on one hand and with biblical texts on the other, in particular the book of Job, which shares a fair amount of structural and thematic analogies with the Poor Man. Furthermore, the Poor Man seems to fall under a literary archetype widespread both chronologically and spatially throughout the Ancient Near East (One Thousand and One Nights), the Mediterranean area (Sicily) and some other European regions. Through this cross-analysis two important issues can be acknowledged. Firstly, the Poor Man, far from being a work «unique in character» (as stated by Gurney), seems to partake in a common Ancient Near Eastern cultural backdrop; secondly, it puts to the test the very label of “wisdom” literature built up by the scholarly debate through the years, framing the possibility that alike and recurring narrative units could be declined into different hues: moral exemplum, light entertainment, theological speculation, theodicy, etc.
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Livia, Feminine Attributes, and Virtues for an Empire
Program Unit: Numismatic Evidence and Biblical Interpretation
Rosemary Canavan, Catholic Theological College, University of Divini
This paper will explore feminine attributes or virtues illustrated on coins via Livia and goddess personifications (such as Salus, Pax, Pietas) to illuminate virtues of the Roman Empire and examine how these interact with the virtues and/or attributes of the early Christ follower communities as expressed in the Pauline literature.
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The Exegetical Significance of the Old Testament’s Silence in the Case of Melchizedek’s Ancestry and Progeny in Genesis 14
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Ardel B. Caneday, University of Northwestern - St. Paul
Accepted paper for the IBR research group on the Relationship between the OT and NT
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Reflections on Scripture and the University: A Biblical Scholar's Perspective
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Ardel B. Caneday, University of Northwestern
Caneday will reflect on the relationship between Scripture and the university from the perspective of a professor of biblical studies.
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Is the Eschatological Window Closing? The Hour between Q al-Kahf 18:32–44 and the Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:16–21)
Program Unit: The Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition (IQSA)
Anna Canton, Sapienza University (Rome-Italy)
The imminent coming of the Hour or the Last Judgment is one of the core messages communicated both by the Gospel and the Qur’an. Both sacred texts use different devices to express this topic, including the parable/mathal. These narratives aim to create an analogy between something well known to the people to whom these stories are addressed and the message that Jesus or Muhammad desire to teach them. The Parable of the Rich Fool finds an apparent echo in the mathal transmitted in Q al-Kahf 18:32–44. One of the focal points of these passages appears to be human faith: both stories exemplify how human choices might have eschatological consequences. The Hour is a matter of belief: the believer will be rewarded on the Last Day, whereas the unbeliever will be punished. The Last Judgment is the horizon between now and not yet, in which the narratives of the parable/mathal are placed. It could happen anytime and both stories articulate a subtle warning to be ready and act accordingly. The characters involved in these narratives act like fools and this could be a reflection of their faithlessness. The Hour is a constant reminder that no one will be saved despite all the riches of the world. Both stories are focused on human greediness: man considers himself self-sufficient in relation to his Creator without recognizing that Judgment will come upon him. Human self-satisfaction reveals a hubris stuck deep in man’s soul. Having acquired worldly riches and amenities, man forgets who has provided these things, including his own life. Hidden in this forgetfulness is the human desire for immortality that makes man set God aside. One cannot say that in both stories the human figures are the main characters. While Luke’s parable centers on a rich fool, the qur’anic mathal involves two main characters, whereby one represents the good God-fearing man and the other the man who is filled with selfishness and pride. To describe this latter one, some Muslim commentators have used the root k-f-r to underline both his disbelief and the foolishness of his attitude leading him astray. Similarly, the parable in Luke 12 finds some reflections in Sirach 11:10–28 and 1 Enoch 97:8–10 in which there is a warning: if man does whatever he wants and accumulates earthly wealth, this potentially leads to perdition and punishment when the Last Judgment arrives. This paper suggests that the Hour might provide an interpretative key to this kind of allusive literature based on an analysis of the wider biblical and apocryphal literature (for example, the Gospel of Thomas) and qur’anic commentaries.
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Reconciling Humour and Horror: Black Comedy as Reading Strategy in Megillat Esther
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Hannah Capey, University of Southampton
Accepted paper for IBR research group on Biblical Violence.
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The Apotropaic Ritual against Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in Numbers 5:11–31
Program Unit: Social Sciences and the Interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures
Reed Carlson, United Lutheran Seminary
The enigmatic procedure for investigating a woman suspected of adultery in Numbers 5:11–31 has long puzzled biblical scholars. Conventionally referred to as the “śôṭâ ritual” according to the name of the relevant Mishnaic tractate, in form, it reflects a so-called “divine ordeal,” a prevalent type of ancient Near Eastern law. Yet, this passage is the only example of such in the Hebrew Bible. Consequently, approaches to interpreting the śôṭâ have varied. Those pursuing biomedical explanations have often focused on the “water of bitterness which curses” (vv. 19, 22) and the (likely euphemistic) consequences of drinking it while guilty (e.g. “womb discharge” and “uterus drop” NRSV v. 22). Others employing comparative religion approaches have labelled the ritual as a type of “magic” and suggested that it sits uneasily among other biblical legal traditions. Most interpreters, however, are agreed that the problem the ritual seeks to address is that of the wife’s supposed adultery.
Without necessarily discounting many of the insights of previous approaches, this paper argues that the problem at stake in the ritual is less that of the woman’s supposed behavior than it is that of the husband, who has been possessed by a “spirit of jealousy” (vv. 14, 30). This spirit has provoked the husband to abusive and potentially violent behavior, which is a risk to his wife and the wider community. Since the supposed adultery is unverified (v. 13) it is unreasonable to assume that the woman is guilty a priori. Instead of an investigation, the śôṭâ ritual takes on an apotropaic purpose, not only appeasing the husband’s lurking jealousy but perhaps also exorcizing the offending spirit. By design, the concoction that the woman is coerced into drinking may in fact be harmless, thereby exonerating her and eliminating the threat of the spirit.
Such a reading of the ritual is not as implausible as it may initially seem. Researchers have established a firm connection between instances of Intimate Partner Violence (IVP) and motivations of jealousy in a variety of cases. Additionally, in cultures where spirit possession is widely practiced, ethnographers have documented the connections that practitioners make between jealousy and pathological spirit ailments. Jealousy is widely portrayed cross culturally as an unpredictable and potentially violent passion that must be controlled. This is true also of biblical literature—especially wisdom texts (e.g. Prov 6:34; 27:4; cf. Job 5:2). In this way, an interpretation of the “spirit of jealousy” is consistent with other presentations of humans in biblical literature as being spiritually porous bodies whose most powerful emotions originate outside of the self. Against this backdrop, a portrait of the śôṭâ ritual develops in which the jealous spirit that has seized the husband is a problem that needs to be be managed not just inter personally but also ritually.
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Why'd the Exorcist Cross the Sea? Mark 4:35–51 in Light of Ancient, Comedic Travel Narratives
Program Unit: Gospel of Mark
Jon Carman, Baylor University
Sea-travel in Mediterranean antiquity was a dangerous affair. The presence of pirates and the perennial threat of dangerous weather were experienced by a broad range of travelers and commented upon at length by ancient authors. Notably, these issues were not limited to “serious” writers of the Greco-Roman world. Rather, sea-faring and its concomitant dangers was also taken up by comedic writers. This trope of pirates and shipwrecks is attested as early as Plautus’ comedies and grew to become a staple among the writings of the 1st century CE, acting as an especially important element of the Greco-Roman novels. In the present paper, I propose a fresh reading of Mark 4:35-41, a Jewish-Christian tale of ancient travel relating the odd detail that Jesus slept even as his boat was nearly destroyed during a storm at sea. Scholars have examined this text against an array of backgrounds, but none to my knowledge has interpreted this text in light of the trope of sea-storms in comedies or comedic writings. Yet, two texts in particular offer a new and potentially more straightforward way of understanding the act of Jesus’ sleeping: Jonah (LXX) and Petronius’ Satyricon. Both of these texts relate not only the presence of a storm at sea, but intentionally exaggerate for comic impact the behavior of characters acting strange during such a phenomenon. Such a reading opens up new avenues for interpretation. First, it is likely that humor enhances the narrative’s performance, memorability, and persuasive capacity. Second, this story precipitates a discussion concerning Jesus’ abilities (and inabilities) that will recur through the rest of the miracle-cycle (4:35-6:6a). Third, this cycle problematizes Mark’s christology earlier than is generally assumed by throwing into question Jesus’ status as a wonderworker well before the half-way point of Mark's Gospel.
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Egyptian Scroll Practices for "Literary" Texts and the Formation of the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature
David McLain Carr, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York
Ancient Egypt represents one of the best sources of information about how scrolls with ‘literary’ texts were inscribed, revised and read/performed in the ancient world. [Note that the consciously etic term ‘literary’ is used here (with Parkinson 1996; Baines 2000; essays in Lepper and Enmarch 2013) to designate non-situation-specific texts (e.g. business records, legal texts, burial texts) that come to be included in an oral-written ‘stream of tradition (Oppenheim) that includes use in, but is not limited to scribal education.] Egypt’s scribal apparatus was extensive, and Egypt’s dry climate helped preserve a number of papyrus scrolls over thousands of years, in some cases large portions of such scrolls. As a result, Egypt provides the best documentation, by far, of scroll practices in the second and early first millennium. Furthermore, a number of clues suggest that Egyptian writing and (more specifically) scroll practices were influential in the Levant, including (but not limited to) the use of red tint lettering and other Egyptian paratextual elements in Levantine texts, the adoption there of the Egyptian hieratic numbering system, and diverse indicators that Israelites used papyrus scrolls (likely from Egypt) to inscribe extended texts.
This paper, which is part of a more extended project on ancient scroll technology and biblical studies, explores how knowledge about Egyptian scroll practices surrounding ‘literary’ texts might offer productive models for how ancient Israelites (including Judeans) inscribed and revised scrolls with texts of the kind that are included in the Hebrew Bible. The particular character of ancient (Egyptian) scroll media meant that substantial additions to an existing scrolls tended to occur at their conclusions, whether through inscribing the remaining space after the last column, continuing the text on its reverse side or (less frequently) adding pages to the end of an existing scroll. In addition, several aspects of ancient scroll technology meant that Egyptian literary scrolls were of relatively modest length (up to around 6-7 meters), far shorter than the larger documentary and burial texts (e.g. iterations of the Book of the Dead tradition) that are often featured in discussions of the Bible and ancient scroll length. Finally, Egyptian evidence adds new data to the emergent discussion of the complicated relationship between the broader scope of larger ancient literary works (e.g. Homer, the Pentateuch) and the varying and more limited scope of material inscriptions of (parts of) those works.
Of course, all of this evidence must be considered with caution, both because of the distinctive character of ancient Egyptian culture and text practices and because of the fragmentary evidence we have to illuminate it. Nevertheless, this paper builds on recent Egyptological research into how literary texts were inscribed, revised and read/performed (e.g. Parkinson 2009, Eyre 2013; Ragazzoli 2019) to treat three brief strategic questions on the formation of the Pentateuch, historical books and the book of Isaiah.
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Terms for Teaching about and Discussing the Formation of Non-P/JE Materials in the Pentateuch in the Twenty-First Century: A Query and Proposal(s)
Program Unit: Pentateuch
David M. Carr, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York
It is not as clear as it once was how to designate strata of the Pentateuch, especially when trying to teach some basic, broadly-accepted views to students. In an earlier era almost all students learning a historical approach to the Bible were taught the Documentary Hypothesis, learning to list, date and describe its four hypothesized sources, J, E, D and P. Now, in the early twenty-first century, crucial parts of that hypothesis are no longer part of the broader scholarly consensus on the formation of the Pentateuch. It is no longer accurate to say that the field agrees that one can reliably identify J and E cross-pentateuchal sources (let alone place them in early Israelite monarchies). Moreover, scholars have posited an increasing number of supplementary, relatively late layers across different parts of the Pentateuch, even as they/we have disagreed on the extent, dating and character of such layers.
Faced with this complex scholarly situation, it is unclear how one responsibly and clearly teaches the field to students. For example, use of the scholarly term “non-P” for materials outside P (or outside P and D) only characterizes what those materials are not. Yet just using the term “JE” for materials outside P and D just reproduces the parts of the documentary hypothesis that are most controverted.
This presentation advances some ideas on this topic that were formed in the process of producing a fully revised edition of an introductory textbook (now entitled The Hebrew Bible: A Contemporary Introduction to the Christian Old Testament and Jewish Tanakh [Wiley, 2021]). Using an unusually brief format to allow for broader discussion, this short paper will suggest some different possibilities for terming scholarly schools in Pentateuchal study and raise several arguments for the benefits of using the letter “L” to speak to students about a set of relatively late, layers of non-Priestly lay materials that many scholars now identify across different parts of the Pentateuch.
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Mythological Subjectivities: Pauline Anthropology and Greco-Roman Mythology
Program Unit: Bible, Myth, and Myth Theory
Frederick David Carr, Northeastern Seminary at Roberts Wesleyan College
Recent works in Pauline anthropology have fruitfully compared Paul’s epistles with ancient Greco-Roman philosophical (especially Stoic) and medical writings, as well as assorted Jewish texts, to gain insights into Pauline conceptions of selfhood. Scholars have given less attention to Greek and Roman mythological writings to aid their quests for Pauline understandings of the human person. In this paper, I will demonstrate that we can continue to gain insights into aspects of “Pauline subjectivity” by reading Paul in conversation with Greek and Roman mythological narratives. Specifically, I will explore in what sense(s) Paul’s rhetoric is “mythic” and briefly discuss the promises and limitations of reading the Pauline epistles alongside Greek and Roman mythologies. Next, I will examine the inseparable relationship between human transformation and selfhood in 2 Cor 3:18 alongside a selection of mythic tales by Antoninus Liberalis and Ovid. In so doing, I will show how putting these writings into conversation with one another can bring Paul’s views on selfhood into relief and can begin to identify where his conceptions fit into the landscape of ancient mythic viewpoints. More pointedly, I will argue that Paul’s “transformation discourse” features modes of becoming and conceptions of relationality that exhibit points of convergence with and divergence from ancient mythological perspectives.
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Neglected Constructions of Powerful Masculinity in Matthew 23:1–12
Program Unit: Matthew
Warren Carter, Phillips Theological Seminary
Three interpretations have dominated readings of the troubling Matthew Chapter 23: a rhetorical approach typical of the discourse of rivals in philosophical traditions (Johnson); a social-psychological approach whereby groups define their identity over against other groups (Luz; Stanton; Berger and Luckman); an ecclesial didactic and parenetic approach about scribes and Pharisees but addressed to the Matthean church (Garland; Harrington). This paper argues that imperial gender dimensions comprise a further and neglected aspect of the power exerted in the chapter. The chapter sets two parties of powerful male figures in conflict; one speaks while the other is spoken about. The Matthean Jesus rhetorically attacks the scribes’ and Pharisees’ embodiment and mimicry of imperial masculinity and societal leadership, even as the chapter mimics imperial masculinity in constructing Jesus’ performance of dominance. Because of time limits, the paper’s discussion is limited to 23:1-12. Verses 2-7 attack the absent scribes and Pharisees. Verse 3 names their dominant and prestigious “seat of Moses” from which they exercise power in shaping societal practices. Verse 4 intensifies the critique of their failed male societal leadership because the hierarchical societal structure they impose is burdensome to many poorer people. Verses 5-7 condemn their public performance of elite privilege and parading of male dominance with oversized phylacteries and fringes, places of honor at banquets and synagogues, greetings in the marketplace. By contrast, Jesus-followers in humility are to seek the good of the other (23:8-12). The Gospel thereby positions Jesus to reinscribe for his followers an imperial-philosophical tradition whereby elite ruling males are to use their power and status to enhance the well-being of their subjects.
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The "Perfect" Language of Divine Decisions in Biblical Hebrew
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Daniel E. Carver, Lancaster Bible College | Capital Seminary
This paper examines divine decisions expressed by the perfect in Biblical Hebrew and particularly those in prophetic literature. As Max Rogland (2003: p. 63) has noted, these verbs express situations that will (or may) happen, though they have not yet occurred at the time of speech. I describe the semantics of this use, identify the instances in which the perfect is used to express a divine decision, and distinguish this use from other, sometimes similar, uses of the perfect in Biblical Hebrew. I show that Biblical Hebrew is not alone in attesting this use, as the Akkadian stative, the suffix conjugation, is also used to express divine decisions in Mesopotamian prophetic literature. The decisions expressed by the Biblical Hebrew perfect and the Akkadian stative are expressions of divinatory information that is revealed by deities or the divine council. In sum, this study shows that there are many divine decisions expressed by the perfect in the Hebrew Bible that have often been misinterpreted (e.g., as prophetic perfects).
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Earthquakes Everywhere: Matthean Allusions to Ezekiel 37:7 and Their Aramaic Vorlage
Program Unit: Intertextuality in the New Testament
Brendan Case, Harvard University
The Gospel of Matthew mentions “σεισμοὶ” or its cognate verb “σείω” five times, where Mark and Luke mention them once, and John, not at all. Moreover, four of these five occurrences in Matthew (excepting 21:10) are associated with someone or something being “raised” (ἐγείρω): Jesus from sleep (Matt. 8:24-25), “nation…against nation” (Matt. 24:7), the deceased saints from their graves (Matt. 27:51-52), and then Jesus from his tomb (Matt. 28:2, 6). Why the tight association in Matthew of earthquakes with “rising,” especially from sleep or death?
The answer lies in Ezekiel’s vision in the “Valley of the Dry Bones” (37:1-14), particularly in its Old Greek version: when the bones come together, there is a “σεισμὸς” (37:7), while God interprets the sign to Ezekiel by declaring, “I am opening your tombs (ἀνοίγω ὑμῶν τὰ μνήματα), and I will bring you up (ἀνάξω) from your tombs and I will lead you into the land of Israel” (Ezek. 37:12), a passage which is particularly resonant with Matthew 27:51-52. Matthew’s repeated pairing of earthquakes and resurrection subtly declares that in Jesus, God is bringing to pass his promise to raise his people from their death in the exile of sin.
Nonetheless, Matthew's earthquake-texts include some puzzling prose. For instance, he describes an “earthquake [σεισμὸς] in the sea” (8:24), though he plainly means a storm (cf. the “winds” in 8:26, and Mark 4:37's “λαῖλαψ μεγάλη ἀνέμου”). So too, Matthew 24:7 confusingly predicts that, along with “famines,” “earthquakes” – and not “tumult” or “havoc” – will follow “nation rising against nation.”
These textual stumbling blocks perhaps indicate that Greek Matthew’s earthquake passages reflect an Aramaic Vorlage. Notably, the “Old Syriac” (E. Aramaic) versions of these passages preserve their allusions to Ezekiel 37:7 (as reflected in, e.g., its Targum Jonathan and Peshitta versions), but “ܙܰܘܥܳܐ” has a broader semantic range than “σεισμὸς,” referring in the first instance to any “commotion” or “disturbance.” In Aramaic, then, all of the occurrences of "ܙܘܥܐ/זוע" in Matthew are idiomatic, yielding a "tumult on the sea" (8:24), or "havoc & famines" (24:7). Greek Matthew preserves the allusions to Ezekiel, but at the cost of a certain stylistic woodenness.
That Matthew’s earthquake passages reflect an Aramaic Vorlage is consistent with a wide range of evidence for its at least partial composition in Aramaic, evidence both external (e.g., Papias, Irenaeus, Eusebius, Epiphanias, Jerome, i.a.), and internal (thoroughly surveyed by Étienne Méténier in his recent *Vetus Syra* (Parole de l’Orient, 2019, 3 vols.), following Marie-Émile Boismard ("Évangile des Ébionites et problème synoptique," 1966, p. 351), and Charles Torrey (*Our Translated Gospels*, 1936, passim), among others).
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The Perils of Prophetic Proximity: Violence against Children in the Elisha Narratives
Program Unit: Children in the Biblical World
M. L. Case, Drury University
In general, children did not fare well throughout the Elisha prophetic cycle. Whether it is the boys who are killed by an angry bear after mocking Elisha in 2 Kgs 2:23–24, the son who dies and is resurrected in 2 Kgs 4:8–37, or the sons who are eaten by their starving mothers during the besiegement in 2 Kgs 6:26–29, violence is frequently committed against children to illustrate Elisha’s role as a man of God. While the rise of Childist interpretations has brought light to these unnamed children and emphasized their importance to the stories in which they appear, attention still remains primarily on Elisha, the prophet. For example, in her study of the role of children in the Elisha narratives, Julie Faith Parker concludes with a discussion of how a Childist interpretation of these stories “deepens our understanding of Elisha,” not our understanding of the children themselves (Valuable and Vulnerable [Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 2013], 197).
Rather than consider what these children can teach us about Elisha, in this paper, I examine how the violence committed against children in the Elisha prophetic narratives is utilized by the biblical writers/editors as clichéd literary tropes to further the plot or provide motivation for the protagonist(s) of the stories. While I acknowledge the important role these children play in the narratives, similar to other Childist interpretations, I ultimately argue that the producers of the biblical text exploited vulnerable characters, such as children, throughout the Hebrew Bible for the sole benefit of the plot. Whether the texts reflect any actual reality in ancient Israel, the children in the Elisha cycle, like many other children in the Hebrew Bible, are innocent victims of the biblical text, suffering violence and death not for their own personal character arcs, but for motivation in Elisha’s hero journey as a man of God.
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James, Jesus, Jeremiah, and the Double Love Command
Program Unit: Letters of James, Peter, and Jude
Benjamin E. Castaneda, University of St Andrews
Recent studies have underscored the importance of Leviticus 19 for the logic and theology of James, with the clearest example being found in the citation of Lev 19:18b in Jas 2:8. However, scholarship has largely overlooked the allusion in Jas 2:5 to another love command––the command to love God in Deut 6:5. I support this identification by observing the collocation of inheritance language, election terminology, the phrase τοῖς ἀγαπῶσιν αὐτόν, and other contextual elements. I then briefly trace their usage in the scriptures of Israel.
Second, I argue that James 2:5, 8, by juxtaposing the commands to love God and neighbor and linking them lexically via the repetition of the βασιλ- stem, presents the double love command as an epitome of the Mosaic torah refracted through the lens of Jesus’s teaching. James 2:5 and 2:8 both incorporate reformulations of Jesus traditions, with 2:5 identifying who is an heir of the kingdom and 2:8 clarifying the standard of life in the kingdom. The torah, thus interpreted by Jesus, is portrayed as the royal road leading to eschatological reward in the kingdom (cf. Philo, Post. 101–102). On this point, Jas 2:5, 8, may reflect commonalities with specifically Markan tradition.
Third, following the insights of Mariam Kovalishyn, L. L. Cheung, and Richard Bauckham, I claim that echoes in Jas 1:17–25 of Jeremiah 31 and its promise for an internalized torah underpin the author’s hermeneutical strategy for linking the Mosaic torah with Jesus’s teaching. I suggest that James 2 serves as an example of a hermeneutical trend in early Christian literature which associated Jesus traditions––specifically the double love command––with the promise of the internalized torah of Jeremiah 31. In this section, I survey a number of examples of this trajectory in first- and second-century writings, with comparisons to James 2.
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Boundary Construction in Barnabas: Rereading an Adversus Judaeos Text
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Benjamin E. Castaneda, University of St. Andrews
Accepted paper for the IBR research group on Early Christian Judaism.
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“Anchoring” as a Conceptual Tool for Interdisciplinary Research
Program Unit: Comparative Method in Biblical Studies
Silvia Castelli, Universiteit Leiden
In the ancient world as today, ‘innovation’ in the widest sense of the word, which includes new ideas, new forms of literature and discourse, new practices/rituals, and material objects, occurs in every domain, not least in the religious domain. However, innovations, understood in this broad sense, cannot be adopted by a relevant society unless they are integrated and accommodated in the conceptual categories, values, beliefs, and ambitions of that society through a process—or an activity, involving agency—of ‘anchoring.’
In the first part of this paper, based on some preliminary results of the on-going Dutch project ‘Anchoring innovation’ (‘Anchoring Innovation’ Gravitation Grant, 2017–2027; https://www.anchoringinnovation.nl), I will show that the concept of ‘anchoring’ provides a fruitful category to understand the dynamics between innovation and tradition, old and new, in several domains of Classical antiquity and its reception.
In the second part of this paper I will argue that the concept of ‘anchoring’ can also provide a valid conceptual tool for interdisciplinary research in biblical studies. Some examples from Second Temple Judaism—notably ‘Hellenistic’ Judaism—and Early Christianity will be used as case studies in this second part of the paper.
Selected bibliography
Dijkstra, R. (ed.), The Early Reception and Appropriation of the Apostle Peter (60-800 CE): The Anchors of the Fisherman. Euhormos: Greco-Roman Studies in Anchoring Innovation 1. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2020.
Klawans, J., Heresy, Forgery, Novelty: Condemning, Denying, and Asserting Innovation in Ancient Judaism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Sluiter, I. (2016). “Anchoring Innovation: A Classical Research Agenda.” European Review 25/1 (2016): 20-38.
Sluiter, I., and M.J. Versluys, “Anchoring: a Historical Perspective on Frugal Innovation,” in: C. van Beers, A. Leliveld, P. Knorringa, and S. Bhaduri (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Frugal Innovation, London: Routledge, forthcoming.
van Henten, J.W., and S. Castelli, “Massah and Meribah Re-interpreted: Biblical Accounts, Judith, and Josephus,” in B. Schmitz and K. de Troyer (eds.), The Early Reception of the Torah. Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies 39. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020, 19–38.
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Colonial Babel
Program Unit: Postcolonial Studies and Biblical Studies
Jeremiah Cataldo, Grand Valley State University
Genesis entails a number of troublesome themes from a colonial perspective. But what if it is read through a postcolonial lens? Despite being a mythic text, with metaphors amenable to large-scale political critique, postcolonial analyses have done little with the book. I would argue that not only does Genesis offer productive strategies for reading around colonized history, it offers strategies for subverting the dominant framework of meaning that has taken pride of place under European and American Colonialism. In making that case, this experimental reading of broad themes and primary stories in Genesis pays attention to ways of reading the text that can be applied to modern situations and circumstances. My motivation is to identify areas where Genesis might be productive for postcolonial strategies, as well as to challenge how the discipline still tends to preserve dominant value systems that remain unfriendly to postcolonial analysis (as Sugirtharajah has already challenged).
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The Lexeis of the Books of Kingdoms
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Historical Books
Reinhart Ceulemans, KU Leuven
In this paper, I present a Greek glossary on I-IV Kingdoms, which was composed in Late Antiquity/Early Byzantium. Such glossaries exist for many (but not all) books of the Greek Bible. They are collections of words extracted from the Biblical text (‘lexeis’). Each entry is accompanied by a short explanation: one or two synonyms, a brief description, an exegetical comment, a grammatical remark, etc. Diverse in content and composed with a philological interest in the Greek Bible, these glossaries are fascinating documents, yet they have not been studied in detail. That on I–IV Kingdoms presents one of the glossaries available in print (Fabricius/Harles, Bibliotheca Graeca vol. VI, 1798, pp. 646–648, published from MS Leeuwarden 38). I am not aware of any modern studies of this text. In this presentation, I outline the transmission of this collection of "lexeis" of the Biblical text and discuss how it was recycled in subsequent Greek dictionaries and encyclopedias. On the basis of a selection of entries, I present the methods and sources of the glossary and discuss its relations with the Septuagint version, variant readings and Hexaplaric material. In my conclusion I turn to the question of the text-critical use of these Lexeis.
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The Late Antique Samaritans: Rethinking the Shape of Religions (1
Program Unit: Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism
Matthew Chalmers, Northwestern University
“The Late Antique Samaritans: Rethinking the Shape of Religions”
The Samaritans are often isolated to the periphery of the scholarly imagination; a marginal test-case or a curiosity when they appear. This short paper instead emphasizes the participation of Samaritans in the religious ecosystem of late ancient Palestine, building on recent work within Samaritan Studies, Rabbinics, and Patristics. It thereby experiments with a narrative of Jewish and Christian self-fashioning that includes the full participation of Samaritans in the same environment. I suggest, therefore, that the Samaritans offer a striking opportunity to rework our scholarly framing of interreligious competition and its role in the formation of Judaism and Christianity, demanding careful examination of how Israel is identified and defined – and whose acts of selectivity maintain which definitions.
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Cultic Personnel in the Characterization of Saul and David
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Nathan Chambers, Wiser Lake Chapel
Accepted paper for the IBR research group session on the Early Historical Books.
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Eternity above and Eternity in Christ: Ritual Time and Cosmology in the Scrolls and in Pauline Traditions
Program Unit: Ritual in the Biblical World
Kai-Hsuan Chang, China Evangelical Seminary
This paper explores the correlation between cosmology and ritual experience of eternal time in antiquity. As cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson demonstrate, time is usually conceptualized through spatial metaphors because people conceptualize abstract ideas on the basis of concrete experiences. Thus, the conception and organization of time usually correlate to understandings of cosmic space. Paying attention to this correlation, this paper argues that the different organizations of time in Qumran and in Greco-Roman society revealed different understandings of cosmic order, and that these understandings in turn led to different ritual experiences of divine eternity as reflected in the Scrolls and in Pauline traditions.
First, the Qumranites observed a calendar that did not accord with the course of nature because they adopted the idea that the cosmos had fallen and the heavenly bodies had “transgressed the commandments of God” (1 Enoch 18:14-16). Thus, the calendar synchronized the community’s ritual time of sacrifices and festivals with the divine time in heaven instead of natural regularity. It seems that, accordingly, sacred time was conceptualized in a spatial and vertical sense and eternity was ritually experienced as being “lifted up” to the heavenly space to an “eternal height” (1 QH xi 21).
Second, although Paul also considered the cosmos as fallen, he conceptualized the alternative time in the otherworldly space (eternity) in a different way and claimed that eternity could be experienced “in Christ.” It seems that the Hellenistic idea of the body and the cosmos had influenced Paul’s gentile mission and his teachings. As reflected in Greco-Roman organizations of time, time was assumed as an aspect of cosmic order and regularity that were supposed to be in harmony with the human body (Martin 1995; A. R. Jones 2016). The Romans employed this idea in their mythmaking of the Augustan power and in their figurative representations of the emperor’s body. The emperor was the embodiment of his own power, the corpus imperii, and was in harmony with the cosmos. It is noteworthy that, although Paul believed that the cosmos had fallen, he similarly conceived the community as the body of its leading figure, Christ, who has rescued the whole cosmos. Paul also considered members as having been baptized into this body instead of the corpus imperii (1 Cor 12:12-27). I will argue that this understanding of baptism had a continual effect on the later Pauline thoughts and traditions, and influenced the experience of ritual time in Christian communities. Through baptism, members had entered the body of Christ, in which all the fullness dwelled (Col 1:19), and had participated in Christ’s death and resurrection (Col 2:12-13; cf. Rom 6:3-4). The past, present, and future collapsed in the body of Christ through ritual, and so members have experienced a sort of death while yet biologically living and experienced their eternal life in Christ (Col 3:1-11). Two distinct yet related understandings of cosmic order thus led to two spatial conceptualizations of ritual time in the Scrolls and in Pauline traditions.
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Mortality as Religious Experience: Paul’s Spiritualization of the Experience of Aging and Physical Suffering
Program Unit: Cognitive Science Approaches to the Biblical World
Kai-Hsuan Chang, China Evangelical Seminary
Applying embodied cognition theory and cognitive linguistics, this paper investigates how Paul tried to reconcile the religious experience of bodily transformation and the everyday experience of mortality, arguing that he eventually redefines the latter as a constitutive part of the former. Paul struggles greatly with the mortal body largely because his experience and expectation in Christ are very much somatically-oriented. Arguing against the common ancient ideas that consider spirituality as the transcendence of the body, Paul maintains that the body is not to be escaped or abandoned but to be transformed both in experiences here and now and in the afterlife. In 2 Cor 3:18 Paul explicitly claims that “we all are being transformed.” This is an ongoing transformation that starts when one “turns to the Lord” (3:16) and participates “in Christ” (3:14). Using recent findings in the cognitive science of religious experience as well as the ancient concept of the “porous body” (Martin 1995), I will argue that Paul’s statement about ongoing transformation starting at a person’s religious initiation is at least partially dependent on 1 Cor 12:13, where Paul integrates the ecstatic experience of receiving the Spirit and the ritual experience of being baptized into the body of Christ. Applying conceptual blending theory, I will show that Paul interprets the Corinthians’ religious experience as the ongoing transformation of the body. However, Paul still has to face the problem of the weakness and ongoing decay of the body. This is a reasonable challenge to the idea of ongoing transformation especially when it is followed by the conviction of a future transformation in the afterlife (cf. 1 Cor 15; 2 Cor 5). If the body is already being transformed and will continue to be in existence in the afterlife in a glorious form, why is it obviously weak and wearing away in our present life? Being concerned with mortality, Paul delivers his fullest exposition of bodily transformation in 2 Cor 4-5. Again, applying conceptual blending theory, the second half of this paper then investigates the way in which Paul uses the metaphor of “treasure in clay jars” (2 Cor 4:7) to distinguish the outer and the inner of a person and to argue that the decay of the outer mortal body contributes to the transformation of the inner person, an inner transformation that will culminate at the complete transformation in the future (5:1-5). In so doing, Paul spiritualizes the experience of mortality and redefines it as an ongoing religious experience producing an eternal glory (4:17).
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The Πίστις Lexicon in the Book of Revelation: Lexical Semantics, Pragmatics, and an Ancient Idiom
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Alexander Chantziantoniou, University of Cambridge
The debate about whether to take the phrase πίστις Χριστοῦ as an objective genitive (‘faith in Christ’) or a subjective genitive (‘faith of Christ’) has raged ever onwards over the course of the past two centuries, particularly among Pauline scholars. While the debate has ventured beyond the boarders of Paul for brief excursions into the Synoptics or the Patristics, John’s Apocalypse has remained relatively unexplored. In a lonely essay, David deSilva has rightly observed that any contribution to the question from Revelation must be inferred from glosses adopted in commentaries and the arguments occasionally rallied in their defence. For all the controversies swirling around the Apocalypse, the πίστις Χριστοῦ debate is not one of them. But perhaps not for long. Recent studies indicate a growing interest in the πίστις lexicon in Mediterranean antiquity, including its application to Jesus in Revelation. In this paper, anticipating the inevitable, I will examine the use of πίστις with particular reference to the genitive constructions in 14.12 (τὴν πίστιν Ἰησοῦ) and 2.13 (τὴν πίστιν μου), where Jesus is brought into direct grammatical contact with ‘faith(fulness)’. While deSilva appeals to an ancient idiom to read these phrases as objective genitives (‘faithfulness to Jesus’, 14.12; ‘faithfulness to me’, 2.13), I will draw from modern theoretical and applied linguistics to argue in favour of subjective genitives in both instances (‘the faithfulness of Jesus’, 14.12; ‘my faithfulness’, 2.13). I will do so in two steps. First, I will offer a lexical-semantic analysis of the πίστις lexicon John's Apocalypse in order to disambiguate the meaning of the head term as perfecting its action reference (‘faithfulness’). Second, I will offer a pragmatic analysis of the collocational patterns in which πίστις habitually reoccurs in wider Graeco-Roman literature (including case function and syntax) in order to specify its referential relation to the genitive constructs in Revelation (‘Jesus’s own faithfulness’).
I will conclude by critically engaging deSilva’s appeal to an ancient idiom in light of my findings.
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Jewish Aniconism and the Question of Alterity: Redescribing Jewish "Idol" Discourse within Mediterranean Iconic Discourse
Program Unit: Hellenistic Judaism
Alexander Chantziantoniou, University of Cambridge
It would be difficult to exaggerate the lasting legacy of early Jewish 'idol' discourse. In the history and anthropology of religion, the concept of ‘idolatry’ has long served as a point of categorical difference between Jews and non-Jews in Mediterranean antiquity. Jews are aniconic, indeed anti-iconic, while Greeks, Romans, and other non-Jews are each, in their own way, iconic. On this view, ritual aniconism (the absence of figural cult images) and rhetorical anti-iconism (the opposition to figural cult images) together constitute a bright line dividing early Judaism from other Mediterranean religion. However, recent studies in classics, art history, and archaeology have deeply problematised this perspective. Jews could be iconic, just as non-Jews could be aniconic, even anti-iconic. Drawing from these studies, I will argue that the still popular appeal to the prohibition of ‘idolatry’ as indicative of Jewish alterity is, quite precisely, a category mistake. Not only does it subtly reproduce the polemic it purports to describe, but it misdiagnoses Jewish ‘idol’ discourse as sui generis in late antiquity—wholly set apart from the iconic ritual and rhetoric of its Mediterranean milieu. In contrast, I will argue that Jewish ‘idol’ discourse belongs precisely within the ethnopolitical dynamics of Mediterranean iconic discourse and social formation. I will do so in two steps. First, I will redescribe Jewish ‘idol’ discourse as an iconic mode of social formation, which reifies and differentiates ethnic groups (especially one’s own) on the basis of ritual classification. As such, it is more a rhetorical strategy of ethnic self-differentiation than it is straightforwardly reflective of real ritual difference. Second, I will identify this same ethnopolitical strategy in classical Greek ethnography, which similarly reifies and differentiates ethnic groups through their ancestral use, misuse, or non-use of figural cult images. In this way, I hope to show that Jewish ‘idol’ discourse is not at variance with Mediterranean iconic discourse, but, in fact, a variation on it.
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Feeling Womb-ey: The Presence of Emotions in Proverbs 31:1–9
Program Unit: Bible and Emotion
Amy J. Chase, Carey Theological College
Examinations of Proverbs 31:1-9 increasingly recognize it as not mere placid parental instruction but as strewn with interpersonal conflict. So Fox: “The tone of urgency here gives the impression that Lemuel has already done wrong and his mother is imploring him to cease,” and Yoder: “One imagines the mother scolding Lemuel ... seizing a bottle from him ... and waving it toward the masses…” The tension of a parental confrontation invites attaching emotion to these lines — perhaps anger? Frustration? Dismay? As is typical of biblical texts, this poem does not explicitly name the emotions that might accompany rebuke or that this mother's words might provoke in her son. But are they nonetheless present? How might readers identify them?
Scholars such as Paul Kruger and Francoise Mirguet caution that the expression of emotion in biblical texts differs from contemporary English practice. Whereas English possesses multiple words to describe abstract feelings, biblical texts instead employ conceptual metaphors and actions to convey emotions. This paper draws upon such insights to engage a close examination of Proverbs 31:1-9 that identifies how this text powerfully communicates distress, fear, and shame.
References to the human body constitute primary conceptual metaphors employed in the Bible to convey emotion. In Proverbs 31:2, Lemuel’s mother mentions her womb — ought this mention of her body to be classified with other body parts such as “nose” (anger) and “inner organs” (fear) as a conceptual metaphor communicating emotion? This paper will explain how, beyond reminding Lemuel of their biological bond, “son of my womb!” elicits a variety of possible emotional states. Furthermore, mention of the womb can be understood not only to signal the speaker’s emotions, but also to evoke emotional responses in hearers through triggering memories of attachment. Patrick Hogan’s explanation of attachment stories and Victor Matthew’s discussion of female use of shaming speech aid in understanding the emotional dynamics of Proverbs 31:1-9.
Other textual signals of emotion in vv. 1-9 include syntactical interruption, repetition, and silence. But toward what purpose is emotion present in this poem? What meanings does it contribute? Emotions in the Hebrew Bible are not experienced individually in isolation but socially. Lemuel’s mother’s outburst is directed toward an intimate, her son, and also to her larger community, conveying anxiety regarding the tenuousness of social hierarchies as well as concern for exploited peasant classes who lack resources and any means of redress. The emotions conveyed intensify her message, convicting hearers that the issues she is raising are crucial. They cannot be neglected; they must be discussed.
Such study of Proverbs 31:1-9 contributes to scholarship by highlighting the presence and interpretive significance of emotion within this text. It also increases understanding of how emotions were conceptualized in ancient times and represented in biblical texts. Given the gendered nature of the womb, this paper makes a particular contribution to the study of gender and emotion in the Hebrew Bible.
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Sonic Echoes (Rhyme and Much More) in Biblical Hebrew Poetry: Linguistic and Literary Perspectives
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Kevin Chau, University of the Free State
Scholars have noted for some time how Biblical Hebrew poetry’s structures of equivalence and contiguity are controlled at different linguistic levels: semantic, syntax, morphology, and phonology. However, in biblical poetry sonic echo (phonological parallelism) is arguably the hardest feature to evaluate because of its seemingly subjective nature. A person may identify a rhyme, and at some level it indeed possesses a quantifiable measure of phonological parallelism, but questions remain as to whether that rhyming is coincidental or intentional and how it may pertain to the poetry’s structure and meaning. Many instances of sonic echo are additionally hard to evaluate because the phonologically paralleled elements are often not perfectly matched but “near rhymes.” Nevertheless, though less prominent than semantic and syntactic parallelisms, phonological parallelism in biblical poetry indeed occurs, often contributes as a major feature to parallelism, and occasionally significantly controls how the poetry conveys its meanings. In literary studies, the many forms of sonic echo have been long identified: rhyme in its narrow sense (repetition of cVC; dog vs. fog), alliteration (Cvc), assonance (cVc), consonance (cvC), frame rhyme (CvC), back rhyme (CVc), and rich rhyme (CVC). By employing articulator-based feature theory (AFT), this paper describes and evaluates these forms of sonic echo through the concepts of place of articulation (e.g., labial [mem] vs. dental [taw]) and manner of articulation (e.g., +/- voice; dalet [+] vs. taw [-]). Employing AFT provides precise means for evaluating the strength of these different forms of sonic echo, especially in those instances where the echoing does not perfectly match but involves sonically-similar phonemes. By analyzing the different forms of sonic echo through AFT, it is possible to present defined controls for evaluating the seemingly subjective nature of sonic echoes and for describing complex sonic echoes (e.g., an echo involving rhyme in the ultima syllable and also assonance in the penultimate syllable). The latter half of this paper focuses on how sonic echoes in their different forms operate in biblical poetry (primarily Ps 22, Ezek 24.1-8, and Lam 3). It presents a hierarchy for explaining how the diverse forms of sonic echo in poetry are employed differently. It concludes with close readings of select sonic echoes, illustrating their roles in contributing to poetic rhythm, parallelism, metaphor, and poetic closure.
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Review of Constructing Ethnic Identity in 1 Peter: Who You Are No Longer
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Diane Chen, Palmer Theological Seminary (Eastern University)
Accepted paper for IBR Asian-American Biblical Interpretation session
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Through Baptism and Virginity towards Death: A Visual Analysis of a Miaphysite Funerary Chapel (Beth Qadishe)
Program Unit: Syriac Studies
Emily Chesley, Princeton University
The deep ritual, spiritual, and personal significance that communities attach to death evidences in their funerary art. Under Justinian I in the eastern Roman Empire, Miaphysite Christians reflected upon death and their hopes for the afterlife in the visual programs of their funerary spaces. On the edges of the empire, sixth-century Miaphysite monks of the Dayr al-Za‘farān Monastery carefully decorated their funerary chapel (beth qadishe)—a location for worship, ritual observation, and eventually the resting place of several Syrian Orthodox patriarchs. The visual designs they selected reveal the beliefs and hopes about death held by that particular Miaphysite community and provide a window for the contemporary scholar into understanding an immediate and particularized experience of death.
Built between 526 and 536 CE, just before the church of Mar Hananyo on the same site, the beth qadishe of Dayr al-Za‘farān is decorated with designs traditional to Northern Mesopotamia like acanthus capitals, Greek crosses, and leaf friezes. Other elements of its visual program, however, evoke a marine theme: scallop shells, dolphins, and pearls decorate the small chapel. Seemingly at odds both with their desert location and funerary setting, these marine designs evoked baptismal and salvific themes rather than emphasized mortality or dying. This paper builds upon the material and textual work of Marlia Mundell Mango, Elif Keser-Kayaalp, Sebastian Brock, and others. Analysis of the artistic program and contemporary Syriac authors elucidates how this particular monastic community conceived of death and, perhaps, prepared themselves to meet it.
In this paper, I will analyze the symbolism of the beth qadishe’s marine program—its scallops, crosses, dolphins, and pearls—giving particular attention to the theological symbolism of pearls in Syriac hymnody, where they were popular and multivalent metaphors for Christ, baptism, salvation, and virginity. From Ephrem’s Hymns on the Pearl, Aphrahat’s Demonstration 14, and Jacob of Serugh’s homilies and funeral orations, contemporary theological understandings of these symbols will be elucidated and explored; the poetic images frequently were multivalent, which would have played especially well with the chapel’s artistic program. For images themselves function on multilayered strata. Ultimately, through this material and textual analysis I will argue that the visual program of Dayr al-Za‘farān’s beth qadishe plays upon Syriac theological symbolism generally and Miaphysite typology in particular to offer a location-specific commentary on death as new life and to connect the chapel to its monastic affiliation by evoking virginity. Hope of resurrection embedded in baptism and virginity—both the monk’s own and Christ’s—filled the funerary chapel and served as the community’s visual centerpiece as they reflected upon the deaths of their brothers and prepared their souls for their own.
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“Why Brides Evoke Great Desire": Performative Aspects of a Mêmra Attributed to Jacob of Serugh (PT 9)
Program Unit: Syriac Studies
Jeff Childers, Abilene Christian University
Like other ‘Praise at Table’ (PT) homilies attributed to Jacob of Serugh, the recently published PT 9 depicts a meal setting, specifically that of a wedding feast. Although its formal features are comparable to those we see in many of Jacob’s verse homilies, certain themes occurring in PT 9 are particularly characteristic of Jacob, including rich Christological imagery involving the bride and groom. This paper argues that the marriage theme of PT 9 is central to the homily and the key to understanding its purpose. Instead of serving a Christological aim, the marriage imagery functions as the thrust of the homily, with Christological associations serving instead to validate human marriage. Jacob is known for affirming the (qualified) validity of human marriage yet the place of the marriage theme in this homily is noteworthy due to its unreserved regard for marriage as such. Seen as an expression of God’s creative intent and upheld as a witness to deep mysteries, the joining together of a human bride and groom remain the homily’s consistent focus. An analysis of the poet’s techniques in vividly depicting the wedding scene from start to finish will enable an evaluation of the suggestion that a late antique wedding context supplies the homily's performative backdrop.
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Enslaved to Mammon: Enslavement and the Emotion Work of Money
Program Unit: Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy
Michelle Christian, University of Toronto
Work was an everyday reality for enslaved people in the Roman Mediterranean. In addition to the physical and manual, there was the "emotion work" of managing feelings and desires within contexts of unequal social and power relations (Hochschild 2012; Levin-Richardson 2019; Seesengood 2019). The world of monetary transactions is a revealing example of enslaved work that required such emotion management. Roman financial life operated through enslaved and formerly enslaved agents, who were made to bear the anxieties, vices, and negative affect that the free associated with the handling of money. At the same time, the commemorative practices of enslaved and freed bankers, money testers, and household accountants potentially illustrate the strategic disciplining of their own responses to their occupational identities. Attention to this complexity, along with its class, gendered, and racialized aspects, challenges common assumptions about work, enslavement, and manumission in the Roman world, including the "professional pride" that historians often see in funerary representations of work.
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The Metaphorical Problem of Q al-Naml 27:80: Is Death really a (Spiritual) Disability?
Program Unit: The Qur’an: Surah Studies (IQSA)
Johanne Louise Christiansen, University of Southern Denmark
In the qur’anic verses 80–81 of Q al-Naml 27, the Prophet seems to take comfort in the following words: “You cannot make the dead hear (innaka la tusmi'u l-mawta), nor can you make the deaf hear the call (wa-la tusmi'u l-summa ’-du‘a’a) when they turn their backs and move away./ You cannot guide the blind from their error (wa-ma anta bi-hadi l-'umyi 'an dalalatihim). You cannot make [anyone] hear (in tusmi'u) except those who believe in Our signs and surrender themselves”. This passage is part of the surah’s concluding section, intertwining polemics, comfort, and eschatological promises of reward and punishment (vv. 59–93). Here, Muhammad is exempted from any responsibility for the unbelievers given that they are dead, deaf, and blind. However, similarly to the almost verbatim repetition of this passage in Q al-Rum 30:52–53, Q 27:80–81 contains a metaphorical problem: Whereas the mentioning of deafness and blindness is clearly meant in a spiritual sense, is that also the case for the dead, as has been argued by O’Shaughnessy (1969, 11–13)? Or is this a physical reference to the preceding prophet stories of Q 27, linking these two parts of the surah firmly together? The description of unbelief as “spiritual death” is not uncommon in the Qur'an (e.g., Q 44:56), but placing death in the same overall conceptual category as blindness and deafness is. Such spiritual disabilities usually occur together in clusters, including also the “dumb” (al-summ), the “lame” (al-a'raj), and the “sick” (al-marid) (e.g., Q 2:18; 48:17; Schipper 2006). With point of departure in Q 27:80–81, this paper focuses on the interplay between qur'anic descriptions of the actual, physical body – including its (lack of) qualities – and the metaphorical one (Avalos 2007). Based on cognitive metaphor and conceptual blending theories, I argue that this interplay has fundamental consequences for the understanding of not only the coherence and structure of, e.g., Q 27, but also the Qur'an’s general usage of metaphorical language (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Fauconnier & Turner 2003).
Avalos, Hector, et al. 2007. This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies. Atlanta: SBL; Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2003. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books; Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago UP; O’Shaughnessy, Thomas. 1969. Muhammad’s Thoughts on Death: A Thematic Study of the Qur’anic Data. Leiden: Brill; Schipper, Jeremy. 2006. Disability Studies and the Hebrew Bible: Figuring Mephibosheth in the David Story. New York: T&T Clark.
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The Ambivalence of Right Hand: The Hand Imagery in Psalm 89 in Light of Egyptian Smiting Motif
Program Unit: Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Bible
Paul EuiHyun Chung, Columbia Theological Seminary
Psalm 89, a royal psalm, is widely known for its radical turn from praise to communal lament. In the first half of the psalm (vv. 1-37), the psalmist praises YHWH for his establishment of everlasting ‘ḥesed’ and covenantal promise to David. However, this praise suddenly shifts to protest in the latter part (vv. 38-51), for God forsakes his ‘ḥesed’ and covenant. This unexpected turn is even more marked in the psalmist’s way of using the hand imagery. The hand (or right hand/arm) of YHWH is a symbol of God’s incomparable power and what protects Israel in the former part of the psalm (vv. 10, 13). The same metaphor, however, radically shifts in the second half. It is now the enemies’ hand (yāmîn) that is raised (v. 42). What is worse, even God exalts that hand, which is traumatic on Israel’s side. This hand imagery throughout the psalm is likely to be inspired by the age-old tradition of the Egyptian smiting motif (cf. Exod 15:1b-18; Pss 44:3; 118:15b-16; 136:10-13; 144:7).
This paper explores the ambivalent hand motif in Psalm 89 not only literarily but also iconographically. It demonstrates that constellations of images in Egyptian smiting iconography help us understand how dynamically and ingeniously the psalmist employs the hand motif to reveal how devastating the current circumstance of Israel is. The ambivalent hand imagery which is already striking in the textual realm becomes more distinctive and disturbing in the non-textual domain.
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Incarnating the Word in Image: The Visual Biblical Reception of Luke 1:26–38 in Durante Alberti’s Annunciation (1588) in the Santa Maria ai Monti, Rome
Program Unit: Bible and Visual Art
Chloe Church, University of Exeter
The Annunciation by Durante Alberti was created in 1588 for the Santa Maria ai Monti in Rome. It was contracted by the nephew of Andrea Del Monte, who was a radical preacher in the Counter-Reformation Church. His role was to serve the Church in the attempted conversion of Jews in Rome through the delivery of evocative sermons. In these discourses, Del Monte promoted the typological method of biblical interpretation, in which New Testament events were postulated to be the fulfilment of prophecies of the Hebrew Bible. Before his death, Del Monte requested and paid for the redecoration of the Chapel of the Annunciation at the Santa Maria ai Monti, a church that endeavoured to convert Jews to Christianity through baptism.
The altarpiece of Del Monte’s Chapel is Alberti’s Annunciation, which depicts the biblical narrative of the Annunciation to Mary (Lk 1.26-38). Within the image, Alberti incorporates a book in the bottom right-hand corner that bears the text of Isaiah 7.14, “Behold a virgin shall give birth to a son and she shall name him Emmanuel”, in Hebrew. The presence of this Hebrew text within a painting of the Annunciation implies the continuation of the prophecy into its fulfilment in the New Testament narrative. Alberti’s visual exegesis of Luke 1.26-38 is therefore mediated by the same typological interpretation employed by the patron of the Chapel in his sermons. For the first audience of the Annunciation at the Santa Maria ai Monti, the painting united the modes of image and text to propose typology as a key doctrine of Catholic ideology. This paper presents a close analysis of Alberti’s Annunciation and explores how the initiatives of a conversionary preacher were embedded into the fabrics of Rome through the sophisticated visual rhetoric of the object’s biblical reception.
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Habakkuk 2:4 in Galatians: Echoes, Allusions, and Rewriting
Program Unit: Scripture and Paul
Roy Ciampa, Samford University
While most scholars only seem to recognize the influence of Hab. 2:4 on Paul’s letter to the Galatians only where he quotes it in 3:11, this paper will argue that the presence of its influence should be discerned across a much broader range of texts within the letter, including 2:16, 19-20; 3:7-9, 11-12, 22, 24; 5:5. Various parts of the letter will be reconsidered in light of the understanding that ἐκ πίστεως serves as a snippet quotation of the distinctive wording of Hab. 2:4LXX and that Paul rewrites or paraphrases Hab. 2:4 in a variety of ways.
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Laughing in the Face of Fear: Reconsidering the Objective of the Epistle of Jeremiah
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Paul Cizek, Marquette University
Idolatry is the ultimate concern of the pseudepigraphic Epistle of Jeremiah. Correspondingly, some have argued that the author of the epistle aimed to disparage idolatry (Wacker 2016; Salvesen 2012; Brooke 2007; Vanderkam 2001; Moore 1977), while others have argued that the author composed the epistle to dissuade Jews from worshipping false gods (Adams 2014; Fraade 2013; Moore 1977). While these theses have some merit, I contend that the author did not target the ultimate concern of idolatry head on but rather the penultimate concern, namely the fear of idols, which the author conceptualized as a precursor to idol worship. Accordingly, I demonstrate how the epistle’s opening address (vv. 1–6), repetitive refrains, and individual strophes reveal the author’s focus on assuaging the fear of idols. The study not only refines our understanding of the author’s objective in composing the epistle, but makes the often-noted satirical nature of the strophes (Wacker 2016; Salvesen 2012; Nicklesburg 2005) all the more fitting, to the extent that humor can be an antidote to fear.
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Harmonizing Deuteronomy’s “Levitical Priests” in the Temple Scroll
Program Unit: Qumran
Paul Cizek, Marquette University
At two points in the Temple Scroll, its author augmented material adopted from Deuteronomy concerning priests. In the kingship legislation, the author adopted material from Deut 17:18 indicating that the “Levitical priests” oversee the production of the king’s lawbook but dropped the term “Levitical” with the result that the “priests” alone would oversee the production of the king’s lawbook (11Q19 56:21). In legislation concerning testimony, the author adopted material from Deut 19:17 indicating that litigants testify “before YHWH, before the priests, and the judges” but inserted the phrase “and the Levites” with the result that the litigants are now to stand “before me, before the priests and the Levites, and before the judges” (11Q19 61:8–9). Scholars have put forth various theses concerning the motivations behind these alterations, some arguing for textual motivations like harmonizing or homogenizing (Stackert 2011; Crawford 2000; Milgrom 1989; Maier 1985; Yadin 1983) and some arguing for historical or ideological motivations (Stackert 2011; Paganini 2009; Crawford 2000; Milgrom 1978). After briefly reviewing and commenting on the limitations of previous studies regarding textual motivations, I build upon these studies to put forth a new explanation regarding the textual motivations behind these changes. I argue that these two alterations are part and parcel of the author’s wider effort to harmonize Deuteronomic material which did not maintain the intra-Levitical distinction between priests who are the sons of Aaron and the Levites, specifically material from Deut 17:9; 17:18; 18:1; and 21:5 (cf. 11Q19 56, 60, and 63), with the wider Temple Scroll which did maintain the intra-Levitical distinction, likely under the influence of other Pentateuchal texts like Lev 3 (cf. 11Q19 22:4–5). Because the alterations in 11Q19 56:21 and 61:8–9 can be explained on textual grounds, I argue that additional historical or ideological explanations are superfluous.
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The Ethical Obligation to Disrupt: Facing the Bloody City in Nahum 3:1–7
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Julie Claassens, Universiteit van Stellenbosch - University of Stellenbosch
In Nah 3:1, the Assyrian capital Nineveh is called “City of bloodshed.” Nineveh is indeed “a bloody city,” filled with the blood of the numerous dead bodies associated with the fall of the city. However, as also in the case of a similar portrayal of the city of Jerusalem in Ezek 22:2, Nineveh is depicted as a female entity, hence suggesting that one may also read these poetic texts as invoking the image of a bleeding, menstruating city with all the connotations of not only ritual impurity, but also moral guilt associated with this portrayal of sexual perversion or pollution (cf. Lev 18:19; 20:18). In this regard, it is significant that Nineveh in Nah 3:4 is called “a whore” – a derogatory slur that often is used to denote those who are “other” or foreign. For the purpose of the “Reading Biblical Poetry Disruptively Panel,” the paper will explore the ethical implications of disruption as a reading strategy that is particularly important when it comes to reading the prophetic traditions through the lens of gender, postcolonial and queer biblical interpretation.
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Symbolic Retellings of Imperial Violence: The Destruction of Vegetation in Jonah 4 and Jeremiah 14
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
Juliana Claassens, Universiteit van Stellenbosch - University of Stellenbosch
Scholars like Kathleen O’Connor, Louis Stulman, and Brad Kelle have drawn our attention to the myriad creative metaphors, imagery, and stories that are utilized by the biblical prophets to tell and retell the traumatic memories of the Babylonian invasion and Exile. In this way, the Jeremianic triad of “sword, famine, and pestilence” in Jer 14:12 (also Jer 24:10; 29:18) occurs in the context in which the destruction of vegetation is used to capture the devastation wrought by imperial violence. As O’Connor rightly observes, this repetitive retelling of the catastrophe helps survivors gain control over past trauma that extends far beyond the original events.
Another example of this rhetorical strategy of using symbol to speak about the unspeakable comes from Jonah 4:6-7 in which the story of a militarized worm’s attack on a defenseless plant serves as a way for the traumatized prophet and his equally traumatized constituents to voice the effects of imperial violence on their community.
In this paper, I will consider how these symbolic retellings of the trauma inflicted by the Babylonian empire in Jeremiah 14 as well as Jonah 4 utilize the symbol of the destruction of vegetation to create a “safe confrontation” with the wounds of the past.
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Wait, Did Paul Know Homer? A Reflection on Reflecting on Paul’s Reflections
Program Unit: Comparative Method in Biblical Studies
Dan Clanton, Doane University
In this presentation, I will reflect on my attempts to propose a new way of understanding Paul’s ambiguous comments in 1 Thessalonians 4.13-18, which describe what will happen to living followers of Jesus once he descends to inaugurate the End of Days. That proposal argues that (a) the traditional explanations of Paul’s imagery of “snatching away” in 1 Thessalonians 4.17 do not fully account for his unique verb choice and the context in which he employs it; and (b) if we supplement these explanations with a textual paradigm found in Homer’s Iliad, Paul’s choices will make more sense. Here, I will offer some insight into my effort to show that Paul uses imagery from Homer to augment and clarify his explanation as to how Jesus will save or rescue faithful followers from the “wrath that is coming,” by explaining the comparative questions I asked and why I ultimately felt that the solution I posit makes the most sense.
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Listening with Philo to Our Mother Sarah: Assessing the Validity and Value of Allegoresis Implicit in Paul’s Use of It (Gal. 4:21–5:1)
Program Unit: Scripture and Paul
Ernest Clark, Development Associates International
“These things are to be taken allegorically,” Paul says in Galatians 4 of Abraham’s family. Yet only here in all of his extant writings does Paul state that he is interpreting Israel’s scriptures allegorically. Indeed the explicit allegory in Gal. 4:21–5:1 is unique among the Old Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures and among the early Jewish Christian writings collected in the New Testament. This paper locates Paul’s allegoresis among his several other, more “normal” interactions with Jewish scripture in Galatians. It demonstrates significant congruence between Paul’s allegorical method and Philo’s. It then probes Paul’s letter critically to discern his rationale for choosing an allegorical mode at this point in his argument. To what use does Paul put this allegory? In what ways might allegoresis serve those ends more effectively than “normal” exegesis of Genesis? Finally the paper assesses the validity and value Paul assigns to allegoresis as a mode of interpreting Israel’s scripture by his use of it. Does Paul’s appeal to the allegory validate his argument, or must he cite other scriptures to confirm an otherwise tenuous interpretation? Is the allegory’s value essentially rhetorical, or is it also interpretive?
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What Lies Beyond? A Spatial and Ritual Reading of The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice.
Program Unit: Ritual in the Biblical World
Judith Clark, University of Oxford
The collection of material manuscripts discovered at or near Qumran which comprise the Dead Sea Scrolls, offer a unique glimpse into an aspect of first century Jewish life. The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice or Shirot ‘Olat HaShabbat provide us with a series of fragmentary texts which describe a form of ritual Sabbath worship for an earthly community.
The Shirot are a liturgical document which provide material for the first thirteen Sabbaths of the Qumran liturgical calendar. The Shirot are a liturgical document and therefore as material texts would have held a ritual role for an earthly community. However, they also describe a ritual - the ritual of angelic worship in a heavenly temple. There is also a spatial journey to the Shirot, as the text moves through the Temple to the Heavenly debir - the inner sanctuary.
However, what lies beyond the physical material text? Beyond the physical geographical space of the Qumran desert? And beyond the ritual use of such a text?
This paper will begin by exploring the concept of ritual space and how the ritual use of a text has an impact on the liturgical space of the text. Next, the relationship between the divine, angelic and earthly in the liminal 'meeting' space (created by the liturgical use of the text) will be investigated, before the spatial geographical concept of third-space is applied to the Shirot.
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Reading Zonah Narratives with Formerly Prostituted Women
Program Unit: Bible and Practical Theology
Ron Clark, George Fox University
How do women who have left the sex industry view Biblical narratives concerning women considered a “prostitute,” or zonah? Do they see themselves as heroes within the narrative or carry the shame that many times is expressed in a surface reading of the story? After reviewing Avaren Ipsen’s Sex Working and the Bible, I began to invite women in our ministry to experience these Zonah narratives while journaling their thoughts, experiences, and understanding of the texts. In our work with women in intimate partner violence, the sex industry, and houselessness we have experienced healing in Biblical narratives where they identify with major characters. Our Biblical narrative reading group has also found that inviting those to the reading table who have experienced life as a Zonah, provides important resources for scholarship in understanding the life of the characters, while embracing the role reversals that often lie beneath the text. I will discuss their perspectives of the stories i Tamar, Rahab, Solomon, and the prophetic metaphor in Ezekiel while offering a model to invite this marginalized population to the table as one way to practice practical theology.
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Preaching Decline: The Fall of Rome in the Sermons of Augustine and the Fall of Carthage in the Sermons of Quodvultdeus
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Thomas Clemmons, Catholic University of America
Even at the time, the sack of Rome in 410 by the Gothic army was understood to be momentous. For some it shook faith in Roma aeterna, for others it called into question the Empire’s recent embrace of Christianity, still others longed for a return to the pagan days of old. For many the sack of Rome was a crisis, not simply of identity, but of personal loss (for example, Jerome’s lament for Rome in Epistle 127centers on the death of Marcella). While recent scholarship has emphasized the continuity after the barbarian invasions, often downplayed has been the loss and catastrophe of the sack of Rome and other similar events, such as the sack of Carthage (in 438). When we examine the homilies given by Augustine and Quodvultdeus, we therefore find both aspects, the personal loss and the social significance, of these catastrophic events.
In this paper, I compare and contrast Augustine’s sermons on the fall of Rome and Quodvultdeus’s homilies on the sack of Carthage. The first section will treat Augustine’s sermon De excidio urbis Romae. This sermon offers Augustine’s most proximate response to the sack of Rome. Although the homily was given in North Africa beyond the immediate devastation of Rome, Augustine’s pastoral concern is evident. Augustine discusses the sack of Rome in relation to Job, Noah, Daniel, Abraham before Sodom, the rich man from Luke 16, and Proverbs 3:12. Augustine ultimately focuses on how the sack of Rome is a “correction,” not a “destruction.”
The second section of the paper treats Augustine’s more extensive reflection on the sack of Rome in the City of God and other writings and Possidius’s account of the death of Augustine and the Vandal invasion in his Vita Augustini. The purpose of this section is primarily to present material, known to Quodvultdeus, from the twenty-eight years between the Gothic sack of Rome and the Vandal occupation of Carthage. While these writings are not homilies, they show us the development and complexity of Augustine’s reflection on and response to the sack of Rome and Possidius’s consideration of the Vandal invasion of North Africa.
The final section is the heart of the paper. I discuss Quodvultdeus’s homilies (especially the two sermons De tempore barbarico) given in the immediacy of the Vandal occupation of Carthage. I first examine Quodvultdeus’s pastoral response as the sitting bishop of Carthage. I then compare similarities found in Quodvultdeus’s homilies and Augustine’s earlier writings, specifically the use of the biblical figures mentioned above and Proverbs 3:12. Lastly, I identify telling differences between Augustine and Quodvultdeus. While the theme of “correction” by God is prominent in both bishops, Quodvultdeus reframes what he views as the suitable Christian response by emphasizing true Christian history (notably through the martyr saints Perpetua and Felicity). I also show that when preaching of “decline,” Quodvultdeus’s “apocalyptic” response to the sack of Carthage is functionally identical to his Augustine’s pastoral response to the sack of Rome.
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The Production, Movement, and Use of Eulogia Tokens: The Examples from Bet She’an
Program Unit: Archaeology of Roman Palestine
Rangar Cline, University of Oklahoma
One of the better-known types of 5th-7th century Christian pilgrimage eulogiae are small tokens, typically around 40 mm., often made of unfired clay and impressed with an image on one side. Most such objects are unprovenanced. However, two assemblages of eulogiae tokens excavated in situ come from Bet She’an. One group is made up of four tokens and associated finds excavated in the Byzantine shops on the Street of the Monuments, and excavators suggested that they could have been among the goods offered for sale to pilgrims and passers-by. The second group consists of five tokens found in a large house, which was assumed to belong to a wealthy Christian family, based on its size and associated finds. These tokens all display images associated with biblical figures or stories associated with Roman Palestine. Petrographic analysis of those found in the Byzantine shops suggests that they originated in the Jezreel Valley. Those discovered in the house have images associated with Christian sites in Palestine and display evidence of use, such as scraping away at the edges of the objects. This presentation places the tokens from Bet She’an within the wider context of Byzantine pilgrimage souvenir production, including GIS maps of comparable pilgrimage souvenir distributions, and contends that the assemblages from Bet She’an challenge common assumptions about the production and movement of pilgrimage eulogiae. Such objects are often assumed to come from and to have been purchased at the places they depict. However, the petrographic analysis of tokens from the Byzantine shops at Bet She’an, combined with the range of places depicted on the tokens, suggests that tokens could be produced away from the places they depict and that they could be sold at commercial hubs like Bet She’an and not exclusively at the pilgrimage locations depicted on the objects. The presence of tokens depicting Palestinian holy sites in a house in Bet She’an indicates that they were acquired and used by local populations, where they made up part of the household religious environment. Both assemblages are also suggestive of potential secondary markets for pilgrimage objects, which challenges common assumptions that eulogiae were acquired and transported by individual pilgrims.
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“Advancing to the Ends of the Earth”: Lamenting Domination in 1 Maccabees
Program Unit: Postcolonial Studies and Biblical Studies
Kelley Coblentz Bautch, St. Edward's University
This paper explores 1 Maccabees’ depiction of “earth” and “home” from a postcolonial feminist hermeneutic and how habitations and their vulnerable inhabitants in this text serve as plaintiffs against the violence of empire. Alexander the Great and subsequent Seleucid rulers represent in 1 Maccabees outsiders who despoil and threaten the communities represented in 1 Maccabees. After introducing readers to the aggressive colonial powers, the narrative of 1 Maccabees describes how communities are impacted during a season of war: homes are abandoned, cities destroyed, and persons are forced to flee violence. As the Maccabee family becomes successful in the quest to repel Seleucid rule, those who once fought for freedom become formidable leaders themselves. Thus, in addition to examining 1 Maccabees’ condemnation of rapacious behavior toward the earth, this paper also considers the subtle critiques of this significant family from within the narrative of 1 Maccabees. Read holistically and from a contemporary perspective, 1 Maccabees offers a cautionary tale about power, violence and the abuse of the land wrought in warfare.
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Sinai in the Letter to the Hebrews: God Speaks Today
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Gareth L. Cockerill, Retired, Wesley Biblical Seminary
Accepted paper for the IBR research group on the Relationship between the OT and NT
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Plague, Freedom, and Resignation: Camus and the Wheat and the Weeds from an Asian-American Perspective
Program Unit: Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics
Kristofer Phan Coffman, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
The experience of the global pandemic has reignited interest in The Plague by Albert Camus, often with reference to the lessons that readers can glean from the reactions of its main characters to life under quarantine. As some commentators note, The Plague, like much of Camus’s work, neglects to include the experience of the native Algerian population. This lacuna makes Camus’s work ripe for a contrapuntal reading and in this paper, I propose the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds (Matthew 13:24-30) as my counter text, reading both texts against the backdrop of anti-Asian racism in the university. I argue that the while the two texts describe a world in which freedom is limited by outside forces (plague and “weeds”), they respond to that view in opposite ways, and that only the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds presents an adequate expression of the experience of Asian-Americans in the university. I begin first by making use of the insights put forth by Tat-Sion Benny Liew in his chapter “Reading with Yin-Yang Eyes” (Liew 2008). By complicating binary oppositions, including the “Asian/American,” “colonizer/colonized” and “powerful/powerless”, I show that the parable presents a situation that is readily identifiable to Asian-Americans entangled within the American university (Liew 2008, 27). It is a world, to use a formulation of Sze-Kar Wan, “of double tradition” and “double rejection” (Wan 2006, 150-151). Thus, the parable presents Asian-American biblical scholars with an image to think with in the midst of anti-Asian racism. Moving from the way in which the parable speaks to the modern situation, I move to the way in which reading Asian-American ambivalence back in to the biblical text reveals nuances missed by traditional western scholarship (Wan 2012, 181). In particular, I point to the Asian American coping strategy of resignation as an explanatory model for the text. Resignation, I argue, provides a reading of the text that avoids caricaturing the text as “quietist” or “vindictive.” The topic of resignation brings my argument back to reading with Camus and I close by showing the way in which Camus’s philosophy of revolt as articulated in The Plague is only possible in a world in which he excludes the native Algerians. With this in mind, I conclude by paralleling the lacuna of the Algerian in The Plague to the lacuna of the Asian-American in the university, arguing that we, too, have been excluded in order to foster a myth of revolt.
*If the paper is judged satisfactory, I would be interested in publishing in an edited volume.
Works Referenced:
Liew, Tat-siong Benny. What is Asian-American Biblical Hermeneutics? Reading the New Testament. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008.
Wan, Sze-Kar. "Betwixt and Between: Towards a Hermeneutics of Hyphenation." In Ways of Being, Ways of Reading: Asian American Biblical Interpretation, edited by Mary F. Foskett and Jeffrey Kah-Jin Kuan, 137-151. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006.
Wan, Sze-Kar. “Asian American Perspectives: Ambivalence of the Model Minority and Perpetual Foreigner.” In Studying Paul's Letters, edited by Joseph A. Marchal, 175-190. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012.
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Between Utopia and Contingency in the Mishnah
Program Unit: Utopian Studies
Naftali Cohn, Concordia University - Université Concordia
This paper takes up the repeated assertion that the Mishnah’s imagined past and rabbinic rulings can be understood as a “utopia.” While there is a pronounced subset of material that imagines the social world of the past and present in unrealistic, utopian terms, there is a countervailing tendency to engage fully and thoroughly with the contingency of the everyday world, with the possibility and reality that things can and do go wrong. Drawing on Utopia Studies scholarship, I demonstrate that the function of utopian imagining in the Mishnah is to express rabbinic ideals, especially about ritual activity and rabbinic authority. Taking up ritual theory, the concept of ritual failure, and the revisionist approach to rabbinic authority, I argue that the more nuanced portrait of the world full of contingency also represents an ideal, in which a robust ritual system can maintain stability in the face of an uncertain world.
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God's Biography of Muhammad in the Qur'an
Program Unit: The Qur’an and Late Antiquity (IQSA)
Juan Cole, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Scholars have long noted that the Qur’an does not offer a narrative of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, differing in this way from other world scriptures. His name is mentioned only four times. Uri Rubin and Alford Welch have written pieces pulling together the few biographical details that they argue can be gleaned from the text of the Qur’an; both are short essays. This paper will take a different tack, concentrating on direct divine address to or comments about the Prophet. The Qur’an is characterized by a frequent change in authorial voice: sometimes Muhammad as prophet is speaking, and sometimes God is the speaker. Sometimes God addresses Muhammad, whereas at other times he addresses wider audiences. When God is speaking to Muhammad, the second person singular is used. Many of these passages speak of affect: Muhammad is consoled or encouraged. At other times the voice of God rebukes him. What would this emotional biography of the prophet, told in the voice of God, look like if we pulled out second person singular passages and analyzed them together?
God sometimes praises the Prophet. Sometimes he consoles him. Sometimes he commiserates with him. Sometimes he upbraids him. The later anecdotes about the meaning of these verses are unreliable, but the text is not so opaque that we cannot analyze it in its own right. Whatever the actual social context of the story of Muhammad neglecting a blind seeker in favor of socializing with and proselytizing the pagan elite of his city, Q. 80:1–10 clearly seeks to correct not only Muhammad’s behavior but also to question his assumptions about what is important. Q. 94:1 –8 clearly offers solace: “Did we not soothe your breast and lift your burden—which weighed upon your shoulders—and exalt your mention?” Then Q 94:7–8 offer instruction: “Then when you have finished, stand for worship and turn toward your Lord.”
Some comparisons with other scriptures can also illuminate this direct address to the Prophet, which if followed through the Qur’an becomes a history of the latter’s emotional life in the sense used by Norbert Elias. In Numbers 12:6–8 God is depicted as saying that he speaks to Moses “face to face” and clearly rather than in riddles. Only a few other examples of divine direct address are found in the Hebrew Bible, all of them in Genesis. God speaks with Adam and Eve, Cain, Noah and his sons, and with Abraham and Sarah. In the New Testament, only in John 12:28 does there appear to be a direct address by God to Jesus: “Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’” It is used to underline Jesus’s struggle with the prospect of his imminent crucifixion and so does tell us something, obliquely, about his inner turmoil. If we read John 12:28 against some of the Qur’an passages in which God speaks to Muhammad, will it affect our perception of the latter?
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The Date of Codex Sinaiticus: Revisiting Milne and Skeat's Numerical Argument
Program Unit: New Testament Textual Criticism
Zachary Cole, Union Theological College (Northern Ireland)
This paper presents new evidence relevant to H. J. M. Milne and T. C. Skeat’s argument for the date of Codex Sinaiticus, which they described as “not likely to be much later than about A.D. 360.” Such precision derived in part from their observation of an “old system” of scribal figures for numerals in the thousands found in the codex. In addition to presenting many new relevant comparanda, this study also provides a critical examination of the argument itself. It is argued that although many of Milne and Skeat’s observations were correct, their appeal to numerals to establish a terminus ante quem for Codex Sinaiticus is invalid.
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What Does It Mean that Jerusalem Was a City Built “Compact Together” (Psalm 122:3)?
Program Unit: Historical Geography of the Biblical World
Chandler Collins, Jerusalem University College
Among the Psalms of Ascent, no chapter is so clearly associated with pilgrimage to the Jerusalem temple as Psalm 122. This song includes an important physical description of the city, usually translated “built compact together” or “bound firmly together,” which the psalmist connects with the ascent and worship of the Israelite tribes. Ancient manuscripts and versions reflect differences in both the underlying Hebrew text and their understanding of the enigmatic
phrase ו ֶׁד ֶׁח ֶׁי ה ֶּׁלֶׁה ֶׁר ֶׁב ֶׁח ֶׁש) MT). Modern approaches have situated this phrase within the context of Iron Age II pilgrimage festivals, Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the city, or of Zion theology in the
Psalms more broadly. Some scholars have also sought to incorporate data from the topography and archaeology of Jerusalem. Four basic understandings of יחדוֶׁלהֶׁשחברה have emerged, most engaging elements of Jerusalem’s physicality. Our study evaluates these understandings within the physical context of Jerusalem and the literary context of Psalm 122.
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“Fore-Skin and Seven Years Ago…”: Re-addressing Paul’s Past Proclamation of Circumcision (Gal 5:11) in Light of His Previous Occupation in Ἰουδαϊσμός (Gal 1:13–14)
Program Unit: Pauline Epistles
Ryan D. Collman, University of Edinburgh
In Galatians 5:11, Paul indicates that at some point in his past he “proclaimed circumcision.” While a handful of interpretations have been put forth regarding when this activity occurred and what it entailed, the most prominent proposal is that prior to his fidelity to Jesus as Israel’s Messiah, Paul was open to—and possibly even a proponent of—gentile proselyte circumcision. In light of recent studies that argue that Paul was an ethnic essentialist/primordialist and committed to a strict halakhic position on the requirement that circumcision must be performed on the eighth-day after birth—therefore ruling out the possibility that non-Jews could become Jews through circumcision—it is worth reconsidering what activity this previous proclamation of circumcision refers to. This paper argues that the brief autobiographical detail Paul gives in Galatians 1:13–14 regarding his former occupation in Ἰουδαϊσμός—understood not as “Judaism,” but as a religio-political activist movement (2 Macc 2:21; 8:1; 14:38)—is the crucial datum that sheds light on what his past proclamation of circumcision entailed. In light of this information, I propose that “proclaiming circumcision” refers not to the acceptance or promotion of gentile proselyte circumcision, but to an exclusionary stance on gentile participation within the people of God. That is, Paul previously promoted the idea that only the circumcision (natural born Jews) were the people of God, but in light of his revelation of the Messiah (Gal 1:15–16) he now believes that non-Jews are able to share in this status.
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Philo’s Knowledge of Medicine in His Later Roman Writings
Program Unit: Philo of Alexandria
Colten Yam, Chinese University of Hong Kong
This paper aims at investigating Philo’s knowledge of medicine in his later Roman writings, especially in De specialibus legibus and De praemiis et poenis, an area that has not been adequately explored in the scholarship. In contrast to his early Alexandrian writings, in which the theme of physicians/medicine largely serves as a rhetorical device for expressing the importance of the healing of the soul (e.g., Legum allegoriae I 42; II 97; III 76; III 87), Philo’s writings for the Roman audience (c. 40-49 CE) discuss physicians/medicine on their/its own right and have thus revealed Philo’s knowledge of medicine in a more explicit manner.
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Christ the Young Shepherd and Baptism at Dura-Europos: Baptismal Christophanies as Ekphrasis in the Apocryphal Acts
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
Jason Robert Combs, Brigham Young University
In the apocryphal Acts of Peter, Acts of Paul, and Acts of Thomas, the resurrected Christ appears in the form of a young man at several baptisms. Discussions of these narratives have focused on the christological implications of Jesus’s polymorphy, but have said little about the ritual context of these christophanies (e.g., Foster 2007, Lalleman 1995, Junod 1982, Klauck 2008, Garcia 1999). Reading these marginal narratives in the context of the Dura-baptistery, however, I show such narrative depictions of Christ function as ekphrasis. Building on the studies of baptism and art (e.g., Ferguson 2009; Jensen 2011, 2012; and Peppard 2016), I argue that the ritual experience of the baptisand and other participants at Dura-Europos would have included visual engagement with the images on the walls—images brought to life by the flickering light of oil-lamps and the dancing shadows cast upon the walls. In particular, during the baptism itself, witnesses would be fixated on the partial or full immersion of the baptisand directly under the image of a young shepherd—a common representation of Christ. Apocryphal acts give narrative form to this scene, depicting Christ as manifest in the form of a young man at baptisms to witness and validate the ritual. Reading these apocryphal acts in light of early Christian baptismal art—especially the depictions of Christ at Dura-Europos—sheds new light on the apocryphal narratives as well as on early Christian practice.
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Before “Wisdom Literature”: Examining Insights from Early Research on Wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Charles P. Comerford, University of Birmingham
The invention of new categories (or the adoption of old ones) plays an essential role in the cognitive process of understanding and organising new information. At best, systems of classification help create order out of disorder, familiarise the unfamiliar, and provide a heuristic framework for thinking about complex clusters of data. Yet categories, once established, can become so relied upon that it is difficult to break free from the reins of their interpretative influence. This is perhaps no less true than for the category of “Wisdom Literature” in biblical studies, which over the years has become the primary lens through which the subject of ancient Jewish wisdom is observed and examined (although some scholars have highlighted significant issues concerning this particular categorical construct: see Weeks 1994; 2010; 2016; Sneed 2011; 2015; Kynes 2016; 2019; 2021). In search of an alternative approach that seeks to avoid falling into what Molly Zahn has called the “category trap” (Zahn, forthcoming), this paper will examine a curious period in the history of Qumran research where it was widely believed that “the Sapiential was not a Qumran characteristic” (Worrell 1968, 115). As a by-product of this assumption, there are a number of studies (prior to the official publication of the so-called “Sapiential Texts” from Cave 4 throughout the 1990s) that explore the subject of wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls without the imposition of the biblical Wisdom Literature category. This early literature can be divided into three groups. The first group includes articles or books on specific texts that make brief (yet insightful) comments on the topic of wisdom. The second contains a selection of word studies that examine the appearance of wisdom terminology in their chosen texts. The third group is comprised of a small number of studies that focus specifically on the presence of wisdom at Qumran in general (see Tanzer 1987, 12–13).
To be sure, it is by no means a mistake to make use of well-established models of classification, providing that one is careful to recognise and work within the limitations of the category. However, issues arise when the labels we assign become so fossilised within the foundations of our interpretative structures that they are no longer regarded simply as reading alternatives, but instead operate as rules that govern the way we approach and understand the texts. The goal of this paper will be to investigate the methods and findings of early Qumran wisdom scholarship and consider what benefits their insights might contribute to future research on wisdom in the scrolls and beyond.
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Tesnière’s Dependency Grammar and the Verbless Clause of Biblical Hebrew
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Vasile Condrea, Dublin City University
After Andersen (1970) and Hoftijzer (1973), a flurry of contributions by Niccacci (1993), Zewi (1994, 2008), Zewi and van der Merwe (2001), and Holmstedt-Jones (2014) have focused on the verbless clause, including a volume edited by Miller-Naudé (1999). The current paper continues this conversation, drawing on Lucien Tesnière’s ‘dependency grammar’ (1965; trans. 2015)—this is an alternative framework to Noam Chomsky’s constituency grammar for analyzing syntax (Mazziotta and Imrényi 2020). This paper suggests that what Tesnière called (in French) 'phrase attributive' = English ‘attributive clause’ (Tesnière 1966, Chapter 66) may help in understanding the syntactic meaning of the verbless clause in BH. Let us take the following two sentences: (i) והוא אדמוני (literally) ‘and he [David] ruddy’ (1Sam 16:12) and (ii) ותהי חטאת הנערים גדולה מאד את־פני יהוה ‘and the sin of the young men was very great in the sight of the LORD’ (1Sam 2:17, RSV). Tesnière’s grammar suggests that the verb ‘to be’ may be understood as an auxiliary and hence is open to the possibility of being agglutinated into the attributive member of the sentence. When this is applied to the two sentences above, one may say that (1) they are both ‘attributive clauses’, as they attribute a property to a subject and that (2) the syntactic difference between them seemingly regards whether the auxiliary ‘to be’ is agglutinated or not, respectively (Tesnière 1965). After outlining some brief methodological issues based on Tesnière’s work, this paper argues that while these two sentence types may semantically convey the same meanings, at the grammatical level they are different. A semantic-level analysis explains that (1) the verbless clause and the verbal clause with היה ‘to be’ share the same semantic meaning of attaching to something or someone the following items: number; name; property; location or time; or indication of the existence of something or someone—that is, the property of being in existence is attached to something or someone. Grammatical analysis argues that (2) the absence of the verb in the verbless attributive clause has a linguistic consequence: the verbless clause prolongs or imitates the features of its syntactic situation. That is, its syntactic value is provided by its syntactic VSO or SVO ‘head’. The underlying reason is that, as Harald Weinrich explains, a “linguistic sign in a text remains valid until the text comes to an end or its validity is overridden by another sign of the same category” (Weinrich 2001, 23). As it lacks the verb, the verbless clause should not be able to replace the syntactic value of a preceding VSO. Along with the work of Tesnière, this paper explores these various issues within Weinrich’s text-linguistic method.
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The Camel Sleeps Tonight: Thinking about Animals and the Mundane at Late Antique Shrines
Program Unit: Greco-Roman Religions
Jordan Conley, Boston University
In literary depictions of late antique saints’ shrines—animals often function as earthly, corporeal counterpoints to kingdom of heaven, even as they also serve as conduits for divine agency. This paper considers the presence of two types of animals—camels and serpents—at three late antique saints’ shrines: those of St. Menas and SS Cyrus and John in Egypt, and that of St. Thecla in Seleucia. I demonstrate how camels serve as means of emplacement, whereas serpents (and other squamous creatures) tend to complicate firm distinctions between the animate and the inanimate, the corporeal and the material—especially in instances where the creatures serve as either causes of or cures for ailments. Drawing on the work of Patricia Cox Miller, who has explored human-animal contact zones of engagement, I first consider how animals at these shrines participate in discourses and encounters of affliction, healing, and transformation, and also serve as a means of locating the shrines within broader physical and spiritual landscapes. By unpacking such uses of animals in the hagiographies and miracle accounts associated with these shrines, I suggest that animal references lend insights into sensory affordances and the phenomenological experiences of affliction and healing at the shrines.
Secondly, however, this paper also considers how such a rhetorical analysis can obscure the presence of very real animals at these sites. I argue that it is methodologically-limiting and theoretically-inadequate to think only with these animals without also thinking about them. In critiquing anthropocentrism and advancing an ecofeminist framework, Donna Haraway notes that animals are not surrogates for theory; not for “thinking with.” Instead, she affirms: they are here to live with. Applying Haraway’s critique to the literary accounts of the shrines demonstrates that animals did not function merely as symbols or instruments. Rather, animals were also simply present as hapless visitors and long-term inhabitants. As actants similar to yet distinct from their human interlocutors, animals wander into the shrines seeking assistance and restoration, or else find themselves dragged along unwillingly. They both wittingly and unwittingly become implicated in the broader rituals and socio-political activities of the shrines. Meanwhile, they eat and defecate, attend to offspring, and observe the comings and goings of the sick and well, the saintly and the demonic.
The literary accounts feature speaking serpents and flying camels, and yet are also peppered with incidental references to serpents passing by as other, more dramatic scenes unfold or camels lazing about courtyards while humans fight over access to efficacious well-water. Therefore, this paper focuses on mundane appearances of animals at these three late antique saints’ shrines, asking: What are the animals doing? Why are they even there? What might be revealed about these sites specifically, and late antique pilgrimage sites more broadly, if we bracket the flashy encounters between animal and non-animal entities in order to focus on incidental references and everyday presence?
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Beyond “the Veil of the Letter”: Christ as Logos in Late Antique Italian Art
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
Chelsea Alice Connelly, Yale University
In mid-fourth-century Italy, a new iconography of Christ develops. This pictorial program which modern scholars have typically designated as the traditio legis centers on a frontal portrait of the Savior presenting a book to the viewer. While much has been said about the traditio of these images, this paper investigates the identity and function of the book in Christ’s hands, the so-called legis. The open scroll, or rare codex, does not face its holder, but displays its contents to the viewers outside of the image. With this novel form of textual presentation in the Roman visual sphere, the scroll is no longer a simple attribute of education or status as in representations of emperors, philosophers, or doctors. It becomes an independent figure which invites the viewer’s participation. The unrolled scroll is an image within an image that acts as a point of contact for viewers, regardless of literacy levels, since it shifts them into the mental space of visual exegesis and interaction. The scroll further asserts its autonomous authority by displaying text written almost exclusively in the third person, but Christ’s grasp on the volume attests to their intrinsic connection. In this way, Christ’s scroll exemplifies the paradox of his identity. It is both a signifier of Christ as the Logos and the Logos signified. The iconography of Christ revealing the scroll thus invites the viewer to “see the divine spirit that is concealed in the veil of the letter,” as Origen encourages in his Homilies on Leviticus 1.1. The represented scroll in his hands holds potential to be both the incarnate word and unincarnate Logos, just as Christ is accessible to all men through the written word, yet his divinity and works cannot be contained or comprehended by earthly means.
Focusing on depictions of a frontal Christ holding a book in the fourth and fifth centuries, this paper seeks to expand the category of the traditio legis to include representations previously designated as “Christ as Teacher.” The combined iconography, which I call Christ as Logos, is diffused from the private to the public arts of fourth- and fifth-century Italy, in the funereal arts of sarcophagi, catacomb paintings or mosaics, and gold glass and in basilica, chapel, and baptistery apses. As they are seen at consistent and repeated intervals throughout the Christian visual environment, Christ as Logos images function as cult portraits that bear the promise of divine presence rather than conveying a narrative or exegetical meaning exclusive to interpretations of death, baptism, or liturgy. By centering the discussion on the scrolls and codices represented with Christ, this paper gives agency to the books in late antique Italian art and thereby presents a new interpretation of Christ’s early iconography.
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“The Whisper of the Crowd”: On the Nature of Jeremiah’s Enemies in Jer 20:10
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Cristiana Conti-Easton, York University
Traditional biblical exegesis understands the Hebrew word dibbâ in the phrase dibbat rabbîm in Jer 20:10 as a reference to the jeering whispers of Jeremiah’s opponents. This exegesis has focused primarily on intrabiblical comparative data, overlooking the contribution of the Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft tradition. This tradition links the Hebrew verb II dbb, which is the basis of the word dibbâ, to the Akkadian verb dabābu. The noun dabābu in turn lies behind, for example, the phrase bēl dabābi, a malevolent Mesopotamian figure appearing mainly in legal texts. Bēl dabābi represents the stereotype of the opponent of a man in court. But it also overlaps with the image of the warlock in Assyro-Babylonian anti-witchcraft ceremonies revolving around social failure and degradation. Dibbâ and its interdialectal Akkadian equivalent dabābu functioned as technical terms in the ancient Near Eastern magical tradition. The Semitic root *dbb undergirding both of these words connotes the witch’s slanderous speech in anti-witchcraft rituals. Comparative analysis of the root *dbb sheds light on the meaning of the phrase dibbat rabbîm in Jer 20:10. In this paper, we will first examine the meaning of the word dibbâ in Jer 20:10 and in Ps 31:13(14), where we find the closest biblical parallel to the phrase dibbat rabbîm. We will then see the connotations of the root *dbb in an Ugaritic incantation against black magic (KTU 1.169). With this framework in hand, we will further examine the function of bēl dabābi in two Mesopotamian incantations (CMAwR 2, 8 22; 23). As I show in this analysis, the phrase dibbat rabbîm in Jer 20:10 carries darker undertones than is generally recognized. In using the term dibbâ, the Jeremianic author may have tapped indirectly into the Assyro-Babylonian tradition of bēl dabābi to portray Jeremiah’s opponents as demoniacal persecutors bent on destroying the prophet’s career and character through what Brueggemann would call “a whisper campaign.” While comparative investigations have shown compelling cases of biblical prophetic allusions to the Mesopotamian magical literary tradition, analogous research on the book of Jeremiah lags. The present analysis intends to be a small contribution on this subject, offering a more nuanced understanding of some elements of Jeremiah’s rhetorical communication.
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Thinking through Things: New Philology and the Textual History of the New Testament
Program Unit: New Testament Textual Criticism
Jeremiah Coogan, University of Oxford
Scholarship on the text of the New Testament has long devoted careful attention to individual manuscripts, to codicology, and to the work of scribes. Textual criticism frequently also attends to how liturgical and exegetical reading have shaped the transmission of New Testament texts. Precisely these phenomena—manuscripts, scribes, reading—are the locus of critical attention for ‘new’ or ‘material’ philology as well. What then is ‘new’ about new philology? I argue in this paper that the novelty of new philology is not primarily in its objects of analysis but in its historiographic perspective. Textual criticism has traditionally privileged a ‘retrospective’ mode of textual history, focused on reconstructing or approximating an original or initial text. Studies of manuscripts, scribes, and reading are oriented toward this project. By contrast, new philology has programmatically centred individual material texts in a kaleidoscopic approach to textual history. This has brought renewed attention to how specific readers encounter particular textual objects and to how those textual objects change over time—both affording significant insights for more traditional textual history. Nonetheless, in its programmatic form, new philology often offers a series of disconnected micro-historical ‘snapshots’ at the expense of historical continuities in texts and reading. Yet fragmentation is unlikely to be the enduring influence of new philology in the study of the New Testament. For more than two decades now, New Testament textual criticism has instead witnessed an interest in a diachronic ‘living text’. New philology has widened the historiographic lens to examine what texts, manuscripts, scribes, and readers do across time and geography. Its focus on materiality and use invites a ‘prospective’ textual history that observes the ongoing vitality of the New Testament in diverse contexts of study and worship. Recent scholarship on major variation units and on paratextual systems exemplifies these new perspectives. Such a prospective textual history is also the focus of my own work on the Eusebian apparatus and the history of Gospel reading, from which I will offer a number of examples. Paradoxically, new philology—or by now perhaps better ‘material philology’—may both succeed and disappear. The ongoing materiality and use of the New Testament might simply become an integrated part of textual scholarship. (One can witness a similar shift already in disciplines like medieval studies.) Yet whether the prospective mode of textual history will find a lasting home in the discipline of New Testament textual criticism alongside retrospective approaches is less clear.
This paper is an invited submission for the session on New Philology and its significance for New Testament textual criticism.
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Reading a Quadriform Cosmos: Gospel Books in the Early Christian Imagination
Program Unit:
Jeremiah Coogan, University of Oxford
Reading a Quadriform Cosmos: Gospel Books in the Early Christian Imagination
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From Text to Tell: Stratigraphy and the Study of Editing in the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Sarah Cook, University of Georgia
The Hebrew Bible has very little to concretely connect it to a material culture of writing. Due to the use of papyrus in ancient Israel and Judah, any earlier drafts of biblical texts are lost to us and scholars instead must turn to other written evidence in order to understand writing in ancient Israel. This engagement with material culture is key for a better understanding of the world that produced the Hebrew Bible, but the language of material culture analysis appears in other studies of biblical literatures as well, particularly in studies on the editing of the Hebrew Bible. These studies, especially those related to the Torah, transform the text into a Tell by discerning different layers within the text and proposing theories that can date these layers and articulate the relationship between them. Though they employ literary methods, they turn to the language of material culture and archaeology to describe the source elements that they find in the text. From Martin Noth’s proposal of a grundschrift to David M. Carr’s description of a “basic P-stratum in Genesis,” archaeological and material culture language permeates the way in which biblical scholars analyse sources and seams in biblical texts. This language constitutes an attempt on the part of scholars to reify the text, to take the literary evidence that it provides and construct from this evidence a kind of physical model that provides an archaeology of the text. Without the benefit of real material evidence for a culture of writing in ancient Israel though, how much does this archaeology of the text constitute merely a constructed history, that may or may not have any bearing on the historical development of these texts? In this paper, I argue that archaeological and material culture evidence is key to an understanding of the redaction of the Torah. It is this evidence that provides support for the embodied lives of texts and allows us to construct a better model for our Tell and come to a better understanding of the strata within it.
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Zechariah's "Worthless Shepherd" as an Anti-Messiah
Program Unit: Apocalypse Now: Apocalyptic Reception and Impact throughout History
Stephen L. Cook, Virginia Theological Seminary
In Zech 11:15–17 something remarkable happens within the dynamic, messianic fervor of the Zecharian millenial group. As their messianism intensifies, the group comes to speak not only of a coming ideal ruler, but also of the figure’s evil counterpart, a coming useless ruler who feasts on the flock in his care, who “devours flesh” and “tears off hoofs.” They anticipate the Messiah’s archetypal shadow, the “worthless shepherd.”
The notion of an “archetypal shadow” comes from the psychoanalytic work of Carl Jung. According to Jung’s principle of “Enantiodromia,” the superabundance of any psychological force inevitably produces its opposite. With increasing mental and emotional investment (“Cathexis”), the object of investment reveals a shadow opposite. Put metaphorically, the coming of a bright light is certain to generate stark shadows. If something as sublime as a messiah should appear in a millenial group's consciousness, group members would soon observe an ever more menacing awareness of that which opposes the ideal, messianic and millennial age. As an example, Jung cites the Gnostic teaching that Christ “cast off his shadow from himself.” He emphasizes that an Antichrist figure develops as an imitating spirit of evil who follows in Christ’s footsteps.
An unambiguous messianic “shadow” based on Zechariah’s prophecies appears in the first century BCE in the Gabriel Vision, the three-foot-tall “Dead Sea Scroll” in stone. In lines 21–22, there appears a “Wicked Branch [ṣemaḥ]” an archetypal shadow of the “Branch” of Zech 3:8; 6:12. Since the language of ṣemaḥ is exclusively from First Zechariah, the inscription’s authors apparently had a keen sense of the unity and logic of the book of Zechariah. They put two and two together and designated the “worthless shepherd” of 11:15–17 the “Evil Branch,” a term not specifically used in Zechariah.
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The Perplexing Placement of the Tree of Life in Ezekiel 47
Program Unit: Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Bible
Stephen L. Cook, Virginia Theological Seminary
A conundrum appears in vv. 7 and 12 of Ezekiel 47, where, far from the center of Ezekiel's utopian temple complex, out in profane territory, there appears the tree(s) of life. Comparative evidence leads us to expect to find the tree(s) bundled with the sacred river, but not here—not outside the holy temple. One example is a thirteenth-century BCE Assyrian ivory inlay showing a mountain god. Here, the tree of life is certainly at the cosmic center. The Mari investiture panel gives us another example. The vases of the river goddesses in the panel sprout their trees within the panel’s innermost frames. The trees lie in the midst of the Mari garden (cf. Gen 2:9). The inner frames correspond to Ishtar’s inner shrine in the Mari palace. Should not the life-bearing trees of Ezek 47:7, 12 lie deep within Ezekiel’s utopian temple complex as in this iconography? There, at the center of the holy compound, the trees of life would be symbolically shielded by cosmic trees, trees corresponding to the specifically stylized palmetto trees of the Mari panel. Such “second-tier,” cosmic trees are represented by Ezekiel’s temple’s ʿāb (lintel, canopy) and by the palm trees of Ezek 41:18, 25. Farther out are the lower-tier palms, like those in the side frames of the Mari panel. In Ezekiel’s complex, these are the trees adorning the walls of the outer gatehouses (40:16, 22, 26, 31, 34, 37). The solution to the puzzle of the location of the prized, "top-tier" tree of life in Ezekiel 47 lies in renewed, intensified study of ancient Near Eastern iconography. This paper lays out the results of such a study.
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Legitimacy of Drawing Biblical Texts into Modern Ethical Discourse: A Psychological Approach
Program Unit: Ethics and Biblical Interpretation
Matthew J.M. Coomber, Saint Ambrose University
Since before Sts. Ambrose and Augustine, Christian theologians have used biblical texts to address various social-justice concerns. Deuteronomy 15’s protections against perpetual debt and God’s punishment of Pharaoh’s abuses against the Hebrews are but two examples of biblical texts that have been drawn out of their original settings and into societal contexts vastly different from their own. But can biblical texts legitimately speak to the ethical quandaries of societal environments so vastly different from their origins? Is it possible for modern readers to ethically apply the stories and oracles of the ancient past to modern socio-political circumstances, without resting upon the shaky foundations of eisegesis? Recent developments in social psychology have uncovered an area of human behavior which supports the idea that legitimate connections can be made between biblical texts on social justice and contemporary concerns.
The psychology of privileged contempt finds that humans—as well as other primates—share a predisposition toward behaving unethically toward those of lower status, regardless of culture or time. Reflecting a phenomenon rooted not in cultural norms but in our neurological makeup, the psychology of privileged contempt has been useful in gaining deeper understandings into the potential psychological foundations of various justice texts in the Bible. In this paper, the lens is shifted to consider a connecting thread of human behavior that has the potential to both help us relate ancient justice concerns to modern contexts, and also to shed light on the legitimacy of drawing ancient biblical texts into ethics conversations in the public square.
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Building Barns: Adaptive Cycles, Wealth, and Functional Systems in Luke 12:16–34
Program Unit: Gospel of Luke
Rebecca Copeland, Boston University School of Theology
In The Literary Function of Possessions in Luke-Acts, Luke Timothy Johnson notes that, “Luke consistently speaks about possessions,” but he “does not speak about possessions consistently” (1977:13). This is particularly apparent through the juxtaposition of the parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:16-21) and the admonition to “Consider the ravens” in Luke 12:22-34. Beginning with the cautionary tale of a man who has no anxiety about money because his harvests have yielded enough for many years and he has stored them in brand-new barns, the next passage advises the audience not to worry about food or clothing but to rather “Consider the ravens” who “have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them” (Luke 12:24). Because of the agricultural threat posed by ravens, both Luke and his original audience were likely to be more aware of and knowledgeable about the behavior of ravens than are modern interpreters from industrialized nations. By giving focused interpretive attention to the ravens who have historically been marginalized by more traditional approaches, ecological hermeneutics provides valuable insights for scholarship on Luke’s Gospel. A close examination of raven feeding and caching behavior demonstrates both similarities to and differences from the behavior of the rich fool. Although it is true that ravens do not build storehouses or barns, they nevertheless hoard surplus food in caches for future use. Unlike the rich man’s barns, however, these caches do not remove the resources from larger ecological cycles and they do not prevent the use of those resources by others. By offering the ravens as examples to be emulated despite their hoarding behavior, Luke 12:24-25 undermines simplistic readings of both the preceding parable and the admonition not to worry. Instead, it invites the interpreter to engage in more nuanced reasoning about the uses of wealth, and particularly the ways in which multiple different approaches to excess resources can foster communal resilience. This indicates that Luke’s inconsistent treatment of wealth may not need to be harmonized, but rather demonstrates the need for multiple approaches if the community is to flourish.
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Evidence of a Source Used in the Composition of Sifre Deuteronomy
Program Unit: Midrash
Robert P. Costello, University of Aberdeen
Three of the eight midrashic narratives attributed to R. Joshua b. Levi in b. Shabbat 88b–89a bear many striking parallels with Sifre Deuteronomy. One cluster in Sifre (Sifre Deut. 305–306) contains two groups of parallels to adjacent narratives in the Bavli and a third lone parallel to a neighboring Bavli narrative. One of the groups of Sifre parallels involves a narrative with the same theme, nearly identical events that occur in the same sequence, and similar allusions to Job 28:13, 14, 22, and 23 as those found in one of the Bavli narratives. A second cluster in Sifre (Sifre Deut. 48–49), widely separated from the first, contains two groups of parallels to the same two adjacent Bavli narratives as the other cluster.
It is highly improbable that random coincidence can explain the correspondence between two such clusters of parallels, including one entire narrative, in Sifre and three out of four sequential narratives in the Bavli. The age of the two texts suggests that the passages in Sifre ought to reflect more primitive versions of the parallel Bavli traditions. Surprisingly, however, an examination of the texts indicates the reverse: The Bavli narratives appear to reflect the more primitive forms of the traditions. I conclude that there is a strong probability that a pre-Sifre collection of Sinai midrashic narratives existed that included, at a minimum, the Moses-ascent tradition and the Torah-and-Satan tradition. The nature of the allusions in Sifre to the Moses-ascent tradition indicates that at least this one, if not more, of the narratives attributed to Joshua existed for some time prior to the composition of the Tannaitic Midrash Sifre. This may also be true for the entire pre-Sifre collection, but the lack of further evidence precludes certainty in dating the other narratives.
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Isaiah’s Bestiary: The Portrayal of Ferocious Creatures in the Book of Isaiah
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
J. Blake Couey, Gustavus Adolphus College
Most readers of the Bible associate monstrous creatures with the final chapters of Job or the apocalyptic visions of Daniel. The Book of Isaiah, however, not only refers to natural predators like lions, leopards, or hawks, but also features a variety of (quasi)mythological beasts, including Sheol (5:14), seraphim/flying serpents (6:2, 6; 14:29; 30:6), satyrs (13:21; 34:15), Leviathan (27:1), the sea-monster Rahab (30:7; 51:9), and the demon Lilith (34:15). Most of these creatures are known from other biblical texts or ancient Near Eastern sources. Notably, they appear across multiple compositional layers of the book of Isaiah
This paper argues that Isaiah references to these creatures form a kind of bestiary within the biblical book. That is, like Medieval taxonomies of beasts, they imbue the created order with both threat and wonder. As recent work in ecology has demonstrated, ferocious creatures play an important symbolic role across cultures in human self-understanding vis-à-vis nature (e.g., E. O. Wilson’s notion of the “grizzly bear effect,” adapted for Leviathan by William P. Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder; see further David Quammen, Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind). Isaiah’s portrayal of these animals draws upon these imaginative resonances to construct a world in which human power is not absolute, as both God and nature dwell beyond human control.
Also like the Medieval bestiaries, Isaiah’s parade of beasts encourages reflection upon the complex relationship among God, humans, and non-human animals. In some cases, God sympathizes with humans at the expense of these creatures and kills them to guarantee human survival and well-being (e.g., 27:1; 51:9). The peaceable kingdom texts (6:6-9; 65:25) operate similarly, as wild animals must be denuded of their ferocity for the sake of human and domestic animals. In other cases, God more explicitly sympathizes with these creatures. They are affiliated with God (e.g., Isa 6:2) and benefit from God’s removal of humans from urban centers (e.g., 13:21; 34:15). The paper will conclude by considering the resonance of Isaiah’s discourse about these divine/human/non-human relationships with the current extinction crisis and recent observations of changed animal behavior in response to decreased human activity during COVID-19 pandemic.
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Adam, Evel, and Satan: The Emergence and Rationales for the Tryst Motif between Eve and Satan
Program Unit: Early Exegesis of Genesis 1–3
J. R. C. (Robert) Cousland, University of British Columbia
The emerging Adam and Eve traditions over the first centuries of the Common Era feature widely disseminated accounts or allusions to sexual congress between Satan and Eve, a union that is often presented as an explanation for Cain and his malignity. These accounts are confined to just Judaism or (proto-)orthodox Christianity, but are also to be found in a number of gnostic treatises. Works as diverse as 4 Maccabees, the Protevangelion of James, Genesis Rabbah, the Apocryphon of John – and numerous other documents – all reference this liaison, and it is remarkable that such variant religious traditions should all appeal to this (now largely overlooked) motif.
After providing a brief overview of the broad diffusion of this motif in the early Common Era, this paper will assess why, in each instance, the Jewish, Christian, or Gnostic documents – with their very different literary and theological strategies – all appropriated this particular motif. Even a superficial consideration of the various texts reveals very different strategies at work within these diverse literary documents, whether it be disquisitions on cosmogony/anthropology, explanations for evil and the evil inclination, or vindication of patriarchy. It will close by offering suggestions as to why the motif largely disappeared in Judaism, orthodox Christianity, and Gnosticism.
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John's Gospel as Isaiah's "Report": The Vocalization of Isaiah's Witness in John
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Joshua Coutts, Providence Theological Seminary
The Gospel of John features several figures as speakers of the text of Isaiah. Most obvious among these, John (the Baptist) is presented as the voice of Isaiah 40:3 and Jesus is most likely the speaker of Isaiah 6:10. Drawing on rhetorical and social memory approaches as well as insights drawn from the early technique of prosopological exegesis, this paper identifies believers as giving voice to Isaiah’s question, “Who has believed our report?” (Jn 12:38). Likewise, the first eyewitnesses of the resurrection vocalize Isaiah’s testimony, “I saw the Lord,” and the comment that Isaiah “saw his glory and spoke about him” functions equally as an apt description of the Gospel itself (12:41; cf. 1:14). Consequently, the “report” (ἀκοή) of Isaiah (Isa 6:9; 52:7; 53:1) turns out to be the testimony to Jesus, particularly as it is preserved in (and as) the Gospel. John then shares in the status and authority of Isaiah, as well as his rejection.
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Philo’s Prodigal Nephew: Divine Fatherhood, Forethought, and Mercy in De Providentia and Luke’s Parable of the Two Sons
Program Unit: Philo of Alexandria
Michael Cover, Marquette University
This paper investigates the narrativization of a Stoic doctrine of divine providence in Philo’s philosophical dialogue On Providence and Luke’s Parable of the Two Sons. Part one of the paper demonstrates the presence of a similar providential pattern in both texts. In Philo’s dialogue with Alexander (Prov. fr. 2.2–16), the Jewish philosopher argues to his apostate nephew that divine justice is sometimes forestalled out of mercy for the foolish, as for prodigal sons (καθάπερ…οἱ ἄσωτοι υἱοί). This is because God acts not as a Tyrant, but as a Father, blending two providential capacities: the ruling with the caring (τὸ ἡγεμονικὸν μετὰ τοῦ κηδεμονικοῦ). Philo further argues that caring parents often attend more to the prodigals than to wise children, since the former require more help, whereas the latter have minds of their own. The same is true for God as Father. Philo’s philosophical account of divine providential care recalls Luke’s portrait of God in the Parable of the Two Sons (Luke 15:11–32). Luke presents in narrative form another father, whose son lives prodigally (ζῶν ἀσώτως) and requires more paternal attention than his obedient elder brother. Although Luke does not use the term τὸ κηδεμονικόν (see Chrysippus, Fragmenta logica et physica, fr. 1126), the divine Father imaged in the parable exercises a similar kind of compatibilist forethought for the wellbeing of both of his children.
Once this common philosophical pattern of providential care is established in both authors, the second part of the paper examines their respective literary settings. It is often noted that Luke’s Jesus tells his parable in the presence of both “tax collectors” and “Pharisees” (Luke 15:1–2), who represent the prodigal and the obedient sons, respectively. Less fully appreciated is Philo’s setting of his argument for God’s providential care for wayward children in the literary presence of his prodigal nephew, Tiberius Julius Alexander. Through an investigation of the Armenian version of this portion of the dialogue, in which Alexander’s objections are presented more fully, I will illustrate how Philo shapes his argument to speak directly to his fictive interlocutor (Alexander), just as Jesus’ parable is attuned to the situations of the literary tax collectors with whom he eats in sympotic, dialogical context. They, like Alexander, have been attracted by the powers of Rome and civic office, to abandon their Jewish religious values and beliefs. Philo and Luke’s Jesus both narrativize Stoic arguments about providential care to draw such wayward children back to the God of Israel.
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Conflict in Colossians: An Ethic of Love in the Kingdom of the Beloved Son
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Eric Covington, Howard Payne University
Conflict characterizes the New Testament epistle to the Colossians. The letter evidences a struggle between the author of the letter, thrice self-identified as Paul (Col 1:1, 1:23 and 4:18), the recipients of the letter, and those proclaiming “plausible arguments” (Col 2:4) and “philosophy and empty deceit” (Col 2:8) who, according to the author, threaten to deceive the Colossians (Col 2:4) and take them captive (Col 2:8). This deep and pervasive conflict makes Colossians an interesting window into methods of conflict resolution within early Christian communities. There has been considerable focus on the way the letter seeks to theologically repudiate this “Colossian philosophy,” which, when viewed from the perspective of conflict resolution, suggests that the letter primarily responds to conflict as an intellectual, polemical refutation of the “false” and affirmation of the “true.” This paper suggests an alternative reading of the letter’s approach to conflict resolution by analyzing the letter’s ethical exhortations for the Colossians to demonstrate an ethic of love in Col 2:3 and 3:14. Such an analysis, this paper argues, demonstrates that Colossians encourages its addressees to demonstrate an ethic of love that connects and unites all members of the community in the midst of conflict. It further indicates that this ethic of love is a present possibility in the midst of conflict because the Colossians are citizens of the Kingdom of the Beloved Son (Col 1:13). This study ultimately suggests that Colossians maintains that encourages its recipients to respond to conflict with a theological understanding of Jesus that leads to an ethic of love demonstrable in everyday actions that exhibits unity, connection, and reconciliation in the midst of conflict.
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Antiquity in the Antiquities of Josephus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus: History, Ancestors, and Cultural Capital in the Greco-Roman World
Program Unit: Josephus
J. Andrew Cowan, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Many scholars have noted that antiquity performs a legitimating function in ancient literature. In this paper, I seek to bring greater clarity to this concept by exploring how antiquity functions within the respective presentations of Israel and Rome’s origins in Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities and Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities. First, I examine Dionysius’ work, giving particular attention the place of the theme of antiquity in his argument that the Romans are descended from ancient Greeks, and then I probe Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities, using Against Apion as a hermeneutical guide in order to uncover the implicit function of antiquity for Josephus. After exploring the shapes of their arguments, I conclude that the works of both authors suggest that antiquity was a necessary but insufficient condition for cultural respect in the early Imperial era; accruing cultural capital required not merely ancient origins but honorable origins and a time-tested tradition of virtue.
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A Symphony of Young and Old: Ethical and Ecclesiological Aspects of Intergenerationality in Luke´s Overture (LK 1–2)
Program Unit: Bible and Ethics
Malte Cramer, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
In unique manner the narrative complex of Luke 1–2 considers the topics of age and intergenerationality from multiple perspectives. First of all, Luke tells the stories of the births of John the Baptist and Jesus the Messiah. Stories that relate to a person´s youngest age, respectively the beginning of all aging in general. Secondly, the auctor ad theophilum tells us the story about Jesus as a boy at the age of twelve, teaching in the temple (Lk 2,41–51). The only story in the biblical canon about Jesus in a youthful age. Thirdly, Lk 1–2 includes as many old narrative characters as nowhere else in the New Testament in such a tight framework: Elizabeth and Zechariah (Lk 1,5–25.36.39–45.57–80), Simeon and Anna (Lk 2,22–40). Finally, Mary and Joseph as a young couple, respectively together with Jesus as a young family contribute another facet of intergenerationality to the overture of the third gospel. Given these facts, there is probably nor more appropriate place in the New Testament to investigate intergenerational relations than the storyline of Luke 1–2.
Methodologically the primary approach of the paper will be to analyze the characterizations of the characters of different age in this narrative framework. In particular the paper will focus on aspects such as behavior and speech in order to sketch a picture of the intergenerational dimensions in the figure constellation in Luke 1–2. By doing so, this paper aims to elucidate the (socio-)ethical as well as the ecclesiological implications that can be derived from the relationship between the various protagonists coming from different generations.
The paper wants to emphasize at least the following three theses: 1) The voices of both young and old resound together in a cross-generational symphony, to proclaim the salvation, which takes shape in the coming of Jesus Christ. Young and old voices meet without excluding one another on the basis of youth or age. They complement, enrich and depend on each other. An outstanding example of this is the interaction between Mary und Elizabeth (Lk 1,36–45). 2) Still, it is up to the old to specify the keynote in this symphony. Luke gives the leading voice to the old and its essentially up to them, to anticipate and interpret, what will happen to John, Jesus and the rising generation. This becomes particular evident in the prayers of Elizabeth (Lk 1,41–45), Zechariah (Lk 1,67–80) and Simeon (Lk 2,28–35). 3) According to the traditions of ancient near-eastern society the younger generations have a duty of care towards the old (Ex 20,12; Dtn 5,16; Rut 4,15). The old should be respected and honored (e. g. Lev 19,32). These aspects also come to light in Luke 1–2. However, in the narrative of Luke 1–2 it becomes certainly clear that it is also up to the younger generations to admonish, rebuke or teach the old. Especially the angel´s words about John and his destiny refer to this dimension of intergenerationality (Lk 1,17).
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Relinquishing Flesh, Regarding Flesh
Program Unit: LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics
Ashon Crawley, University of Virginia
Relinquishing Flesh, Regarding Flesh
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"A Class of People Loathed for Their Vices": Christian Criminals in 1 Peter
Program Unit: Letters of James, Peter, and Jude
David A. Creech, Concordia College - Moorhead
In the early decades of the Christian movement, many followers of the Way operated on the margins and challenged the norms of society. Their founder was a convicted criminal subjected to capital punishment. In Mark 13:9-13 (par. Matt 10:16-23 and Luke 12:4-12) Jesus warns his followers of trials before governors and kings. In 2 Cor 6:4-5 and 2 Cor 11:23, Paul lists his many detentions among his credentials. Acts narrates the detainment of followers of the Way at numerous points (see, e.g., Acts 5:17-21, 12:1-19, and 16:16-40). Evidence of confinement is not limited to the New Testament. According to Suetonius conflict between Jews about “Chrestus” was so public and contentious that it caught the attention of the emperor Claudius and expelled them from Rome. Tacitus reports that Nero could plausibly accuse Christians of arson in the aftermath of the great fire in Rome in 64 C. E. The Bishop of Antioch, Ignatius, was led in chains to Rome in the early second century. As Glanville Downey (1976) observed, early Christians very likely could have been seen by so-called upstanding Romans “as a troublesome and potentially dangerous minority in an empire that was full of un-Roman minorities and strange people.” There is considerable debate as to what crimes Christians may have been guilty of. Some options include treason (maiestas), general contumacy, participating in banned societies, and practicing superstition or atheism. Christians, fairly or not, were perceived to be criminal.
1 Peter 4:15 perhaps provides a helpful window into the nature of early Christian criminality. As the letter concludes, the author reminds the audience that their suffering should not be on account of murder, theft, criminality, or the ever so tricky ἀλλοτριεπίσκοποϛ. When discussing this text many commentators appeal to the ways in which Christians were criminalized and their ritual practices (such as the Eucharistic meal and baptism) misunderstood. The very real possibility that Christian actually engaged in criminal behavior is not discussed at length. While caution should be observed when interpreting vice lists and some degree of criminalization (and also intentional misprision) of the early Christian movement certainly exists, this paper explores the factors that would contribute to Christian criminality and the types of crimes that some early Christians would have likely perpetrated.
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Threats to the Roman Order? Crimes and Criminalization in Early Christianity
Program Unit: Jesus Traditions, Gospels, and Negotiating the Roman Imperial World
David A. Creech, Concordia College - Moorhead
As Matthew wraps up the final teaching section of his Gospel he concludes with a parable that though now familiar contains a host of peculiar features. In Matthew 25:31-46 Jesus famously describes the final judgment when the Son of Man returns in his glory to judge the nations. The Son of Man sits on his throne of glory and separates people as a shepherd separates sheep from goats. The sheep go to the right and are welcomed into glory and the goats are condemned to the left and sentenced to eternal agony. Four times exhortation to the same six activities are repeated: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, take care of the sick, and visit those in prison. The sheep unwittingly engaged in these practices, the goats did not. The first five activities in the list make good sense and have a certain logical coherence. Moreover, they are attested widely in Second Temple Jewish literature. The call to visit prisoners, however, is somewhat rare. This final criterion, visiting those who are in prison, then, appears to be a fairly uniquely early Christian ideal. Why might this be the case? Why might Matthew include visiting those who are under watch in this list of essential practices?
The simple, and obvious, answer is that followers of Jesus were detained frequently. This conclusion is supported by not only by the odd list in Matthew 25 but also by many references in the New Testament and beyond. In Mark 13:9-13 (par. Matt 10:16-23 and Luke 12:4-12) Jesus warns his followers of trials before governors and kings. In 2 Cor 6:4-5 and 2 Cor 11:23, Paul lists his many detentions among his credentials. Acts narrates the detainment of followers of the Way at numerous points (see, e.g., Acts 5:17-21, 12:1-19, and 16:16-40). Evidence of confinement is not limited to the New Testament. The Bishop of Antioch, Ignatius, was led in chains to Rome in the early second century. Lucian of Samasota mocks Proteus and the Christians who supported him while under watch in the middle of the second century.
But was early Christian behavior criminal? Had Christians engaged in crimes that merited punishment? The best explanations will include an exploration of the criminalization of disenfranchised and marginalized people. The question is pretty straightforward: In what ways were Roman laws written and enforced unequally? How did people in power define criminality and use it to maintain their privilege? How did Christians respond to this criminalization?
The paper will conclude with a short contemporary reflection on criminal justice in the United States. The criminal justice system in the United States disproportionately punishes marginalized communities. People of color are especially disadvantaged by a flawed system that does not value Black and Brown bodies and views them as a threat. How can the various early Christian responses to criminalization inform our response to similar disenfranchisement of marginalized people in the 21st century?
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Irenaeus, the Cainites, and the “Gospel of Judas”
Program Unit: Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism
Eric Crégheur, Université Laval
In his "Against Heresies" (I, 31), Irenaeus is the first to report the existence of a group of Christians who, subverting the "traditional" interpretation of the book of Genesis, held the figure of Cain in high esteem. Without ever naming them, Irenaeus accuses the members of this group of exhibiting, in support of their beliefs, a "Gospel of Judas" which they had forged. The public unveiling of the Tchacos Codex in 2006 and of the “Gospel of Judas” it had preserved, apparently confirmed Irenaeus' assertions, at least as far as the existence of such a text. Almost as soon as it was revealed, this newly discovered “Gospel of Judas” was quickly identified with the one invented by the so-called Cainites. But considering the fluidity of titles in Antiquity and the proliferation of writings with identical titles but very different content (for example the two “Revelations of James” of Nag Hammadi, or the “Gospel of Philip” of Nag Hammadi and the one cited by Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion XXVI), can we really be certain that we are before the same text? In this paper, we propose to compare what can be deduced of the positions of this group of Christians apparently favorable to Cain with what can be read in the “Gospel of Judas” in the Tchacos Codex, in order to establish whether Irenaeus refers to the text which has come down to us, or to a still unknown text.
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Wisdom for Women: A Reader-Response Interpretation of the Berlin Codex (P. Berol. 8502)
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Caroline Crews, University of Texas at Austin
Dated to the 5th-7th centuries CE, the “Berlin Codex” (Codex Papyrus Berolinensis 8502) may have been used in a setting similar to that of the Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC). Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott have convincingly argued that the NHC originated in Egyptian monastic settings and have suggested the same for the Berlin Codex. In this paper, I employ reader-response criticism to argue that themes within the Berlin Codex might appeal to a monastic audience. More specifically, I consider how the roles of women throughout the codex’s four Coptic tractates (Gospel of Mary, Apocryphon of John, Wisdom of Jesus Christ, and Act of Peter) might resonate with women within monasteries like those overseen by Shenoute of Atripe. I demonstrate that female characters within the Berlin Codex have elevated roles in their narratives, while they also remain firmly situated within androcentric environments. In this way, I increase the plausibility that the Berlin Codex was read and utilized within an Egyptian monastic context, perhaps even a female monastic context.
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The Rhetorical and Autobiographical Impact of Jewish Lament on Paul's Self-Promotions in 2 Corinthians
Program Unit: Rhetoric and Early Christianity
Channing Crisler, Anderson University (SC)
Some recent examinations of Paul’s rhetoric have encouraged interpreters to apply approaches that illuminate the apostle’s humanity rather than eclipse it. Such encouragement is especially pertinent to the examination of 2 Corinthians where Paul frequently threads autobiographical references into his largely judicial rhetoric. These autobiographical references have parallels with self-promotions (periautologia) within Paul’s Greco-Roman milieu such as Seneca’s Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium. Paul’s self-promotions contain especially vulnerable and transparent admissions shaped by his use of Jewish lament that simultaneously inform his rhetoric and person. One only reads as far 2 Corinthians 1:9 to find such admissions, “We despaired of living” which echoes the darkest of laments, namely Psalm 88 (87 LXX). With a focus on this kind of repeated feature in the letter, the overarching argument in this paper is that Jewish lament language functions as a primary source for the way Paul crafts his self-promotions in 2 Corinthians. By locating his source in Jewish lament, one obtains a wider frame of reference for examining Paul’s self-promotions. Jewish lament supplies Paul with an idiom and multiple exemplars whose afflictions resonate with his apostolic experience. Paul reconfigures Jewish lament around his experience with the crucified and risen Christ as part of his collective effort to defend his apostleship. Part of that defense is to promote a weakness consistent with some of the weakest figures in Israel’s history, namely “lamenters” such as the figure in Psalm 88 (87 LXX), prophets such as Jeremiah, Job, and, climactically, Jesus. While the letter contains several instances of these lament-laden self-promotions, this paper limits its focus to three texts: (1) 2 Corinthians 1:8–10 and its use of Ps 87 LXX; (2) the peristasis catalogue in 2 Corinthians 4:7–15 and its use of multiple lament pre-texts including Psalm 30:13 LXX, Jeremiah 19:11, and Lamentations 4:2; and (3) 2 Corinthians 12:6–10 and its use of Job 7:16. The approach employed in this paper is two-fold. First, the lament pre-texts embedded in Paul’s self-promotions are analyzed metaleptically. In short, the interplay between these texts and the lament language they employ produce unstated points of resonance that clarify and amplify the kind of weakness that Paul promotes to the Corinthians as part of his larger effort to defend his apostleship. Second, Paul’s lament-laden self-promotions of weakness are compared to self-promotions in Seneca’s Epistles in which he appeals to his own weaknesses, particularly Epistles 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 26, and 54. While Paul accentuates his weaknesses by using Jewish lament to instruct the Corinthians, Seneca tends to temper and rationalize his weaknesses in his instruction to Lucilius. The paper concludes by drawing out some of the rhetorical and autobiographical implications of Paul’s self-promotions given their use of Jewish lament and their divergence from contemporaries such as Seneca.
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Galilee, Urbanisation, and Class Conflict in the Quest for the Historical Jesus
Program Unit: Historical Jesus
James Crossley, St Mary's University
This paper will assess the polarised debate in historical Jesus studies concerning the impact of the building projects in Galilee. Put crudely, the scholarly divide is over whether there was a marked change in the life of Galileans and whether (or not) the emergence of the historical Jesus could have been a reaction against such changes. At the heart of this debate (on both sides) is a common assumption about class conflict: the standard of living must have got unambiguously ‘worse’ for there to have been a ‘reaction.’ Thus, so the logic goes, if the standard of living did get worse then we can account for the emergence of the Jesus movement and if it did not then we must look beyond ideas of socio-economic change for our explanation. It will be argued that this is a misreading of how class conflict functions in comparable societies and in Galilee itself, and that if we pay closer attention to historical materialist readings of socio-economic change then we will be in a better position to understand the impact of urbanisation projects in Galilee.
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Communicating without Words: Prophetic Sign-Acts in Jeremiah and Ezekiel
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
Carly Crouch, Fuller Theological Seminary (Pasadena)
The prophetic corpora of the Hebrew Bible reveal a curious preponderance of 'sign acts' in the books associated with Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Although developed over many decades, these prophetic traditions frame themselves as responses to the crises of the sixth century, most notably the destruction of Jerusalem and the involuntary displacement of many of Judah's inhabitants. It is widely recognised that these events were highly traumatic for the individuals and communities involved and that these traumas are reflected in the books' contents as well as their formation. This paper proposes that the unusual number of sign acts in these traditions may be understood in similar terms. Trauma, as is well known, frequently manifests in loss of language. In the face of unspeakable trauma, the prophets are depicted as deploying their bodies in lieu of words.
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The Kingdom of Heaven and Baal-Perazim: New Light on Matthew 11:12
Program Unit: Matthew
Brandon Crowe, Westminster Theological Seminary
In their watershed commentary on Matthew, Davies and Allison claim that Matthew 11:12 “is, without a doubt, one of the NT’s great conundrums” (2:254). Does the kingdom of heaven forcefully advance, or does it suffer violence? Though the options are well known, surprisingly few new suggestions have been proffered to solve the conundrum.
In this paper I seek to bring new light to this old debate by considering a new background from Israel’s Scriptures: the climactic breakthrough of the Davidic kingdom at Baal-perazim in 2 Samuel 5. I argue this victory over the Philistines solidified the Davidic kingdom and provides part of the requisite background for understanding Jesus’s statement about the kingdom of heaven in Matthew 11:12.
I pursue this argument in three steps. 1) First, I first provide context for debates surrounding Matthew 11:12, including the difficulties of translating βιάζεται.
2) Second, I discuss the likely correlations between the eschatological breakthrough of Micah 2:13 and Jesus’s point in Matthew 11:12. This intertext has often been suggested—both historically (e.g., Calvin) and in more recent years (e.g., Notley)—but the verbal parallels are not overly impressive. Even so, the relationship to Micah 2:13 is promising, even as it does not solve all the questions.
3) Third, in light of the parallels to Micah 2:13, I argue that 2 Samuel 5 is requisite background for ascertaining the point in Matthew 11:12. David’s victory over the Philistines in 2 Samuel 5 marked a significant breakthrough for his kingdom, and provides a Matthean precedent for the advance of the kingdom of heaven. This Davidic background accords with the pervasive Davidic dimensions of Matthean kingdom language, and supports the translation “the kingdom of heaven forcefully advances.”
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“Because They Pursued the Gods of Edom”: The Role of Coalition Building in the Origin of “Edomite” Religion
Program Unit: Israelite Religion in Its Ancient Context
Brad Crowell, Drake University
Developments in the archaeology of Edom over the past twenty years have informed our understanding of Edomite history and culture, including the earliest development of what would become Edomite religion. This paper will argue that the uniquely Edomite form of religion formed during a period when pastoral and nomadic groups settled in the Wadi Faynan and participated in the copper exploitation and production that flourished in early Iron Age. Using theories related to coalition building and cooperation among pastoral groups, this paper will focus on the rise of the little-known god Qaus to prominence within the Edomite pantheon. Several scholars now suggest this area as also being the origin of Yahweh, highlighting the importance the nomadic religions of this region for the history of the religion of Judah.
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Ironic Contestations as a Care Strategy in Lamentations
Program Unit: Minoritized Criticism and Biblical Interpretation
Gregory Cuéllar, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
In terms of the poetics of the sacred in Lamentations, this chapter focuses on how irony in this book models a mode of liberating care for those traumatized by imperial violence. For central to this strategy of care was not simply an affirmation of survival but a validation of human agency, resilience, and resistance in the midst of imperial violence and colonial subjugation. Through irony, in other words, the poet of Lamentations was able to counter the empire’s system of representation by affirming and preserving a worldview untainted by imperial conquest. Here, the human agency of the poet was not content with just staying alive; instead, the desired aim was to advance the poet’s wounded self beyond a melancholic state and toward healing and liberation from postcolonial trauma. This is indeed sacred poetry—when human agency reveals itself through modes of resistance such as irony in order to liberate the wounded self from the annihilating forces of empire.
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Growing a Branch of Jesse from the Seed of Babylon: Reconsidering Zerubbabel’s Davidic Heritage
Program Unit: Literature and History of the Persian Period
Marshall A. Cunningham, University of Chicago
This paper explores the possibility that the Davidic genealogy offered for Zerubbabel in 1 Chronicles 3.17–19 is best understood as an ideologically motivated explanation for the political history of early Persian period Judea. The passage establishes continuity between the Davidic-ruled kingdom of Judah and the Persian province of Yehud that ultimately succeeded it by providing one of Yehud earliest governors with Davidic ancestry. In 1 Chr 3, the only passage to explicitly connect Zerubbabel with the former ruling house, the governor is identified as the son of Pedaiah and the grandson of the exiled king Jehoiachin. Importantly, these details are at odds with the earliest reference to Zerubbabel’s parentage in the book of Haggai. In Haggai’s opening verse Shealtiel is the name given for Zerubbabel’s father, without further lineage recognized (cf. Ezra 3.2). Notably, Shealtiel also appears in 1 Chr 3.17–18, where he is listed as the brother of Pedaiah (and thus Zerubbabel’s uncle). This discrepancy need reflect a textual corruption or scribal error (cf. the OG of this passage); rather it reflects a different approach to lending legitimacy to Zerubbabel’s appointment as governor. While earlier sources like Haggai and Zech 1–8 appealed to traditionalist Royal Judean imagery and symbols from the monarchic period (e.g. the seal/signet, language of divine choice, and Zerubbabel as “branch”) to outline their expectations for his political career, the Chronicler made these connections explicit by constructing a Davidic lineage for Zerubbabel and his descendants. This move would parallel the roughly contemporary example of Darius I’s efforts to establish himself as a descendent of Cyrus the Great in the Behisitun inscription. Beyond legitimizing Zerubbabel’s rule through a connection to the previous Judean dynasty, the move also serves the Chronicler’s broader theological program of reaffirming Yahweh’s promise to David of an unbroken line (1 Chr 17). By incorporating Zerubbabel into the house of David, the Chronicler argues that the dissolution of the kingdom of Judah in the 6th century did not mean the end of the line for Yahweh’s chosen royal family; rather it continued unbroken (albeit with geographic disruption) through Yehud’s earliest governors.
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Mechanisms for Cultic Change in Achaemenid Uruk and Yehud
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Joe Morgan Currie, Harvard University
The Achaemenid Empire fomented at least two drastic cultic changes. In Babylonia, the city of Uruk realigned its millennia-old patronage affiliation from Ishtar to Anu. Far to the west, Jerusalem began to codify the rituals, texts, and cosmologies of Second Temple Judaism—an assemblage so distinct from earlier Yahwisms one could almost claim that the Yehudi elite structured the Temple cult around a different Yahweh altogether. Regarding these two roughly contemporaneous cultic transformations, Eckart Frahm (2002) has noted several analogies between the shifts in their cosmological imaginations, namely their trend towards monolatrous devotion. Meanwhile, Angelika Berlejung (2009) has explored the motif of “restoration” as weaponized by texts (especially Ezra-Nehemiah) from both Uruk and Jerusalem to justify the cultic transformations. While Frahm and Berlejung highlight the two cities’ similar cosmological shifts and ideological strategies, this paper explores the underlying mechanism for cultic transformation. Following the work of Paul-Alain Beaulieu (2018) and Caroline Waerzeggers (2004), I analyze the ramifications of the 484 BCE Babylonian Revolt upon Uruk’s cultic landscape. Faced with this disloyalty from the Babylonian families overseeing Uruk, the Achaemenids summarily removed them from power and replaced them with more loyal local Urukean families (who happened to prefer Anu devotion). These newly-empowered local elites then shifted imperial patronage and cultic politics towards their own cultic agendas. I propose that this mechanism for cultic change in Uruk—the Achaemenid shuffling of local elites due to perceived loyalty—can offer a useful model for understanding the cultic transformation of Yehud. In particular, I argue that Ezra-Nehemiah encodes memories of a very real intra-elite struggle for status as “loyal” subjects. This Achaemenid perception of Yehudi loyalties, much like in Uruk, ultimately determined the fate of Jerusalem’s cult.
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Pilgrimage and the Early Jerusalem Church
Program Unit: Jewish Christianity / Christian Judaism
Michael Daise, College of William and Mary
In an incisive paper delivered in 1998 to the SBL Seminar on Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins (published 2004), Dennis Smith proposed that some evidence traditionally taken to support an early Jerusalem church can, in fact, be explained through the convention of pilgrimage. “[T]he fact that Cephas was in Jerusalem for Paul to visit for fifteen days, and James was there for him to ‘see,’ does not necessarily mean that they both lived in Jerusalem and were leaders of the Jerusalem church. It could simply mean they were there during a festival season, for example, since it was quite common for Jews to make frequent pilgrimages to Jerusalem…”
The sweeping scope of this inference cannot be fully borne by Paul’s language in Galatians 1 and must be tempered. Its gist, however, is capable of much broader support; and in this paper I seek to buttress it along three further lines of inquiry: the festal connotations surrounding the “fifteen days” of Paul’s stay with Cephas (e.g., an eight-day khag prefaced by seven days purification); indications of pilgrimage Sitze im Leben throughout Acts 1-7 (Pentecost/Acts 2, of course, but also elsewhere, e.g., Stephen’s diasporic opponents); and (c) Luke’s historiographical potential (drawn from his use of other sources) to recast pilgrimage stories as a Galilean relocation to Jerusalem. Building on Smith, I will ask, Might it be that the Lukan narrative of an immediate Jerusalem church is woven from stories of early apostolic attendance at khaggim? That “to go up to the apostles in Jerusalem” was to expect such attendance as a mechanism for early catholicity?
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Qumran Studies and the First Generation of Christian Judaism
Program Unit: Qumran
Michael Daise, College of William and Mary
In his recent monograph, Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins (Baylor, 2018), Simon Joseph launches a welcome re-examination of ‘the complex relationships among Qumran, the historical Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian origins within first-century Palestinian Judaism’. After reviewing scholarship on these relationships, and offering an account of the Yakhad updated by recent scholarship (maintaining support for the Qumran-Essene hypothesis), he revisits messianic, eschatological, halakhic and cultic aspects of Qumran literature in relation to Jesus, but only begins to do the same for the generation which followed—particularly, its ‘Qumran/Essene-like’ portrait in the Acts of the Apostles.
In the interests of reconsidering the relation between the Scrolls, their sectarian community/ies and the wider culture of Second Temple Judaism, this paper will build on Simon’s reappraisal by applying scrutiny more rigorously to this portrait in Acts. Specifically, it will ask three questions: How do earlier academic conceptions of the Acts community as ‘Qumran/Essene-like’ (as well as Simon’s own updated précis of the Yakhad) fare in light of the more complex, nuanced parsing of Qumran literature in recent studies? What can (and cannot) be said about the relationship between the Scrolls and the Acts community now? And to what extent might the (ostensible) parallels between the two be laid at the door of Hellenistic historiography? That is, if Eusebius will later trace 4th century catholic praxis to Therapeutae, what might it mean for Luke to cast 1st century members of ‘the Way’ as Essene?
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There Remains a Sabbatismos: Divine and Human Rest in Hebrews 3–4 in Light of Early Jewish Sabbath Discourse
Program Unit: Hebrews
Jeffrey M. Dale, Baylor University
The motif of “rest” dominates the section of Hebrews that extends from 3:7 to 4:13. Some have argued that “rest” in this passage should be understood in light of gnostic parallels (or, more recently, Middle Platonism), while others have contended that Jewish apocalyptic literature offers a better basis for comparison. Without in any way denying the importance of exploring the background of the “rest” concept directly, I propose to explore the background of the passage from a somewhat different angle, that of Jewish Sabbath discourse. Such a comparison seems promising because the passage twice associates the “rest” concept with Sabbath observance. In 4:4, God’s rest is defined in terms of ceasing from his works on the seventh day of creation. Then in 4:9, the possibility of humans entering God’s rest is represented as a “Sabbath rest” (σαββατισμὸς) that remains for God’s people.
My comparative analysis will situate the discussion in Hebrews against the backdrop of Sabbath discourse in Jubilees, Philo, and rabbinic traditions (focusing on the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael). Not only do these sources represent three different streams of Jewish thought, but also each discusses theoretical matters pertaining to the Sabbath (i.e., origin, significance, conceptual associations, and the meaning of rest). In other words, these authors give attention to the underpinnings of divine and human Sabbath rest. Turning to Hebrews, I will argue that the author shares in certain perspectives seen in the aforementioned texts as I trace the main contours of the argument in Heb 3–4. With regard to divine rest, the author asserts that God has been in a perpetual state of Sabbath rest since creation (4:3–4), and yet perpetual rest does not mean inactivity (cf. 3:9). This perspective seems to draw on philosophical ideas like those attested in the writings of Philo, who portrays the Sabbath as a universal festival premised on God’s contemplation of his created works (see Opif. 89; Decal. 97). God is a perpetual keeper of festival, but his rest is “a working with absolute ease” (Cher. 87). With regard to human rest, the author of Hebrews speaks of an eschatological possibility available to the audience of entering by faith into God’s own perpetual Sabbath (4:1–2, 9–10) at any time (“as long as it is called ‘today,’” 3:13). Here the perspective is similar to certain rabbinic traditions (m. Tamid 7:4; b. Sanh. 97a; Mek. R. Ishmael, Shabbata 1) that mention a coming age of perpetual Sabbath. The author of Hebrews capitalizes on this perspective but insists that the age to come has already arrived (cf. Heb 6:5). The author engages with these various Jewish perspectives but redeploys them in service of an exhortation to participate in the rest of salvific fulfillment. In short, analyzing Heb 3–4 against the backdrop of Sabbath discourse helps clarify the passage’s function: it calls its audience to join with God in celebrating a perpetual Sabbath of completion and fulfillment, something that is possible because Jesus has already led the way into this eschatological reality.
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The Common Text Project: Some Essential Features
Program Unit: Nida Institute
Stephen Daley, SIL International
By its very name, the Common Text Project wears its vision on its sleeve, but not all of its intricacies are visible there. Focusing on Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, the project seeks to recognize all of the textual issues that are pertinent to Bible translators, collate the ancient sources, published evaluations, and a sampling of modern translations at these locations, then describe and analyze each issue before identifying a best practice solution for Bible translators, the project’s primary audience. But there is more. With a foray into the Letter of Pseudo-Aristeas and a look at further examples and illustrations, this paper seeks to elucidate some of the Common Text Project’s essential features.
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Enabled Matriarchs and a Disabled Patriarch: An Examination of the Matriarchs’ Barrenness and Jacob’s Impairment in Genesis
Program Unit: Healthcare and Disability in the Ancient World
Mary Dance Berry, Duke University
“Am I in the place of God?”: This question that Jacob asks Rachel in Genesis 30:2 highlights the presence of a divine-human boundary that constitutes a theme in the book of Genesis which becomes especially clear in YHWH’s creation and removal of disabilities. Specifically, YHWH disables Jacob at Jabbok because Jacob acted as God each time he tried to claim chosenness for himself. By disabling Jacob, YHWH ensures that Jacob can no longer wrestle what he wants for himself—as when he grabbed Esau’s heel, convinced Esau to sell his birthright, and tricked Isaac into offering his blessing—and alters his way of being in the world. Jacob is no longer the primary actor who shapes his narrative, suggesting that his cultural category has shifted. Conversely, because the men in the matriarchs’ lives overstepped the divine-human boundary in orchestrating and offering up these women’s lives—as in the wife-sister tales and Laban’s daughter swap—YHWH responds as only YHWH can by enabling the matriarchs to bear children. In so doing, YHWH removes the matriarchs’ disability of infertility. This argument extends the work of disability studies within biblical studies; using the cultural model of disability, I argue that Jacob’s impairment and the matriarchs’ infertility constitute disabilities and draw together these instances of divine disabling and enabling. Additionally, I employ a feminist lens in attending to the suffering the matriarchs experienced.
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Engine Behind Tafsir Production in the Malay-Indonesian World at the Turn of the 20th Century
Program Unit: The Societal Qur'an (IQSA)
Majid Daneshgar, University of Freiburg
A large number of commentaries on the Qur’an reached the Malay-Indonesian world through the core lands of Islam. Given the role of the printing industry in Cairo and Mecca, on one hand, and the huge number of Malay students based in Egypt and Arabia, on the other, Malay-Indonesians soon had access to classical and modern commentaries. Bombay also contributed to the production of what was important for Malays, including their commentaries in the 1910s (Proudfoot 1994). Likewise, local presses had been founded in the Malay-Indonesian world since the 16th century. They republished bilingual dictionaries, Christian literature, the Qur’an as well as Arabic-Malay copies of Islamic literature, among other materials (e.g., Gallop 1990; Kaptein 1993; Proudfoot 1995). They later began to publish Arabic Qur’anic commentaries. This began with the first Singaporean edition of Tafsir al-Baydawi (?) between 1884–85 and an anonymous Tafsir Juz’ ‘Amma before 1887 (Proudfoot 1993, 496–97). In line with printing classical commentaries, translations of Egyptian and South Asian tafsirs (e.g., ‘Abduh, Jawhari and Maulana Muhammad ‘Ali, respectively) were published in various corners of the archipelago such as Batavia, Penang, Singapore, etc. However, the literature is silent on how and under what circumstances tafsirs were printed in the Malay-Indonesian world. In this regard, I aim to map the reproduction, translation and printing of Tafsir by local publishers, which led to the circulation of this genre of Islamic sciences among Malays. In so doing, I will rely on under-examined local catalogues and publishers’ notes about the most important classical and modern tafsirs in the region. This study also invites readers to become cognizant of the fact that what have already been called [Islamo-Arabic] Classics in the Arab world (contra, El Shamsy 2020), are not necessarily considered so in different contexts like the multicultural and multinational Southeast Asia.
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Under Divine Protection: Rethinking Infant Baptism in Roman North Africa
Program Unit: Inventing Christianity: Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, and Martyrs
Carly Daniel-Hughes, Concordia University - Université Concordia
This paper reconsiders debates in North African Christian sources about infant baptism, focusing on the writings of Tertullian and Cyprian of Carthage. Moving the emphasis from Tertullian or Cyprian’s own agendas, this paper asks what their debates over baptism tell us about the motivations of those seeking this rite for their infants. While these Christian writers come to differing conclusions about the practice—Tertullian rejects it, Cyprian expressly advocates it—both reveal that parents in their Christ assemblies sought out this ritual, and perhaps especially in cases where an infant was ill or even dying. The practice of infant baptism, I suggest, points to prevalent conceptions of and concern about this early stage of human life. Evident but rarer in other parts of the Roman Mediterranean, this practice was ubiquitous in Roman North Africa by the fourth century. What might have given rise to it among members of North African Christ assemblies? High infant mortality rates and the uncertainties attending pregnancy and childbirth heightened the sensibility that infancy was a momentous and delicate time. Ancient people built up various responses to managing the threat of death and the transition from birth to infancy and childhood. Often these entailed ritually incorporating infants, either near their birth and even in the case of their untimely deaths, into domestic and social networks by placing them under the protection of a god. Considering archaeological, epigraphic and literary sources for these practices, this paper speculates that parents in North Africa could have imbued infant baptism with meanings drawn from Romano-Punic cultic approaches to the precarity and uniqueness of this phase of life.
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Reworking Metaphors of Temple in Second Temple Judaism
Program Unit: Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation
Rachel Danley, University of Aberdeen
This paper will engage temple imagery using analytical tools from Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Spatiality. The Temple as both a physical and ideological entity has served as a rich foundation for conceptualizations of God and his relationship with the world particularly in the biblical theology movement. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) affirms this reality with the understanding that all meaning is embodied and that humans make sense of the world through metaphors. Within Second Temple Judaism, the experience of the Temple and its concerns for purity in relation to the holy presence of God saturate daily life. For this reason, the Temple becomes a significant resource for understanding God and people as it is engaged within the literature of Second Temple Judaism.
In conjunction with CMT, Critical Spatiality provides a valuable complement to identify how ideology and physical space relate to one another. Critical Spatiality (CS) asserts that humans are constructing and participating in social space whether consciously or unconsciously. As a discipline CS shares with CMT the belief that meaning is always embodied. Critical Spatiality analyzes physical Firstspace, ideological Secondspace, and the lived social world of Thirdspace to identify how people participate in, create, and recreate space. Within ideological Secondspace, metaphors provide understanding for our practices (Thirdspace) and how we conceive of our physical environment (Firstspace). Second Temple Judaism engages a variety of metaphors for understanding the physical Temple (e.g. TEMPLE AS MICROCOSM, TEMPLE AS THE CENTER OF COSMOS) as well as metaphorical reworkings of spaces beyond the Jerusalem Temple (e.g. SOUL AS TEMPLE, HEAVEN AS TEMPLE, COMMUNITY AS TEMPLE).
This paper will consider how CS can be integrated fruitfully with CMT to identify conceptualizations and reconceptualizations of the Temple in a selection of literature from Philo (e.g. Prov. 2.64; Somn. 1.149), Qumran (e.g. Songs of Sabbath Sacrifice; 1QS), and the Fourth Gospel (John 2). Each of these communities provide a unique perspective in respect to the temple. Rather than emphasizing the polarization of these communities in relation to the temple, I hope to show that they share a common value for the temple even though this is conceptualized and lived out in a variety of ways.
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Prov 30–31 MT and Prov 30–31 LXX: Different Concepts of Wisdom
Program Unit: Transmission of Traditions in the Second Temple Period
Frederique Dantonel, Goethe Universitaet Frankfurt am Main
The text of the Hebrew Bible (BHQ) and the text of the Greek Bible (Septuagint) have striking differences. Differences in the arrangement of verses and in some cases even of chapters, differences in semantics, differences in the choice of lexemes, differences and nuances in meanings which cannot be explained only by the differences in syntactic structures. Such differences can be found for all books of the Old Testament, including the book of Proverbs.
The aim of the paper is to answer to which extent the wisdom concepts of Prov 30-31 MT and Prov 30-31 LXX unfold in the foreground of the respective traditions of these two texts. To this end, the research question is explored as to whether, how, and why the ideas and the concepts of wisdom of Prov 30 and 31 MT differ from those of Prov 30 and 31 LXX.
The focus, then, is on a comparison between the Hebrew text and the Greek text. The Hebrew text (BHQ) is always the reference and the starting point for the comparison.
This presentation aims to show how the wisdom concepts found in Prov 30-31 MT and LXX unfold in the foreground of the respective traditions of these two texts. My thesis is that the different wisdom concepts unfolded in Prov 30-31 MT and in Prov 30-31 LXX can give precise clues to the respective different tradition backgrounds in the foreground of which they are systematized. In a first part, the specific problem of the text of the LXX in contrast to the text of the Masoretes is explained, and then in a second part the different wisdom concepts are elaborated on the basis of precisely selected textual examples. This text-critical, lexical, and semantic investigation leads to several insights into the different wisdom concepts presented by the two texts. It will be the subject of the third part.
Two prominent evidences result from the study:
In Prov 30-31 MT, wisdom is related to God, the Creator.
According to the creation account in the Priesterschrift, God created the world and brought about a certain order. This order is good. The wisdom of mankind consists in fitting into this good order created by God. This gives rise to the concept of cosmotheistic wisdom.
In Prov 30-31 LXX, on the other hand, the focus is on man. Man is directly addressed as the wise one. Man proves himself wise by behaving as the righteous one in society. This righteousness results from faithfulness to the law, from a good education, and from a sense of responsibility. This is the concept of an educational wisdom.
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The Riddles of Galatians 6:16: Isaiah 54:10's Contribution?
Program Unit: Scripture and Paul
A. Andrew Das, Elmhurst University
Many interpreters have been persuaded of an allusion to Isa. 54:10 in Gal. 6:16. If so, does that allusion provide any leverage on the key issues of the verse? The most articulate advocate of the Isa. 54:10 allusion contends that the Isaianic text confirms the inclusion of the gentiles in Israel. Despite the usual confidence among commentators that Paul integrates gentiles into the Israel of God, the Galatian context provides equal justification for a continuation of the distinction between Jew and gentile. The Septuagintal context of Isa. 54:15 provides some support for gentiles joining Israel, as does recent work on the Septuagintal translation of Isaiah. Further, some Isaianic interpreters have concluded that the gentiles will join Israel at a future point as circumcised proselytes. Still others point to Second Temple traditions of proselytism and the eschatological pilgrimage pattern, and the role Isaianic texts have played in these traditions. Ultimately, this paper contends that an allusion to Isa. 54:10 would be supportive of a continued distinction between the gentiles and the Israel of God.
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"As God Said by Isaiah the Prophet (CD 4:13)": Constructing Unity in the Book of Isaiah in the Second Temple Period
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
David Davage, Umeå Universitet
In a recent survey of research on the "book" of Isaiah, the history of research is summarized as follows: "from the prophet Isaiah to the three books to the one book of Isaiah." So put, it highlights that the issue of unity in Isaiah has long been at the center of scholarly discussion. It also indicates a shift in perspective: away from the prophet, and towards the ”final form” of the book. But how should the relation between the two be conceived of when it is quite clear that the “final form” is the result of a long process of formation? To answer these questions, this paper will focus on the way the relation between the figure Isaiah and the book that bears his name is conceptualized in the Dead Sea Scrolls. More specifically, I will, after a review of the shape of Isaiah throughout the Isaiah scrolls, pay close attention to the pesharim that quote from the book of Isaiah, especially those who do so by mentioning the prophet’s name. The aim is to formulate a “native” model of how unity is constructed in the book of Isaiah in light of the figure Isaiah in the Second Temple Period.
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Historically Heightened Synchrony: Reading Isaiah in Imperial and Digital Ages
Program Unit: Israelite Prophetic Literature
Steed Vernyl Davidson, McCormick Theological Seminary
In comparison to the untidy and repetitious book of Jeremiah, Robert Carroll regards Isaiah as “encyclopedic” (1995, 39). In this sense, Isaiah is a more modernist book that has been subject to the fragmentary impulses of diachronic approaches. However, synchrony still does not make Isaiah an intelligible book with a coherent sense. Accepting that purely synchronic approaches to Isaiah at best leaves us with a book built upon a pretext and that exclusively diachronic approaches potentially distort the center of gravity of the book, this paper reassessing strategies for reading Isaiah. The paper proposes an approach to reading Isaiah where its final form reveals the traces of its textual growth. Rather than an encyclopedia that supplements previous editions, Isaiah reads best as an email thread where subsequent transmissions build upon and extend prior transmissions, leaving visible traces of those prior transmissions in order to make the entire email thread intelligible. The paper, therefore, proposes a synchronic reading of Isaiah that highlights its diachronic marks. After an exploration of relevant scholarship on synchronic and diachronic readings of Isaiah, the paper explores the notion of Isaiah as a threaded email that reveals previous traces of correspondences by way of two main foci in the book. First, the recharacterization of Zion from whore to preferred bride helps to make sense of historically earlier oracles of judgment grounded in the Assyrian threat as well as the hopeful oracles that date to the Persian era. Secondly, the recharting from a limited geography in earlier portions of the book that do not look much further than Jerusalem to more expansive geographical perspectives in later stages as the scene of Israel's mission and future to help make sense of the positioning of the oracles against the nations and other related texts. The paper ends with the assertion that the historically heightened synchronic approach builds upon imperial and power realities that shape the growth of Isaiah and propels its readings in contemporary contexts.
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Patrick Miller, the Psalms, and Preaching the Old Testament
Program Unit: Book of Psalms
Ellen F. Davis, Duke University
This presentation will review the work of Patrick D. Miller, the preacher, particularly in his published collection, Stewards of the Mysteries of God: Preaching the Old Testament--and the New (Cascade, 2013).
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Divine Ambition in Mesopotamian Incantation Prayers
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Ryan Conrad Davis, Brigham Young University
In the Hebrew Bible, there are many indications that, from the Israelites’ perspective, Yahweh had ambition. The Hebrew Bible tells of a god who was largely unknown and unrecognized yet foresees his power and influence one day bringing peace to all peoples and lands. In Assyrian royal discourse, Assur has plenty of ambition as well. Assur was the patron deity of a single city, yet Assur’s ambition to extend his land and tame the chaos outside of it was the primary motivator cited by Assyrian propaganda for extending Assyrian influence and imposing Assur’s yoke over other lands. The question that prompts this paper is: How often was this kind of ambition attributed to the gods of the Near East? Did ancient adherents to other Near Eastern gods attribute to them hopes and ambitions of rising above their current stations? As scholars have examined the rise in prominence of various gods, they have mostly taken an outsider perspective in which they see past traditions reanalyzed and reworked in response to changing political and ideological circumstances. This paper, however, attempts to explore how divine ambition may have been an important part of divine personalities from an insider perspective. As a way into this question, I am investigating signs of divine ambition in Mesopotamian incantation prayers of the first-millennium BCE. Even though this collection of prayers assumes that the gods of Mesopotamia formed a stable heavenly society, there are indications that those performing the incantation prayers expected the gods to want more than the status quo. For example, these prayers address each god or goddess as if he or she is the top of the pantheon, and they promise an elevated social status to the deities when the prayer is answered. The prayers also allude to the Enūma Eliš, indicating that the addressed god or goddess can, like Marduk, ascend the ranks of the divine realm. One incantation prayer written for use with any personal god calls him the “creator of all peoples” (K 3177+ i 55’), making the case that an individual’s personal god is often more important than most acknowledge. Understanding how divine ambition may have been an important element of divine personalities from an ancient Near Eastern perspective may help us better understand how Yahweh’s story could have developed how it did, and why so many could believe that the god of a small backwater nation could one day rule the world.
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Harry Potter and Janet Osteen Teach the Extrabiblical Gospels
Program Unit: Teaching Biblical Studies in an Undergraduate Liberal Arts Context
Cindy Dawson, Rice University
When teaching the extrabiblical gospels, it is difficult to wrest the narrative away from the church fathers and to convey how these gospels may have been received by their original communities. To overcome this challenge, I begin the unit by describing a more contemporary scenario: a fictional author, Janet Osteen, publishes an article denouncing popular books that are so consumed with witches, wizards, and magic, the entire series is named after its most famous wizard, Harry Potter. I describe the series from her point of view, but because the students grew up in the Harry Potter era and know the franchise, they immediately hear the bias in her argument.
Next we speculate. What if the Harry Potter books disappeared so completely that future generations’ only knowledge of them was via Ms. Osteen’s article: how would their understanding of those books be distorted? What if, 2000 years from now, archaeologists suddenly discovered the books themselves? By the time I introduce the Gospel of Thomas in the second half of the class, we are prepared to meet this gospel—and others that follow—on their own terms, to embrace their “strangeness,” and to critically engage with questions of church history, authority, and canon.
We utilize to this comparison between Harry Potter and extracanonical gospels throughout the course (for example, when discussing the problems of multitext conflation in the Jewish-Christian gospels, we remember Harry’s beloved mentor, Gandalf). Since these gospels are unfamiliar to the majority of undergrads, these contemporary characters’ repeated appearance not only aids in assimilation of new knowledge, it provides a welcome respite.
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Matthew’s Authoritative Jesus: Reading Matt 19:16–30 as a Transposition of Deut 8–10
Program Unit: Intertextuality in the New Testament
WITHDRAWN: Kathy Barrett Dawson, East Carolina University
In Pamlimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, Gérard Genette delineates a theory of intertextuality, which he refers to as hypertextuality. Hypertextuality occurs when an earlier text, the hypotext, forms the basis for and is transformed by a later text, the hypertext. If the hypertext is intended as a serious piece of literature, Genette holds that the later writing can significantly transform the original meaning of the hypotext by placing emphasis on new ideas while at the same time presenting the characters and events in a new time and place. Genette refers to this type of hypertextuality as transposition.
Although Dale Allison in The New Moses: A Matthean Typology proposed over twenty-five years ago that the Gospel of Matthew depicted Jesus as “the new Moses,” he did not discuss Matt 19:16-30 in detail. I argue that the Matthean redaction of Mark 10:17-31 directly relates to Moses’s speech as Israel is preparing to cross the Jordan and enter into the land. For example, in 19:17 Matthew changes the Markan Jesus’s statement to the man’s inquiry about obtaining eternal life from τὰς ἐντολὰς οἶδας (10:19) to εἰ δὲ θέλεις εἰς τὴν ζωὴν εἰσελθεῖν, τήρησον τὰς ἐντολάς. The Matthean Jesus makes his answer conditional on keeping the commandments rather than simply knowing them. In his speech, Moses continually stresses that successful entrance into the land is conditional on keeping all the commandments. In contrast to Mark 10:21, the Matthean Jesus does not state that the young man lacks anything after the latter says πάντα ταῦτα ἐφύλαξα (19:20). Rather, in Matthew the young man asks what he lacks (τί ἔτι ὑστερῶ;). The Matthean account is in agreement with Moses’s statement in Deut 8:9 that the Hebrews will lack nothing in the land if they keep the commandments. Additionally, Deut 8-10 makes reference to poverty and wealth and insists that godly justice provides food and clothing for the sojourner, the orphan and the widow (i.e., the poor). Reading this portion of Matthew as a transposition of Deut 8-10 also helps clarify the meaning of 19:28.
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Catherine Malabou’s Affect Theory of Plasticity as an Aid in Understanding Rom 3:27–31
Program Unit: Bible and Emotion
WITHDRAWN: Kathy Barrett Dawson, East Carolina University
In her article, “Following Generation,” Catherine Malabou proposes her affect theory of plasticity in which a reader, who is an inheritor of a particular tradition, plays both an active and a passive role in engendering the inheritance itself. Her theory discusses precedence and causality as components of affect theory’s understanding of consciousness. By using the example deconstruction, Malabou understands the reader of a particular text as participating in a process of deconstructing the text, which in turn creates a new structure by the very process of deconstruction. In this way, the inheritor of a text can no longer read the text in a past state of peace. On the contrary, the inheritor will find a new structure that originates out of the process of deconstruction. I contend that this is the very process that led Paul to engender his previous understanding of his inherited “law” with the new meaning or structure that he labeled “the law of faith” (Rom 3:27). In light of his experience with Christ and through a process much like Malabou’s theory of plasticity, Paul deconstructed his previous understanding of δικαιοσύνη (righteousness) in the law (Phil 3:6) and realized a new structure that erupted through the deconstruction of his previous understanding. This new structure now claimed that the δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ was διὰ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ εἰς πάντας τοὺς πιστεύοντας (Rom 3:22). I will argue that the theory of plasticity helps explain the emotions of Paul as expressed in his understanding of righteousness as explained in Rom 3:27-31 and in his following example of the faith of Abraham in Rom 4.
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Ethics of Genesis 9:20–27
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Quonekuia Day, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
Accepted paper for the IBR research group on Difficult Texts in the OT.
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The Transmission of the Pentateuch in the Last Centuries BCE: A Study of Variants Due to Graphic Similarity between MT and SP
Program Unit: Transmission of Traditions in the Second Temple Period
Hila Dayfani, Oxford University
This paper focuses on variants due to graphic similarity in the two comprehensive Hebrew traditions of the Pentateuch – the Masoretic text and the Samaritan Pentateuch. It presents a comprehensive corpus of all these variants and examines them from a broad perspective.
The paper presents a statistical analysis of the data, including a survey of the interchanging letters and the frequency of the interchanges. Moreover, it discusses the paleographic background of the interchanges and examines the shapes of the interchanging letters during each stage of development of the three relevant scripts – Hebrew script, square script, and Samaritan script. Through this process, it determines the script on which the interchanges occurred and the approximate chronological framework of the interchanges. That is, it identifies the stage at which there exist graphic similarities between the letters and when it is reasonable to presume the changes occurred. The statistical data emerging from the paleographic analysis shed light on the transmission distribution of Pentateuch in the Hasmonean and Herodian period.
The main innovation of the paper is the incorporation of methods from the paleographic realm in order to explore a known textual phenomenon that occurred during the transmission of scriptural texts. Paleographic analysis of variants due to graphic similarity serves as a new criterion pointing to scribal activity at certain periods during the transmission process.
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Deconstructing Western Epistemology: Delany’s Babel-17 and the Tower of Babel
Program Unit: Bible and Popular Culture
Tom de Bruin, Newbold College of Higher Education
The biblical narrative of the Tower of Babel has a rich tradition in popular culture, foundational to blockbusters and bestsellers alike. The biblical themes of unity and dispersion, language and civilization, human endeavour and arrogance have been productive in various ways. This paper will examine Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 (1966), considering the manner in which it uses the themes of unity and language to deconstruct Western epistemology. In Babel-17 the Tower of Babel becomes a fruitful tool to discuss the role of language in engaging with and envisioning the world. Additionally, it shows the power of science fiction as a lens to reimagine reality, specifically as a vehicle for cultural representations besides the white, male, middle-class mainstream. Delany’s vision of a difference-embracing, ethically-driven Babel-18 shows a new vision for the Tower of Babel through we which we may be encouraged to reimagine the world in which we live, and maybe even change it.
Samuel Delany is frequently considered one of the first African-American science fiction writers, and is a representative of the shift in sci-fi in the 1960s from physical sciences to social science. Building on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, in Babel-17 Delany creates a narrative where poets are heroes, languages are weapons, and miscommunication is the ultimate villain. The eponymous language Babel-17 is seemingly perfectly exact and objective, a reference to the pre-Babel universal language as well as to Western rationalist epistemology. Yet the narrative shows that it is exactly this lack of subjectivity that makes this language extremely dangerous. As it becomes increasingly clear that true objectivity precludes the self, and the self-critical process, Delany problematises the valorisation of objectivity. In the novel this objective language is weaponised to override the self, causing the language-learner to lose their identity and perception of reality.
As the poet-hero Rydra Wong learns Babel-17, she loses more and more control of herself. Having lost her Du Boisian double consciousness and having become forcibly initiated into the alien culture, she battles this loss of self-hood. As she struggles to keep her identity, she realises how to improve the language, creating a new language: Babel-18. Through this analogy Delany also suggests ways to improve Western epistemology, placing greater emphasis on ethics and creativity over rationalism and objectivity. Thus while Babel-17 hearkens back to the Tower of Babel a bastion to a unified and specifically uniform humanity, Babel-18 paradoxically represents a post-Babel language of difference and diversity as well as a pre-Babel language of unity.
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Ancient Fanfiction and the Expanded Universe
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
Tom de Bruin, Newbold College of Higher Education
In the last decade, a number of scholars have explored the usefulness of the critical field of Fan Studies for interpreting apocryphal or parabiblical writings. Many have found this field to offer a rich interpretive lens for understanding issues such as canon and canonicity, or examining subaltern, non-orthodox voices. Meredith Warren has demonstrated that just as fanfiction influences media canon, parabiblical texts also influence the biblical canon. Recently Kasper Bro Larsen has argued that fanfiction and early Christian Apocrypha have similar literary strategies and functions, suggesting that apocryphal writings both democratize the creation of meaning and gatekeep it. While certainly productive, many of these analyses do not to take the full economies, history and production contexts of contemporary fanfiction into account.
This paper presents initial results of monograph research into Fan Studies and Christian traditions, offering a more nuanced and historicized reading of the heuristic relationship between apocryphal writings and fanfiction, and considering the implications of this relationship for Early Christian scholarship. Engaging with Sarah Iles Johnston’s concept of the Greek mythic story world, characterised by hyperseriality and crossover, and Fan Studies research on affect and interpretative communities, I examine the influence that secondary Acts and Gospels had on both the reading of the oldest Christian narratives and on the actual world itself. I argue that apocryphal writings had a similar effect as the Greek mythic story world, reinforcing the believability of the earliest Christian narratives and continuity between the first century setting of Jesus and the disciples and the later production and reception contexts. Furthermore, I argue that in these communities that wrote, copied and transmitted apocryphal writings there was a cumulative effect that altered the perception and reception of the earlier narratives. These two facets will demonstrate the usefulness of the Fan Studies discourse in examining early Christian fiction.
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Ambrosiaster and Augustine: Would the Anonymous Commentator Have Been Pleased with His Role in Shaping the Augustinian Tradition?
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Theodore de Bruyn, Université d'Ottawa - University of Ottawa
Ambrosiaster, the anonymous Christian expositor living in Rome in the mid-fourth century, and Augustine are incommensurate in many respects: in ability, position, oeuvre, and significance. Yet they have been forever linked in Augustinian scholarship because of Augustine’s reference to Ambrosiaster’s work in his anti-Pelagian writings to support his interpretation of Rom. 5:12. It is likely that Augustine read at least some of Ambrosiaster’s commentaries on the Pauline letters when he himself began commenting on them. However, despite the echoes of language and ideas from Ambrosiaster in Augustine’s early writing on Romans and Galatians, Augustine’s approach to Paul’s Letter to the Romans is very different than Ambrosiaster’s. The difference emerges not merely in specific points of interpretation but more fundamentally in the narrative that underlies or motivates the reading of the letter. Underlying Ambrosiaster’s interpretation of Romans is an overarching soteriological drama: the story of how God rescues humankind from its subjugation to the devil. According to this narrative, the devil gained lawful dominion over humankind by successfully inducing the first human beings to transgress God’s command and lost that dominion by unjustly seeking to kill Jesus and hold him in the realm of the dead. Ambrosiaster refers to this narrative repeatedly as he seeks to make sense of Paul’s language in the Letter to the Romans. Augustine was familiar with this narrative; he summarizes it succinctly and eloquently in the third book of De libero arbitrio, which he wrote between 391 and 395 CE. But this is not the prevailing narrative in Augustine’s early works, composed between 386 and 396 CE. As is well known, in these works Augustine is preoccupied with his spiritual and intellectual pursuit of ways to return, or ascend, to God. Whereas Ambrosiaster read the Letter to the Romans as a narrative of the history of humankind, Augustine read it as a narrative of the history of each human being, especially as he himself experienced that history. In addition, Augustine was more of a philosopher than Ambrosiaster, and his manner of thinking was more syllogistic and, arguably, more incisive. These qualities of the interpreter and his interpretation led Augustine to conclusions that Ambrosiaster would probably have been unwilling to accept. My paper will illustrate the difference in approach and outcome by selectively comparing Ambrosiaster’s and Augustine’s reading of a few passages in the Letter to the Romans.
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Mystery, Wonder, and Praise: Encountering God as Teachers of His Word
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Mateus de Campos, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
Mystery, Wonder, and Praise: Encountering God as Teachers of his Word
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“Is It Too Late Now to Say Sorry?” Gen 6:6–7 and LXX’s Rendering of Anthropopathies
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Ellen De Doncker, Université Catholique de Louvain
In the recent development of a “Septuagint-theology” (e.g. Ausloos & Lemmelijn, 2020), ideological characteristics of LXX are examined. One of these characteristics concerns the presumed anti-anthropomorphic tendency of the Septuagint, where the Greek would avoid/attenuate humanlike imagery describing God (e.g. Rösel, 2006). The Greek translator would have been influenced by a tendency to spiritualize anthropomorphic and anthropopathic conceptions of God (Fritsch, 1943). Replies have been written, stating there is no anti-anthropomorphic tendency in LXX (e.g. Orlinsky, 1944; Wittstruck, 1967), but no consensus has been reached.
Anthropopathies attribute God humanlike emotions. One of the most striking anthropopathies of the Hebrew Bible, is the repentance of God. From a philosophical and theological point of view, the idea of God repenting clashes with the classical theism of an unchangeable God. Also within the Bible, Num. 23:19 states that God does not repent, since he is not a man. Nonetheless, the Bible mentions God repenting at multiple other occasions.
I aim to study one specific instance of God’s repentance, by analyzing closely Gen. 6:6-7. In the Hebrew Bible, these verses mention three times that God is repenting, twice using the verb nḥm (to repent), once connecting the verb ‘ṣb with ‘the heart of God’.
Throughout times, the LXX translation of these verses has been quickly discarded as anti-anthropomorphic (Fritsch, 1943; Harland, 1996; Wevers, 1993). Indeed, LXX-Gen 6:6-7 differs in a threefold way from the Hebrew text. Firstly, where the Hebrew speaks of repentance and grieving, the Greek uses the verbs enthumeomai/dianoeo and thumo-o; thus portraying a God who reflects and gets angry, instead of a repenting and grieving God. Secondly, the reference to God’s hart is not present in the LXX. Thirdly, LXX has theos instead of the expected kurios to translate the tetragrammaton. The LXX-variants are taken to be indices for the presumed anti-anthropomorphic/pathic tendency.
In contrast to this simplified view that characterizes the verses as solely anti-anthropopathic, I aim to analyze closely the Hebrew and Greek lexicon in order to assess how LXX understood its Vorlage. Thereupon, I will evaluate whether the LXX-variants stem from a different Vorlage, ideology (anti-anthropomorphism), or translation technique. The metonymic idiom of the heart will prove itself a crux interpretum in this undertaking. In the end, I aim to show how LXX-Gen 6:6-7 contains no mere anti-anthropomorphism but portrays a free and creative translation, in between interpretative translation and literal rendering.
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Reading as Ritual: Trajectories in Religious and Interpretive Practices in Mesopotamia and Early Judaism
Program Unit: Ritual in the Biblical World
Rodrigo F. de Sousa, Faculté Jean Calvin
This paper seeks to explore the connection between ritual and the reading of sacred texts in Mesopotamia and Early Judaism. In Mesopotamia, particularly in the Neo-Assyrian period, ritual and divinatory practices were highly technical activities, which required a class of specially trained individuals imbued with specific skills and familiarized with a sizeable body of knowledge. In this connection, it is common to distinguish between five distinct fields of activity: astrology, extispicy, incantation, medicine, and lamentation. A central skill required of scholars and diviners was the ability to interpret the meaning of signs. And it is the case in other communicative processes, the signs of divinatory practices were often ambiguous. This could result in different interpretations and the need to consult (and develop) both “canonical” and "non-canonical” written and oral traditions. Most significantly, the interpretation and manipulation of sacred signs and objects by Mesopotamian scholars regularly occurred in the context of ritual practices.
I argue that this scenario bears analogies with the reading of sacred texts in Early Judaism and that it is possible to identify trajectories of development from Mesopotamian divinatory rites to phenomena attested in apocalyptic literature and the Qumran pesharim. I argue further that some of the interpretive practices attested in these sources suggest that reading itself could be seen as a form of sacred ritual. My contention is that this study can illuminate both the discussion on the relationship between ritual and epistemology and our understanding of the history of interpretation of sacred texts. The theoretical perspectives that inform this paper include Victor Turner’s view of the use of symbols in ritual, and the debate between Clifford Geertz and Talal Asad on the role of symbols in religious epistemology.
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Analysis of the Formulation of the Exclusio of the Jews in the MT, OG, and AT Esther
Program Unit: Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature
Kristin De Troyer, Universität Salzburg
In the MT Esther 3:8-9, Haman, who is the main courtier at Ahasveros’s court, gives three reasons for the king to exclude people: first, that there is a certain people scattered and separated among the people in the king’s empire. Second, that these people have laws that are different from those of every other people. And finally, that these people do not keep the king’s laws.
In this threefold argumentation, the exclusion of one people is described. This ought to convince the king that it is not appropriate to tolerate these people. Subsequently, Haman proposes that a decree be issued for the destruction of the people. In this case, the exclusion as reported leads to the formulation of a Judaeophobic edict.
This paper will focus on the three arguments as listed. It will ask how the king and the reader were supposed to know who the people were. Then it will compare the formulation of the arguments in the three texts, that is the MT, OG and AT, with each other. Finally, the arguments as used will be compared with Jewish and Greek-Hellenistic texts of second century BCE.
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Comparing Esther and Vashti on All (Textual) Levels
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Historical Books
Kristin de Troyer, Universität Salzburg
For this paper, I have selected the texts from Esther chapter 1 and chapter 2 in which on the one hand the figure of Vashti is presented and on the other hand, that of Esther. I will compare the way in which the relationship between the king and Vashti and the king and Esther is described as as well as how both women are depicted in comparison with each other. I will do so on the levels of the Hebrew MT and the two Greek texts, with an occasional view at the Old Latin, where appropriate.
I will address the following questions: is the party that the king gives in chapter 1 a party to celebrate his marriage with Vashti? And how does it differ from the one he throws for Esther in chapter 2? And in which text versions can one observe which marriage party? And what is the relation between the party of the king and the one thrown by Vashti, and on which text level is there a link? And how do these questions and themes help us to understand the translation technique of the different books of Esther, their redactional traits of the different versions, and in general the textual complexities of the books of Esther? And how, on occasion, does the Vetus Latina play a role in our attempt to clarify the textual development of the texts.
This research and approach is part of a larger project (Die Tochterübersetzungen des Estherbuches) to critically describe the relationship between the different texts of the books of Esther.
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WITHDRAWN: Mystical Research as a Key Area in the Religious Discourse
Program Unit: Mysticism, Esotericism, and Gnosticism in Antiquity
Pieter G.R. de Villiers, University of the Free State
This paper will investigate how research on Jewish and Christian mystical texts initially overcame major challenges that relegated it to the fringes of the academic discourse to become a, if not the core area of research in contemporary scholarhip. It will firstly analyse what factors contributed to the growth and innovation of mystical research, including conceptualisation, data, adequate hermeneutics, comparative methodology. It will then ievaluate the controversy about historical and spiritual approaches to the interpretation of mystical texts as an important recent trend in the field with far reaching implications for understanding mystical texts. It will conclude with an analysis of experience and praxis as key issues in mystical research and a short proposal of further research that could innovate the field.
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Cleodemus Malchus: Abraham as “Ancestor of a Multitude of Nations”
Program Unit: Hellenistic Judaism
J. Cornelis de Vos, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Cleodemus Malchus, a fragment of whom is preserved in Josephus’s Antiquities (1.239–241) and Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica (9.20.2–4), connects descendants of Abraham and Keturah (Gen 25:1–4) with African peoples. The great-granddaughter of Abraham even becomes the spouse of Heracles.
In many ancient Jewish texts, Abraham figures as the ancestor of the Israelites in an exclusive way. In Cleodemus Malchus, however, Abraham and his offspring appear as ethnically inclusive.
In my paper I will compare background and aim of this ethnical inclusivity with contemporary historical circumstances.
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Cain’s Disease: Murder, Medicine, and Pedagogy in John Chrysostom’s Exegesis of the Cain and Abel Story
Program Unit: Biblical Exegesis from Eastern Orthodox Perspectives
Chris de Wet, University of South Africa
The purpose of this paper is to examine John Chrysostom’s exegesis the story of Cain and Abel. Chrysostom’s interpretation of this story has been selected specifically because of his rather peculiar construction of Cain. Chrysostom not only constructs Cain as a violent murderer and sinner, but as someone who becomes diseased in his soul and, eventually, his body, because of his acts of passion and violence. In Genesim homiliae 18 and 19, in particular, provide the reader with an exegetical construction of Cain that is especially informed by late ancient medical discourse. In these exegetical homilies, Chrysostom constructs Cain, medically, by having Cain’s psychic disease intersect with his body. Cain is punished with a trembling disease, almost like Parkinson’s Disease or Essential Tremor, which severely disables Cain. The analysis of Chrysostom’s interpretation therefore affords us the unique opportunity to investigate the complex intersections between discourses of conflict and violence, medicine and medical imagery, and the late ancient Christian exegetical and pedagogical imperative. The paper will ask first how Chrysostom understands the nature of Cain’s violent crime; and second, how he subsequently constructs Cain, medically, and to what ends. Thus, I shall first enquire into Chrysostom’s elaboration about the nature of the conflict between Cain and Abel (and God). In this section I shall focus especially on how the soul of Cain, and its various faculties, is delineated by Chrysostom. Thereafter, I shall examine how Cain is medically constructed and pathologised in Chrysostom’s exegesis, examining specifically the disease with which Cain is said to be cursed in the context of ancient Greco-Roman medicine. The main primary Chrysostomic sources for this paper are In Genesim homiliae 18 and 19, upon which most of the focus will fall, with shorter references and allusions in other works of Chrysostom.
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Nemesius of Emesa on Pleasure, Desire, and Sex: A Case of the Medical Making of Christian Sexual Culture
Program Unit: Healthcare and Disability in the Ancient World
Chris de Wet, University of South Africa
This paper examines Nemesius of Emesa’s views on pleasure, desire, and sex, specifically from his work, De natura hominis (late fourth century CE; Syria). While Nemesius is often neglected in modern scholarship, De natura hominis is an excellent example of how some early Christian authors directly appropriated medical discourse and practice in the shaping of Christian culture and society. The paper will focus specifically on how Nemesius combines his religious views with medical principles, specifically on the nature, purpose, and significance of pleasure, desire, and sexual intercourse and reproduction. I will ask how Nemesius constructs and regulates Christian sexuality by combining strategically selected medical and theological concepts about the soul and the body, and their relationship. I will also ask which medical views regarding sexuality were accepted by Nemesius, and why. Finally, the findings will be contextualized within the broader scope of Christian sexuality in Late Antiquity.
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Breaking and Remaking Wisdom: The Proverb as Fragmentary Knowledge
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Hans Decker, University of Oxford
In his description of the anthologies of sayings in Proverbs, Michael Fox compares the collection to a heap of jewels, emphasising their individuality and wholeness over proposals of elaborate literary structures. In this paper, I re-examine these notions of completeness in the wisdom saying, highlighting instead its fragmentary qualities inherent in the transmission and interpretation through a comparative model developed in conversation with the study of material culture and archaeology.
The paper begins with a discussion of John Chapman’s work in Neolithic settlements in the Balkan peninsula, where he discusses instances of fragmentation as part of the life cycle of things. In particular, he notes the ways in which the intentional breaking of objects may serve as a means of generating or transforming their meaning. Fragmentation can initiate a process of accumulation and enchainment that highlights the social cohesion that binds the pieces together.
Using Chapman’s discussion as a conceptual framework, I examine the essential incompleteness of the wisdom saying through a series of readings taken from the book of Ecclesiastes. In each of these passages, I explore different ways in which the proverbs are broken. Some of these sayings are seemingly marred by partial loss, whether through textual corruption or incomplete allusion. Other sayings are reused, but in ways that sit ill at ease with the tenor of the proverb when read on its own. Still other sayings—seemingly whole in themselves—are refashioned as a part of a larger whole through their combination into couplets. Finally, even the individual saying may be broken down through the process of interpretation.
In my examination of the final proverb fragment of my paper, I take a step back to consider the relevance of connections between the text of Ecclesiastes and a far earlier tradition in the Akkadian and Sumerian traditions of Gilgamesh, where an iteration of the same saying is preserved on literal clay fragments. This provides a partial glimpse into the larger narrative of breaking and reassembly in the reshaping of the meaning through the transmission of a tradition over a significant period of time.
Though each of these modes of fragmentation is different, they are all bound together by the way in which the reader must generate a reconstruction of the whole in order to make meaningful the broken shards of a saying. In this way, I seek to problematise the model of approaching the proverb as a fixed and reusable whole—a terse, clever moral to be handed down and recited as an axiom. Rather, the sayings of Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, preserved as they may be in layers of tradition, must also be remade by the reader, which invites her into the process of making meaning around the margins of the fragments. This process of breaking and remaking continues what Chapman called the enchained relationship with the past, as the fragmentary knowledge of wisdom is both preserved and reimagined through successive readings.
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The First Volumes of the Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament (THEOT) Project
Program Unit: Ethiopic Bible and Literature
Steve Delamarter, Portland Seminary
The THEOT project has been under way for nine years now, and the time has come for the release of the first volumes covering the textual history of Ethiopic Obadiah, Amos, Deuteronomy, and Nahum. The introductory volume, on Obadiah, includes a detailed description of the THEOT methods and workflow. This report will cover the history of the project, its team members (Daniel Assefa, Steve Delamarter, Garry Jost, Ralph Lee, and Curt Niccum), the methods employed, an outline of the volumes for publication as well as a description of the substantial digital assets produced by the project and made available online, support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and future goals for the project.
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Sub loco Adventures in the Latter Prophets
Program Unit: Masoretic Studies
David DeLauro, Jewish Theological Seminary of America
Gérard Weil had planned to publish a supplementary volume to the BHS in which he describes and ostensibly resolves problematic masorah parve notes he had marked as _sub loco_. This volume was never published and his research on these notes has been lost. In response, various scholars have taken up the task of completing this work describing the nature of these notes. For this presentation will present my own research into the _sub loco_ notes found within the Latter Prophets. The presentation will present the methods and the various sources used to resolve these masoretic notes. Delving into original manuscripts like the Aleppo Codex, the Cairo Codex, and the Leningrad Codex; I show how to weave together these older original sources with more contemporary--and sometimes digital--research. The goal being to present a methodology for approaching any masoretic quandary that may arise in the study of Hebrew manuscripts.
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Qoheleth as a Realist
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Katharine Dell, University of Cambridge
On a three stage ‘ladder’, from humanism to scepticism to pessimism, Ecclesiastes has traditionally been regarded as the last of those three (following Priest, ‘Humanism, Skepticism and Pessimism in Israel’). Many recent studies, however, have challenged this assessment, seeing ‘joy’ passages as normative, in conjunction with ideas of progression across the book (eg Lee, The Vitality of Enjoyment in Qoheleth’s Theological Rhetoric). This fresh emphasis on optimism has led to scholars feeling that they have to make a choice between the two extremes. It is my argument in this paper that a middle way needs to be found, not through scepticism or irony (eg Crenshaw, The Ironic Wink), but framed in the language of ‘realism’. What does it mean to say that Qoheleth is a realist? Examples of his pragmatic advice, experiential starting point and continual balancing of life’s options will be aired.
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From Jeroboam’s Wife to Gehazi: The Mediation of Prophecy in 1–2 Kings
Program Unit: Deuteronomistic History
Julie B. Deluty, Saint Joseph's University (Philadelphia, PA)
Across the ancient Levant, the number and character of third party intermediaries remain a subject of inquiry in a study of how prophecy is socially mediated. In the books of Kings, in particular, the narratives of Jeroboam and his wife (1 Kgs. 14), and Elisha and his servant, Gehazi (2 Kgs. 4, 5, 8), illuminate the structure of mediation between a prophet and third party intermediary. In these texts, the individual intermediary is central to the communication of prophecy, and does not merely report received information. Jeroboam’s wife and Gehazi are not passive actors in the exchanges. By contrast, the characterization of Jeroboam’s unnamed wife in 1 Kings 14 changes over the course of her interaction with Jeroboam and the prophet, Ahijah. Similarly, the figure of Gehazi exhibits varying attributes across 2 Kings 4, 5, and 8 as he mediates between his master, Elisha, and the recipients of Yahweh’s prophecies, including the Shunammite woman and Na’aman the Aramean. Through new focus placed on the literary representation of these individuals in the Deuteronomistic History, this paper underscores the role of agents that transmit divine speech in a monarchy. Whether in the context of illness or injury, the content of the divine message is no longer transmitted verbatim from the prophet’s mouth to the intended recipient. Rather, the text underlines the effect of the intermediary's speech at each juncture where the prophet's message is transmitted by a third party.
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Experiencing Baptism: Reconsidering the Wall Paintings in the Baptismal Room of the Domus Ecclesiae in Dura Europos
Program Unit: Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds
Richard E. DeMaris, Valparaiso University
A survey of baptismal narratives in early Christian literature documents a rather consistent emotional pattern, one in which prospective baptizands’ anxiety and fear give way to expressions of joy through the baptismal act. This pattern mirrors what Angelos Chaniotis and his collaborators have found in ancient Greek sources that report human–divine encounters. So similar are the patterns that baptism can be classified as a kind of human–divine encounter. With these considerations as guide, the paper turns to an analysis of the surviving wall paintings of the baptismal room of the domus ecclesiae in Dura-Europos with the aim of determining how baptizands would have experienced them. If baptism and epiphanic encounters were co-related and triggered a common emotional response, the wall paintings must be seen in a new way, not as expressions of theological themes or illustrations of biblical story but as facilitating and mediating the baptizand’s experience of the divine.
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The World Stage as the Medium for Teaching the Bible and Engaging Students
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Carol J. Dempsey, University of Portland
The poet and playwright William Shakespeare once wrote: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” For decades Bible scholars and teachers have been researching and teaching the Bible from a historical critical context to students who either interpret biblical texts literally in a “personalized, privatized sentimentalized” way or who teach only original textual meanings divorced from present day global concerns. My paper proposes a different pedagogical approach that focuses on the world stage as the medium and students as the players. Using the Abraham-Sarah-Hagar narrative of Genesis 16 and 21, the paper offers a pedagogical and hermeneutical tip on how to read and appropriate texts critically and creatively to engage students in reading biblical texts as part of contemporary sociopolitical, cultural, and religious concerns.
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Ruminating with Isaiah 1: About My Journey from the Poetics to the Prophetic
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Carol J. Dempsey, University of Portland
This paper offers an interpretation of Isaiah 1 to showcase my scholarly journey, as my biblical work moves from the world of the text to the world in front of the text, from reading with the text to reading against the grain, from appreciating the text’s poetics to interrogating its poetry. The first section of the paper discusses my past published interpretation of Isaiah 1 in the context of biblical Hebrew poetry with a focus on the text’s rhetoric and the world of the text. The second section explain how my exegetical work has shifted from the world of the text to the world in front of the text. The move indicates that my reading of Isaiah 1 has now morphed to a feminist interpretation. The third section explains why my interpretation strategies shifted by taking seriously my social location as a Christian-Catholic Bible scholar of the twenty-first century. The conclusion challenges biblical Hebrew poetry scholars and feminist scholars alike by suggesting new directions for biblical studies if we wish the field of Biblical Studies to continue moving forward, and if we are concerned about the global transformation of socio-political, cultural, and religious structures, attitudes, and mindsets responsible for the myriad of injustices present in the world today.
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Impersonating Augustine? ‘African’ pseudo-Augustinian sermons and their reception
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Iris Denis, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
The immense number of texts labelled ‘pseudo-Augustinian’ in reference works for patristic sermons, such as Machielsen’s Clavis Patristica Pseudepigraphorum Medii Aevi I (1990), vary widely in character: they range from anonymous, late-antique texts to medieval cut-and-paste creations, that were all, at some point in their traditions, attributed to ‘the wrong’ patristic authority. These malleable sermons often prove to be the product of complex composition or obscure origins. This entails that even now, scholars reassess existing hypotheses about the creation, context, authorship and sources of each sermon, even questioning and evaluating labels such as ‘antiquus’ and ‘africanus’ (Dolbeau 2017, in Praedicatio Patrum). This paper intends to expand on this re-evaluation of pseudo-Augustinian sermons and their labels, and to propose several new perspectives that would enhance our knowledge of these texts, their contexts and their interpretations. It will do so by delving into a small selection of case-studies: pseudo-epigraphic sermons that are thought to originate from late-antique North Africa and are associated with Augustine in the manuscript tradition, scholarly literature, or both. To analyse these sermons, two specific research angles will be explored. First, the paper will illustrate the historical processes of authorial attribution, by examining not only the possible points of origin for the sermons in question, but also the authorial attributions of each of them, and how these authorial ascriptions relate to a sermon’s content. The second part of the paper will explore a reception-based approach to these sermons associated with Augustine, intended to move beyond concerns of Echtheidskritik and towards an understanding of the various ways in which these texts, probably not written by Augustine, contributed to the late-antique and medieval perception of the Church Father and his legacy. This will show how, instead of eliminating these false attributions as distorting our image of ‘the true Augustine’, we should read them as reflecting the idea of what was ‘Augustinian’ to their medieval readers and thus as integral witnesses to the author’s reception.
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Technologies of the Charitable Self: Sacrifice and Almsgiving in Clement of Alexandria
Program Unit: SBL International Meeting Presentations
Christopher Denny, St. John's University - NY
The transformation of sacrificial ideology across axial-age cultures has been concisely detailed by Guy Stroumsa in The End of Sacrifice. In Stroumsa’s historical recounting Clement of Alexandria’s role in the specifically Christian internalization of cultic sacrifice centers upon Clement’s advocacy of a Christian gnosticism that exemplifies a new form of asceticism. This presentation will integrate Stroumsa’s thesis with exegetical treatment of Clement’s writings on wealth and charity, particularly the treatise Who Is the Rich Man Who Is Saved? Elizabeth Clark claimed in Reading Renunciation that Clement’s figurative interpretation of Christ’s advice to the rich young man in the synoptic gospels, in contrast to Origen’s exegesis of this passage, illustrated a weakening of ascetic commitment. While Peter Brown, Harry Maier and Judith Kovacs have demonstrated how Clement’s emphasis on internal detachment from wealth stems from non-Christian Middle Platonic and Stoic sources, further social contextualization by L. Michael White shows how Clement uses the gospel story of the rich young man to persuade wealthy Christians in third-century Alexandria of a revisionist gnostic ideal.
Yet Clement’s claim, that synoptic gospel pericopes teach that the well-to-do are often better off keeping enough goods to practice charitable giving, does not fit so easily into an interpretation of Clement as a Christian gnostic preaching to aspiring ascetics. Stroumsa’s hypothesis that the end of cultic sacrifice coincides with a “Christianization of subjectivity,” in a manner similar to the tradition outlined in Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self, needs supplementation. Clement’s interpretation of the rich man in the gospels promotes not simple renunciation but a community of almsgivers in which sacrifice is not only internalized but contextualized within idealized communities dependent upon the mutually beneficial soteriological and economic relationships between rich and poor.
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From Chrysostom Back to Philo and John: Reconsidering Chrysostom’s Philosophical Exegesis of the Fourth Gospel
Program Unit: Biblical Exegesis from Eastern Orthodox Perspectives
Athanasios Despotis, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
There is an increase in the number of scholars (Mayer, 2015; Wilson 2015) that describe John Chrysostom's profile as that of a moral teacher who conceives of philosophy as a kind of care of the soul. His medical-philosophical psychagogy can also be found in his Homilies on John’s Gospel. In his 88 Homilies on John, he refers 116 times to the relative terms φιλοσοφία, φιλοσοφέω, φιλόσοφος. According to Mayer (“A Son of Hellenism”, 2018), Chrysostom adopts an anti-intellectual understanding of philosophy in his exegesis of the Fourth Gospel. In the Chrysostomic interpretation, the Johannine Christ is a masterful teacher who tries to heal and transform the souls of his listeners. Nevertheless, I intend to show that Chrysostom is not only a medico-philosophical therapist but also considers and develops theological and anthropological principles that are derived from religious-philosophical traditions going back to Philo. Through his access to earlier Christian authors who had studied Philonic texts (probably representatives of Cappadocian traditions), Chrysostom inherits two concepts that he stresses more than any other Greek exegete of John: 1) The notion of divine condescension (synkatabasis); 2) The position that human freedom has a status of primacy over human nature. The combination of these ideas with biblical traditions is rooted in Philonic philosophical exegesis (representatively see Somn. 1,147; Deus 48) and is embraced by John Chrysostom in later Christian contexts. Given that Philo shares common traditions with the author of the Fourth Gospel, the survey of the indirect relation of Chrysostomic exegesis to Philonic principles can also be of critical importance for the reconstruction of the religious-philosophical beliefs lying behind the fourth Gospel.
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Mark and the Philosophical Discourses on Mediating Powers
Program Unit: Gospel of Mark
Athanasios Despotis, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
In his recent contribution, Jesus as Philosopher: The Moral Sage in the Synoptic Gospels (OUP 2018), Runar Thorsteinsson claims that the Markan figure of Jesus is consistent with contemporary philosophical figures, especially the Stoics, as regards his conduct and moral teaching. However, as Luke Timothy Johnson has proposed (“The Jesus of the Gospels and Philosophy”, in: Jesus and Philosophy, CUP 2009), one can approach the relationship between the Gospels and philosophical traditions not only from the perspective of ethics but also from the viewpoint of the theological, cosmological and ontological principles lying behind the gospels. Therefore, this paper intends to reconstruct the theoretical principles lying behind the Markan reflections on intermediaries between God and humans, i.e. Christ, the Son of Hypsistos Theos, as well as angels and demons, against the backdrop of current philosophical discourses. I do not assume that Mark depends on Roman philosophers, but rather he is familiar with popular concepts that are also echoed in philosophical texts. It is striking that since the 1 cent. BC, Middle Platonists drew on Plato to speculate on the nature and the distinction of intermediaries bridging the gap between the terrestrial and divine worlds (representatively, Plutarch, Def. orac., 415A; Apuleius, De Plato 1.11, medioximi … loco et potestate diis summis sunt minores, natura hominum profecto maiores). These ideas occur in a period when the Hypsistos Theos cult that includes the mediator notion also became popular, and its followers adopted a kind of monotheistic philosophical theology (Mitchell, The Cult of Theos Hypsistos, in: Pagan Monotheism in
Late Antiquity, 1999). The votive of thanksgiving dedicated to a single anonymous deity called “aggeliko Theo” on an altar from Stratonicea in Carea (IStr 1119) has been found in the proximity of other votives to a Theos Hypsistos and is representative of a cult that involved an angel God serving an abstract transcendent God. This development reflects cultural hybridity that also is evident in Judaism from the 2nd century BC onward among Diaspora Jews who invoked God by the title Theos Hypsistos along with his aggeloi (Cline, Ancient Angels: Conceptualizing Angeloi in the Roman Empire, Brill 2011). Thus, the Markan reference to a son of a Theos Hypsistos and his power over demons (Mark 5:7) could be understood by the Gentile audience as Mark’s answer to debates regarding intermediary beings and its relationship to a supreme God in early Imperial religious and philosophical traditions.
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Is There No Doubt About the Hour?: The Limits of Prophetic Knowledge and the Historical Muhammad
Program Unit: The Qur’an and Late Antiquity (IQSA)
Eric DeVilliers, University of Notre Dame
In its polemics and exhortations, the Qur’an repeatedly decries the ignorance of its opponents, who “do not know” God’s clear signs from nature or the divine character of God’s miracles (e.g., Q al-A’raf 7:187). The Qur’an’s rhetoric, however, provokes the question of what kind and amount of knowledge could be expected of believers and, more pressingly, of Muhammad as God’s prophet. Nowhere is this question more vexing than in Muhammad’s preaching of “the Hour”, where some verses seem to detail the character of the Hour, others strongly imply that Muhammad believed the eschaton to be imminent, and yet still others disavow the possibility that a prophet could ever know its arrival. While much has been written on the eschatological aspect of qur’anic prophetology, this paper seeks to contribute to this discussion by asserting that prophetic agnosticism regarding the Hour is bound to the Qur’an’s prophetological discourse. Muhammad’s claim to prophethood was compared to those of Moses and ‘Isa, and the limits of his prophetic knowledge were re-presented as a doctrinal response against Jews and Christians. Even in passages that appear to acknowledge the historical Muhammad’s political successes, there is opposition from the qur’anic audience which nevertheless rejects the qur’anic verses despite their use of biblical imagery and parables (e.g., Q Al-An’am 6:36-47, Q al-Qamar 54:45-46). This paper argues that in announcing the Hour, Muhammad was understood as a messianic figure and, as such, was expected to possess eschatological power and knowledge akin to Jesus and Moses. However, his divergence from these expectations despite his professed similarities required a rapprochement that can be seen in the qur’anic text.
From this observation, it will argue that Muhammad responded to biblical and late antique apocalyptic traditions by utilizing them to assert the solely human nature of the prophets. As such, the agnosticism of the Hour is a crucial textual witness to a historical progression whereby the historical Muhammad reconciled the prophetic careers of Moses and Jesus to his own. The historical Muhammad may have begun his prophetic career by grounding his authority in the vindication that the imminent arrival of the Hour would bring, but the Hour’s function in the text transitions to a doctrine that delineated the human prophet from the one God. This paper, then, argues with Stephen Shoemaker that the arrival of the Hour was fundamental to the qur’anic faith preached by Muhammad, but qualifies that its importance shifted as Muhammad confronted continued skepticism from Jews and Christians towards his prophethood. Evidence from prophetic movements and personages from Late Antiquity, such as Aphrahat, illuminate the late antique prophetic expectations with which Muhammad conversed, and show that the qur’anic rhetoric surrounding knowledge of the end of the world represents a conscious break with this model after previously having aligned itself with it.
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Is There No Doubt About the Hour?: The Limits of Prophetic Knowledge and the Historical Muhammad
Program Unit: Linguistic, Literary, and Thematic Perspectives on the Qur’anic Corpus (IQSA)
Eric DeVilliers, University of Notre Dame
In its polemics and exhortations, the Qur’an repeatedly decries the ignorance of its opponents, who “do not know” God’s clear signs from nature or the divine character of God’s miracles (e.g., Q al-A’raf 7:187). The Qur’an’s rhetoric, however, provokes the question of what kind and amount of knowledge could be expected of believers and, more pressingly, of Muhammad as God’s prophet. Nowhere is this question more vexing than in Muhammad’s preaching of “the Hour”, where some verses seem to detail the character of the Hour, others strongly imply that Muhammad believed the eschaton to be imminent, and yet still others disavow the possibility that a prophet could ever know its arrival. While much has been written on the eschatological aspect of qur’anic prophetology, this paper seeks to contribute to this discussion by asserting that prophetic agnosticism regarding the Hour is bound to the Qur’an’s prophetological discourse. Muhammad’s claim to prophethood was compared to those of Moses and ‘Isa, and the limits of his prophetic knowledge were re-presented as a doctrinal response against Jews and Christians. Even in passages that appear to acknowledge the historical Muhammad’s political successes, there is opposition from the qur’anic audience which nevertheless rejects the qur’anic verses despite their use of biblical imagery and parables (e.g., Q Al-An’am 6:36-47, Q al-Qamar 54:45-46). This paper argues that in announcing the Hour, Muhammad was understood as a messianic figure and, as such, was expected to possess eschatological power and knowledge akin to Jesus and Moses. However, his divergence from these expectations despite his professed similarities required a rapprochement that can be seen in the qur’anic text. From this observation, it will argue that Muhammad responded to biblical and late antique apocalyptic traditions by utilizing them to assert the solely human nature of the prophets. As such, the agnosticism of the Hour is a crucial textual witness to a historical progression whereby the historical Muhammad reconciled the prophetic careers of Moses and Jesus to his own. The historical Muhammad may have begun his prophetic career by grounding his authority in the vindication that the imminent arrival of the Hour would bring, but the Hour’s function in the text transitions to a doctrine that delineated the human prophet from the one God. This paper, then, argues with Stephen Shoemaker that the arrival of the Hour was fundamental to the qur’anic faith preached by Muhammad, but qualifies that its importance shifted as Muhammad confronted continued skepticism from Jews and Christians towards his prophethood. Evidence from prophetic movements and personages from Late Antiquity, such as Aphrahat, illuminate the late antique prophetic expectations with which Muhammad conversed, and show that the qur’anic rhetoric surrounding knowledge of the end of the world represents a conscious break with this model after previously having aligned itself with it.
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The Winding Journey of a Twice-Told Psalm: The Textual Histories of Psalm 18 and 2 Samuel 22
Program Unit: Book of Samuel: Narrative, Theology, and Interpretation
Heath D. Dewrell, Princeton Theological Seminary
How do scribes deal with multiple extant versions of a text in the process its transmission? Psalm 18 and 2 Samuel 22 provide an interesting test case for answering this question. The same poem appears twice in the Hebrew Bible, first set on the lips of David in the context of the narrative of his rise and reign in 2 Samuel 22 and then again as Psalm 18. As one would expect, the two versions of the psalm are not identical and present more than a handful of textual variants. Previous scholarship has attempted to reconstruct the original psalm lying behind these two textual witnesses or to explore the relationship between the individual textual archetypes of the two extant forms of the psalm. While this paper touches on such issues, its primary aim is to address the underexplored question of textual transmission and to trace the history of this twice-told psalm as it was received subsequent to its instantiation in two distinct forms in Samuel and Psalms. The ancient versions each attest to the fact that the two forms of the psalm were not transmitted in isolation from one another, but rather the version of the psalm contained in Psalm 18 influenced the textual transmission and translation of 2 Samuel 22 in the versions and vice versa. In addition to demonstrating the relationship between these two texts in particular, this paper will provide a window into the way in which multiple extant versions of the same text may influence the way that that text is transmitted and offer a model for how conceptualize the way in which ancient scribes dealt with textual variation as they copied, translated, and harmonized their texts.
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Jewish Poetry in Greek: A Cultural Encounter in Ezekiel’s Exagoge
Program Unit: Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature
Marieke Dhont, University of Cambridge
When scholars talk or write about the encounter between Hellenism and Judaism, it revolves around the meeting of constructs of culture. This encounter has often been framed in terms of opposition and Greek-speaking Jews are often understood as a community that moved away from an “essential” Judaism. Related to this presumption is the observation that the motivation behind the Jews' adoption of Greek is often formulated in terms of necessity. However, this encounter also provided the Jews with opportunity: opportunities to develop and expand their tradition in a new language. Alongside the translation of their scriptures, we see the flourishing of Jewish composition in Greek, including poetry. These texts are concrete expressions of the cultural encounter of Greek and Jewish traditions. What happens when Jews start speaking Greek and start expressing their own cultural heritage in a new language? How do they engage with the traditions that accompany the adoption of a language that has an extensive literary heritage? In this paper, we will look at what happens when Judaism and Hellenism are embodied in a text, when biblical tradition meets Greek literary culture, in particular in Ezekiel's Exagoge, a retelling of Exodus 1-15 in Greek tragic form. This text has often been understood as a Jewish “public relations endeavour” towards the Greek world (Howard Jacobson, The Exagoge of Ezekiel, 1983, p. 8). On the basis of a close reading of the text, I argue instead that Ezekiel’s tragedy needs to be situated within an environment of Jewish multilingualism and provides evidence of a writer who is an insider in two traditions at once.
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A Synchronic Study of the Role of Amos 7:9–17 within the Book of the Four
Program Unit: Book of the Twelve Prophets
Elena Di Pede, Université de Lorraine
Verses 9-17 of Am chapter 7 are often seen as an addition that interrupts the series of the first four visions of the prophet. From an editorial point of view there seems to be no doubt about this. From a synchronic point of view, however, it has already been shown that they fit perfectly into the context in which they are found. They make Am 7:1-8,3 a coherent and unique whole in the corpus of the XII. As the only "call narrative" in the corpus of the XII, it follows in an original way the literary framework of the type-scene of the "prophet's call and sending out on mission" which also governs Ex 2:23-4,17; Is 6; Jer 1 and Ez 1-3. By its uniqueness, the elaboration of chapter 7 of the book of Am could thus aim at the unity of a larger ensemble, such as the book of the Twelve. But what about the book of the Four? Continuing the exploration of the links between this fundamental chapter of Am and the other books of the Twelve, we will try to bring by synchrony an element to the following diachronic hypothesis: the presence of these verses gives more coherence to the existence of a first collection of books, the book of the Four as a precursor of the Twelve.
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Jewish Athletics in Alexandria: A Case of Religious Accommodation?
Program Unit: Philo of Alexandria
Djair Dias Filho, Princeton University
Greek athletics in ancient gymnasia was inextricably linked with cultic practices. Gods and heroes such as Hermes and Herakles featured prominently in these facilities throughout the ancient world. The religious elements implied in athletic training would have been a hurdle for full Jewish integration with their Gentile neighbours. Some have argued that Jews must have founded their own parallel gymnasia (Kasher), or had to compromise their orthodoxy by participating in such religiously-loaded activities (Feldman). The case of Philo, however, is consequential for this discussion, not only because of his extensive use of athletic imagery, but also for his first-hand familiarity with the Alexandrian gymnasium. He praised Jewish parents who had their children educated in such institution (Spec. 2.229-230), and even seems to have himself enjoyed the same kind of intellectual and athletic training. In this paper, I will explore how Philo's attitudes toward the Greek gods may have led to his open engagement with gymnasial activities, and what these practices tell us about Jewish life and thought in Alexandria during Philo's lifetime.
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Successful Aging: The Attitudes of Four NT “Elderly” as a Bridge between Ancient Wisdom and Modern Psychological Theories
Program Unit: Psychology and Biblical Studies
June Dickie, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Several biblical texts refer to aged persons. Among these are stories of characters who seem to play a minor (although crucial) role, such as Zechariah and Elizabeth (in Luke 1) and Simeon and Anna (in Luke 2). These four people serve as an important theological bridge between the Old and New Testaments, being prophets of a new kind. But a study of the pericopes mentioning them shows that they might also serve as a bridge between ancient wisdom about aging (as seen in Ecclesiastes, particularly 12:1-7) and modern views from psychology.
In the past thirty years, gerontological research has given a new focus to qualitative methods. Personal narratives are found to be a rich source of insights into the experience of human aging. By studying these four biblical characters, we can gain a better understanding of their attitudes which enabled them, even in their later years, to deal with life-changing events. Three common features emerge from their stories: first, they were able to keep perspective of the old and the new, not denying one or the other. Second, they all managed to focus on positive things for which to be thankful (as is evident in their songs of praise, which culminate the pericopes). And third, they were able to keep attentive to their roles in their service of God.
The wisdom of the biblical world encouraged a person “to accept one’s lot and rejoice in one’s toil” (Eccl 5:19b), but the losses of aging indicate that one’s lot as an older person has many challenges. These four people managed to retain a clear sense of their role in life and to continue doing what they were able to do while being positive in outlook, principles in line with modern psycho-sociological views of successful aging.
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The Role of Epistles in Pauline Moral Development
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Laura Dingeldein, University of Illinois at Chicago
This paper argues that the epistolary format of the apostle Paul’s teachings was closely linked to the promotion of moral development among the recipients and hearers of Paul’s letters in the first century. Certainly, Paul's letters served many functions in the initial decades of the Christ movement, but this paper will focus on the ways in which letter production and circulation helped facilitate character building within early Christ assemblies. After briefly describing the basics of letter writing, reading, exchange, and collection in antiquity, I will analyze the ways in which such epistolary activities helped foster the conditions necessary for the type of moral development that the apostle championed among members of the Christ movement.
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The Affects and Epistolary Embodiment
Program Unit: The Historical Paul
Michal Beth Dinkler, Yale Divinity School
This paper builds on my recent argument that, rather than conceiving of Paul’s epistles as passive stand-ins for an absent apostle, we ought to think of them as powerful alternative forms of presence – a form of epistolary embodiment. In _Literary Theory and the New Testament_, I explored how, in light of ancient views of the power of language, as well as ancient blurring of modern binaries such as σῶμα and ψυχή, we might productively shift our conversations by conceiving of the Pauline epistles as meaning-bearing beings with their own material agency. Here, I extend that discussion by asking how the affects relate to this Pauline epistolary embodiment.
While the so-called “cognitive turn” of recent decades has helpfully focused on the mental effects of the Pauline epistles’ evocations of emotion, as well as various potential audience responses to them, such work often effaces the fact that communication is not all or always cognitive and conscious. Re-cognized emotion and irrational, non-conscious affectivity together contribute to the Pauline epistles’ power; what’s more, when it comes to written epistles, the affectivity with which we are concerned is paradoxically inexpressible and expressed in words. Recent discussions drawing together affect theory and literary form call us to recognize that the interstices between affect, emotion, embodiment, and cognition are far more complicated than Pauline scholars tend to allow. Paul’s affects as in-scribed in the epistles, the epistles themselves as affective “vibrant” things, and recipients’ embodied experiences of encountering Paul’s presence in and through a letter are all marked by an affectivity – and a plurality – that exceeds the clean linearity suggested by many cognitive accounts of emotion and/in Pauline texts. These varied vectors of affectivity also push us to reconsider what we mean by “the historical Paul.”
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Centralization IS Colonization: An African Reading of Josiah’s Reform
Program Unit: African Biblical Hermeneutics
Samaria Divine, University of Georgia
There is an African proverb that states “Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” For centuries the story of African Traditional Religion has been told from the colonizers’— or hunter’s— perspective. These harmful accounts have negatively shaped the world’s view of Africa and its religious practices. Similarly, the account of Josiah’s reform in 2 Kings 22-23 is recorded from the hunter’s perspective and negatively shapes readers’ view of common and traditionally accepted practices in ancient Israel. Among Josiah’s many actions listed in these chapters, is the demolition of the altar of Bethel. According to the Deuteronomistic text, the purpose of this demolition was to make ancient Israelite religion more in line with the book of law that was found during Josiah’s reign. However, considering that Bethel is such a meaningful worship location throughout biblical tradition—from Jacob to Jeroboam—the significance of Josiah’s destruction of this altar must be examined beyond what is recorded in 2 Kings. By approaching Josiah’s reform through the lens of colonized Africa, this paper uses the significance of Bethel as a traditional worship location to present a critical view of Dtr’s positive account and to offer a more accurate representation of Josiah’s reform.
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Reexamining Phoenician Women in the Epigraphic Record
Program Unit: Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy
Helen Dixon, East Carolina University
This paper explores available social data on women in the Phoenician and Punic epigraphic record of the first millennium BCE, which is largely mortuary in nature. While previous studies focusing on Phoenician women have drawn primarily from classical or biblical references and parallels, this study will instead exclusively analyze emic sources, with an emphasis on inscriptions from the Levantine coast. Patterns in the distribution of women's names, the structure of their genealogical attributions, and the inclusion of professional associations will be presented, alongside an overview of the limits of the corpus and a handful of anomalistic inscriptions that may serve as intriguing case studies. Finally, this presentation will offer some preliminary social historical observations that can be derived from relevant extant votive and funerary inscriptions, enriching our currently quite limited understanding of the intersectional nature of gender and other social identities in the distinct and diverse city-states which utilized these Northwest Semitic dialects.
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Does Judgment Bring Justice? The Relation between δικ- and κρι- Words in Paul and in His Legacy
Program Unit: Pauline Theology
Thomas P. Dixon, Campbell University
“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” –King, “I See the Promised Land”
“Let judgment roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” –King, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians”
This paper will explore the relationship between justice and judgment in Paul’s letters with particular focus on Romans and 1 Corinthians. While δικ- words have featured prominently in myriad studies of justification in Paul since Stendahl and Sanders, κρι- words have received much less attention. In fact, the concept of divine judgment or wrath has become an “ungeliebte” topic (Ralf Miggelbrink) for many in recent years and across modernity, often perpetuating a de-Judaized, Marcionite binary between judgment and mercy that obscures Paul’s pictures of justice (inter alia). Schleiermacher denied that any retributive punishment existed in Paul’s conception of justice, such that Paul’s occasional references to divine judgment are merely accommodations to rustic Jewish audiences and their Old Testament notions of an angry deity. Adolf von Harnack went even further, affirming Marcion’s opposition between love and judgment and suggesting that nineteenth-century Christians decanonize the Old Testament. Even the otherwise fecund apocalyptic Paul school has given little attention to divine judgment outside of the defeat of cosmic forces.
This paper will argue that one integral component of justice for Paul is divine judgment, and that close examination of κρι- texts in Rom 2–3, 1 Cor 5, and 1 Cor 11 reveals surprising contours in Paul’s vision of God’s δικαιοσύνη and δικαιοκρισία. In short, justice in Paul cannot be understood apart from judgment. Paul’s theology of divine judgment situates him in close but complex relation to Israel’s scriptures and Jewish apocalypticism. Imagery in Paul’s letters, furthermore, persistently presses readers toward a picture of remedial judgment that can and should ground discussions of restorative justice in Paul.
One of the most practical and effective interpreters of Paul was Martin Luther King, Jr, and this paper will close by reflecting on how Dr. King likewise interweaves divine judgment with active promotion of restorative justice in ways that continue to resound in today’s church and world.
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From Mourning Beasts to Rejoicing Soil: Joel 1-2 and Ecological Trauma
Program Unit: Biblical Literature and the Hermeneutics of Trauma
Sébastien Doane, Université Laval
The animals and other non-human elements of Joel 1-2 are usually interpreted as anthropocentric illustrations of the people’s relation to the Lord. Building on Braaten (2008) who follows Habel and Trudinger’s (2008) ecological hermeneutics of suspicion, identification and retrieval in reading Joel, this paper explores the trauma of the Earth community in Joel 1-2, to enrich the study of ecological trauma.
As noted by Craps (2020, 280), “Trauma theory has tended to espouse an anthropocentric worldview.” Refinements have included animals and all that is living and now scholars such as Land (2011), Negarestani (2011), Mackay (2012), Matts and Tynan (2012) have begun to address the inorganic domain’s “geotrauma.” Since suffering goes beyond the psychic domain, we need to develop a more global conception of trauma. The study of Joel 1-2 looks very promising for this task, since pain, mourning and joy are described in similar terms for humans, animals, plants and soil.
In their pioneering collection of essays on mourning beyond the human, Cunsolo and Landman (2017, 16) seek to “disrupt the dominance of human bodies as the only mournable subjects,” and expand the realm of the grievable. This paper similarly reconceptualizes trauma in non-anthropocentric and non-biocentric terms, by acknowledging the interconnectedness of all of the members of the Earth community in interpreting Joel 1-2 as eco-trauma literature in which mourning ecological loss does not only a human praxis.
“Has anything like this ever happened in your day?” (Joel 1:2) Unlike Copeland (2019) who uses ecological trauma as a category to describe a posited historical event alluded to by biblical texts, this paper presents Joel 1-2 as a trenchant poem that conveys important effects when read in the context of ecological crises like ours. In Climate Trauma, E. Ann Kaplan (2016, xix) describes “pre-traumatic stress syndrome” as a response to the dread of climate change, lived as an immobilizing anticipatory anxiety about the future. In the literary realm, pre-trauma fictions witness to what must be stopped from happening in the first place. Joel 1-2 gives voice to anticipatory anxiety about environmental devastation, famine, and the threat of war – and do so from the Earth’s perspective.
In his post-humanist introduction to eco-trauma in cinema, Narine (2015, 13) states that “nature sustains and endures trauma as a human victim would [and] a traumatized earth begets traumatized people.” Reading Joel 1-2 as eco-trauma literature has suggestive ethical implications for us as humans. This text portrays animals, soil and humans that are overwhelmingly affected by a painful experience. The whole Earth community is the victim of a crisis, and responds together in lament and eventually celebration. By applying Boase and Frechette’s (2016, 15) definition of trauma narrative, this paper shows how Joel 1-2 is “capable not only of processing past trauma but also of fostering resilience against further traumatization. Such narratives serve to construct identity and solidarity in ways that can restore healthy assumptions about the self in relation to the world.”
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WITHDRAWN: Dualistic Cosmology and Anthropology in Judaism
Program Unit: Early Exegesis of Genesis 1–3
Jan Dochhorn, Durham University
Dualistic concepts explaining world and human life encounter here and there in Judaism; the backgrounds are unclear. In Isa 45,7 God presents himself as the creator both of good an and evil; Archaemenidan Zoroastrism can be the contrasting background. In Qumran we have the Treatise about the Two Spirits (1Q S III,13–IV,26) deriving a predominantly moral dualism from God the creator; Iranian influences have to be considered and are debated in research. In the book of Sirach and the Testament of Asser a dualism which combines moral and cosmic aspects is proposed - with the tendency to see the antagonisms as part of a cosmic order. An anthropological dualism is expressed by the doctrine about the two inclinations (not at least in Bereschit Rabbah); we will have to discuss how this concept is related to older dualistic wisdom. The concept of antagonisms as constitutive for the cosmic order is to be found in the Sefer Jesarim and in the works of the Christian author Lactantius.
The aim of this paper is first to present an overview and then to raise the question to what degree and how these different concepts may have been borrowed from non Jewish sources (Zoroastrism? Neopythagoreanism?) and if there exists an inner-jewish trajectory of dualistic ideas.
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Translating Eve: Death and Female Identity in a Madrasha Ascribed to Ephrem.
Program Unit: Syriac Studies
Maria E Doerfler, Yale University
The so-called necrosima (ܡܕܪܫ̈ܐ ܕܥܠ ܥܢܝ̈ܕܐ), a collection of 85 funerary hymns, appear as part of the great Roman Edition of Ephrem's work. Edited and translated into Latin by Stefano Evodio Assemani, the nephew of the famous Giuseppe Simone, the corpus encompasses a wide range of hymns in a variety of meters, commemorating clergy and laity, adults and children, victims of disasters and those who had died of old age. Scholarly interest in the necrosima peaked in the 19th century. The latter witnessed translation into Italian (Paggi and Lasinio, 1851) and (once again) Latin (Guillon, 1833), a partial translation in English (Burgess, 1853), as well as a number of works using the necrosima to illuminate aspects of Ephrem's literary or theological identity. In the intervening century, however, the hymns have retreated into a measure of obscurity, a fate precipitated in part by the recognition that few appear to be of genuinely Ephremic vintage, and that those attributable to him or to other Syrian greats, including Jacob of Serugh, could be sundered from the rest of the collection and treated separately.
This paper participates in an effort to revive interest both in the necrosima as a corpus, and in its individual hymnic constituents -- including those of uncertain provenance. The latter are striking in part due to their sheer diversity, refracting the lives and deaths of Christians through a kaleidoscopically shifting progression of lenses, celebrating their status in the afterlife, vindicating their accomplishment in the body, narrating the community's response, by turns mourning and yearning, and a variety of other, situationally appropriate, postures. Their rhetorical particularities notwithstanding, the madrashe consistently construct their subjects in dialogue with both scripture and communal ritual practice, crafting identities ad extremis for both the departed and the hymned and hymning community. A particularly striking example of this liturgical transformation appears in Madrasha 31, labeled by Assemani "In funere matrisfamilias," which depicts, not atypically for the necrosima, a dialogue between the Church and the deceased. The latter throughout presents herself as daughter, victim, and, in the last instance, unwitting double of Eve, having experienced her own devolution from paradise to matrimony and parenthood -- a fate all the more troubling as it imposes similar penalties upon her offspring. The communal interlocutor nevertheless resists "her" lament and self-construction, instead narrating the lives of wives and mothers through an eschatological lens in which they, too, will join the choirs of virgins. In the process, the hymn translates the identities of both the departed and those participating in her commemoration into new scriptural registers, performatively resignifying both life and death.
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New Histories, Made Old: Law, Identity, and Competing Sacred Histories in the Didascalia Apostolorum
Program Unit: Jewish Christianity / Christian Judaism
Maria Doerfler, Yale University
The Didascalia Apostolorum, a “church order” commonly ascribed to the third century, has attracted scholarly interest both for its glimpses into aspects of early Christian communal life, and as a source for discursive engagement between different religious groups. Famously dubbed “a Mishnah for the Disciples of Jesus” by Charlotte Fonrobert, the Didascalia combines halakhah and aggadah, instructions for living and biblical exposition, all framed by a pseudepigraphal narrative. The latter provides audiences with a quasi-historical glimpse into first-century Christian life: the apostles, a group whose representatives speak both individually and jointly at different points in the text, here remain in Jerusalem in the aftermath of crafting a "letter to the churches" (Acts 15), to address a variety of supposedly heterodox practices, including, most notably, aspects of the "second legislation," the Mosaic purity laws. In order to loose these false bonds, the Twelve resolve "to write this catholic Didascalia” – the very book now before the reader – “for the confirming of [all Christians]" (DA 24; Vööbus 237.9-10). In this fashion, the Didascalia creates a niche in the Acts narrative into which to insert its own origin story. To do so, however, does not exhaust the work’s historiographic ambitions. Particularly in its concluding chapters, the text weaves a tight literary framework of canonical and extra-canonical narratives surrounding the apostolic era in which it grounds the rules it seeks to convey. As such, the Didascalia is a prototypical example of the complex interrelationship between law and sacred history, between making rules and telling stories about the context from which the rules (allegedly) emerged. The legal and narrative portions of the Didascalia thus mutually reinforce one another: its laws provide a hook for its amplified version of the story of Christian expansion – a final iteration of Acts' cycle of communal fracture and reunification. The narrative in turn stands surety for the authoritative and trustworthy nature of the laws – an anchor for the means by which that unification ought to come about. More than a warrant for the laws it propounds, however, the Didascalia's narrative portions serve as guarantors for its interpretation of another, still more authoritative legal text: that of the Hebrew Scriptures. The latter present its readers with divine laws, albeit without providing instructions on its application to the challenges that face Christian communities in the post-apostolic setting. By entering into the habitus, the historical narratives, and indeed the personae of the apostles, this paper suggests, the Didascalia seeks to provide for its audience the keys to unlocking biblical law as a means of setting it apart from its rivals: at the intersection of law, legal interpretation, and the creation of sacred histories, the Didascalia labors to create the tools by which to forge lasting communal identities.
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Driving the Merchants from the Temple? The Impact of Ptolemaic Fiscal Policy on Temple Industries in Egypt and Beyond
Program Unit: Economics in the Biblical World
Nico Dogaer, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
The Ptolemaic economy is traditionally characterized as a centralized state economy, especially in the industry and trade sectors. According to the established view, the Ptolemaic kings introduced so-called “royal monopolies” in key industries such as vegetable oils and textiles, largely suppressing existing temple industrial and commercial activities. The latter could continue to produce the commodities involved on a limited scale, but only as a privilege awarded within the “monopoly” framework or in royal service. However, recent work has stressed the enduring importance of priests in the Egyptian ruling coalition, and it has become clear that the role played by temples in industry and trade needs to be reassessed. The situation was in fact much more nuanced than is suggested by the “royal monopoly” model. Although temple activity in some sectors, most notably oil production, was reduced, temples continued to be involved not only in the production but also in the taxation of other commodities: craft taxes in certain areas, for instance, were farmed out by priests for the benefit of the temple rather than the king. The available data is most abundant for Egypt, but evidence for the Ptolemies’ other possessions will be considered as well.
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Interpreting JPFs: A Polysemic and Multivalent Approach
Program Unit: Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Bible
Shawna Dolansky, Carleton University
Feminist and gendered analyses of Judean Pillar Figurines have moved beyond the biological essentialism that labelled them “fertility” figurines in the past. Many interpretations of JPFs, however, remain rooted in presentist assumptions about embodiment that continue to limit the interpretive horizon. Because the significance of women in the Hebrew Bible is largely restricted to their portrayals as wives and mothers, interpretations of artistic portrayals of female bodies from biblical regions are often limited to generic functions of biological females. In order to move beyond fixations on gender, sex, and physical functions of the female body, I propose to incorporate insights from semiotics into a gendered iconographical analysis in order to expand our range of potential meanings of JPFs and other symbolic embodiments. A semiotics of gender provides us with a theoretical basis for evaluating the plausibility of potential interpretations, encourages us to think about a variety of potential synchronic meanings of these figures for their viewers, and does not assume that an object’s materiality is predicated on it having a ritual function.
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A New Collation and Translation of the Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon
Program Unit: Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy
B. Donnelly-Lewis, University of California-Los Angeles
This paper will be a brief presentation of the author's new collation of the Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon based on the multispectral images produced by Gregory Bearman and William Christens-Barry in 2009. In this new collation, I propose fifty-nine letters in total, including twelve new readings, some of which are reconstructed on the basis of vestigial ink revealed in the images. This new collation leads to an attempt at a full translation of the ostracon. This translation presents the text as the response of a defendant in a legal dispute to a summons to testify. In the course of analysis, I discuss the language of the inscription, presenting evidence that it should be understood as an archaic, dialectal form of Hebrew.
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Jesus Barabbas: Superstar!
Program Unit: Bible and Film
J. Andrew Doole, University of Innsbruck
There are many ‘extras’ in the canonical gospels, characters who come and go within a single scene. Some have names, others do not; some get to speak a line or two, others remain silent. Barabbas, the man released by Pilate at the behest of the crowd, doesn’t really have a chance to shine in the gospels. He remains an undeveloped character. While films about Jesus might include some new aspect in their brief portrayal of Barabbas, there are now five films that focus on him as the protagonist: Barabbas (Alf Sjöberg / 1953 / Swedish), Barabbas (1961 / Richard Fleischer / English), Barabbas (Aneesh Daniel / 2005 / Hindi), Barabbas (Roger Young / 2012 / English), and Barabba (Evgeniy Emelin / 2019 / Russian). Three of these are adaptations of the 1950 novel by Pär Lagerkvist. The films develop Barabbas’ storyline before and after his arrest and release, the only brief mention he warrants in the gospels. I will look at the back-story and themes developed by the films to provide Barabbas with a personality he lacks in the Bible.
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Why Apocalypse, Why Now: Christian Right Politics and Affect
Program Unit: Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship
Christopher Douglas, University of Victoria
This paper interrogates the political activation of Biblical apocalypse by today’s US Christian Right. If the apocalyptic worldview was forged in the fires of empire, I explore the somewhat frightening question of what happens when the apocalyptic imagination animates not the imperially oppressed, but the most politically powerful single demographic in the strongest neoliberal, military empire in human history. If apocalypse is the theology of last resort, of Jews or Jesus-followers at the end of their tether, desperate for hope in the face of hopeless odds, what occurs when its solutions – warring angels and demons, the cosmic foe, the imminent overthrowing, hell and heaven – become deployed by the powerful who understand themselves to be an aggrieved, persecuted minority, the heirs of the oppressed? The answer, I argue, helps us understand the radicalization of the Christianized Republican Party and the twinned constitutional and epistemological crises the US is currently facing. Briefly recounting the re-activation of the apocalyptic imagination by John Darby in the nineteenth century, I review the influence of premillennial dispensationalism on the emergent Christian Right in the twentieth century. I address the peculiar rereading of Daniel’s patron angels as “territorial spirits” influential in some evangelical circles today, and, as was seen with the actions of President Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White, who recently strode the White House grounds exorcising the “demonic networks” laid to trap the President (https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1171803697292238853?s=03), discuss the way apocalypticism explains the Christian Right’s sense of its foes. While the flattening of historical context is typical of fundamentalist Biblical hermeneutics, the result today is a literal demonization of political opponents, with actual demons being understood to be manipulating Democrats, leading to the impeachment of the President. One of the sites where today’s evangelical apocalyptic imagination is best articulated is in Christian Right literature, and I look briefly at Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness and the Left Behind series as a way into what evangelical scholar Mark Noll calls the “scandal of the evangelical mind.” The novels reflect the productive adaptation of political apocalypse: that born-again Americans are not to sit back resignedly, hoping for the Second Coming, but are to engage the world, battling their demon-supported opponents and helping to bring about God’s kingdom on earth. While the two Biblical apocalypses of Daniel and Revelation tended to emphasize God’s agency rather than human activity in the coming of God’s Kingdom on earth, other parabiblical apocalypses (such as the Animal Apocalypse, Jubilees, and the War Rule) preserved a heightened sense of the role of God’s chosen people in bringing the Kingdom’s arrival – a latent possibility in the apocalyptic imagination that has emerged as dominant in today’s resurgence of political evangelicals. I hypothesize that the apocalyptic worldview animating today’s Christian Right is part of the explanation for the asymmetrical radicalization of the GOP and the fact that they no longer view their democratically-elected political opponents as having legitimacy (see It’s Even Worse Than It Looks and How Democracies Die).
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“Many Have Sold Themselves into Slavery”: Voluntary Imprisonment and Slavery in 1 Clement 55
Program Unit: Slavery, Resistance, and Freedom
David Downs, University of Oxford
The second-century letter from Christ-followers in Rome to the ekklēsia in Corinth, conventionally called 1 Clement, provides a fascinating reference to voluntary enslavement among early Christians. In the context of an appeal for schismatics among the Corinthians to be willing to depart in order to end an ecclesiastical conflict in Corinth (54.1-4), the Roman authors of 1 Clement allude to practices of self-imprisonment and voluntary slavery among Christ-followers: “We know that many among us have had themselves imprisoned, so that they might ransom others. Many have sold themselves into slavery, and with the price received for themselves have fed others” (55.2). This paper will explore the reference to voluntary slavery in 1 Clem 55.2 in light of the letter’s deliberative rhetorical strategies, such as the use of historical examples (e.g., 1 Clem 55.1-6; cf. C. Breytenbach, “The Historical Example in 1 Clement”) and the appeal to the noble past of the Corinthians, including the Corinthians’ earlier commitment to meeting the material needs of those within their community who suffered affliction from others (2.6-7; cf. 38.1-4). In doing so, the paper will contribute to recent conversations regarding Orlando Patterson’s influential thesis that slavery be understood as social death, a status characterized by violence, natal alienation, and dishonor (cf. Bodel and Scheidel, eds., On Human Bondage). For the authors of 1 Clement–and presumably also for the epistle’s intended recipients, given the document’s rhetorical aims– self-imprisonment and voluntary slavery represent noble (gennaios), compassionate (eusplagchnos), and loving (agapē) acts done for the benefit of others, deeds that serve as paradigmatic examples for the Corinthians to imitate (54.1; 55.2). Far from representing social death, voluntary slavery (along with self-imprisonment) in 1 Clement 55 is framed as a practice that solidifies social bonds among Christ-followers (“many among us”) and results in honor for those who have made this sacrifice.
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Solomon's Inauguration of the Temple in the Light of the Mesopotamian Rituals and Inscriptions
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Peter Dubovsky, Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome
This paper will focus on the Assyrian and Babylonian “induction” ceremonials and the “seating” of the gods on their daises that constitute the main elements of a dedication of a temple in the ANE. I will argue that the description of Solomon’s inauguration follows the steps of a typical Mesopotamian ceremonial of the dedication of a temple. Even though this topic was studied by many scholars, such as M. Boda, J. Novotny, V. Hurowitz, etc., I will discuss new Mesopotamian texts that, I believe, can nuance the previous research and cast new light on the background of 1 Kings 8, in particular, I will study the meaning of the induction of the ark into the temple, king’s role in the inauguration ceremonies, and speeches/prayers accompanying the ceremonies.
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Letting Metaphor Be Metaphor: The Logic of Anthropomorphism in Scripture
Program Unit: Christian Theology and the Bible
Steven J. Duby, Phoenix Seminary
This paper will explore the idea of divine corporeality by revisiting the way in which descriptions of God's body in the Old Testament might be regarded as metaphorical. This will involve examining the reasons given for a literal reading of relevant texts and suggesting instead that texts in which God has a body might be read anthropomorphically without imposing an alien philosophical framework upon the canon of Scripture. I will draw from some premodern treatments of metaphor and of figurative attributes of God and make an argument that the Old Testament texts taken on their own terms fit with the conclusion that God is incorporeal or spiritual.
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Document-Driven Philology and the Importance of Being Absent
Program Unit: New Testament Textual Criticism
Elena Dugan, Princeton University
Scholars working on fragmentary, damaged, or incomplete manuscripts are often bound to perform some degree of restoration—but how much? And to which imagined ‘whole’ do we affix our fragments? When a manuscript ‘cuts off,’ to what end do we imagine it was proceeding? These and related questions are crucial to the text-critical enterprise, especially for scholars of the New Testament, but New Philology insists we let our documents lead the way. This talk will begin by introducing the tripartite distinction of ‘text, work, document’ used in some New Philological scholarship, emphasizing the prioritization of documents rather than works. It will be argued that we ought to allow our expectations of ‘wholes’ to be driven by our documents, rather than assuming documents might represent (however fragmentarily) a single or certain work. Such a reorientation of the philological endeavor has many fascinating outcomes, one of which I will highlight here—the revelation of absence in our material record. Using my work with 1 Enoch as a representative example, I will demonstrate the unique ability of New Philology to illuminate negative space in our archive of ancient literature. New Philology can guide scholars towards new clarity in describing and accounting for what is present in our manuscripts, and even more crucially, what is not. By not assuming an absolute presence of a certain work in every document, we can let attention to the phenomenon of absence open the way to newly dynamic stories of the evolution and development of ancient literature.
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Eva Gore-Booth and the Christ of John's Gospel
Program Unit: Recovering Female Interpreters of the Bible
Patricia A. Duncan, Texas Christian University
The aristocratic Irish writer and activist Eva Gore-Booth (1870-1926) is best known for her political work on behalf of working women and women’s suffrage, but she was also a self-taught biblical scholar of considerable talent. Already a member of the Theosophical Society, Gore-Booth pursued both Greek and Latin in order to study the Bible on a deeper level. Although she was a prolific writer in multiple genres (poetry, drama, essays, and even an unpublished novel), her book A Psychological and Poetic Approach to the Study of Christ in the Fourth Gospel is arguably the masterpiece of her literary career, her own pride in it witnessed by the fact that she carefully transcribed the manuscript into a leather-bound journal that now resides in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland. When her publisher (Longmans, Green and Co.) deemed the book “quite off the usual lines” and “unlikely to appeal to the general public,” Gore-Booth financed one thousand copies of the work at her own expense. In the introduction, Gore-Booth writes that her work can have “no claim to scholarship,” and yet she is clearly in conversation with historical-critical scholarship on the Bible, as well as the science and psychology of her day. She meets us in the pages of her book as a radically creative mind, undaunted by convention or orthodoxy and boldly anticipating much of the feminist and gender criticism of the Bible that would flourish in the second half of the twentieth century. This paper will explore, on the one hand, the critique of historical-critical scholarship that is subtly woven into Gore-Booth’s treatise on the Gospel of John. On the other hand, it will seek to outline the contours of the informed, sophisticated, and deeply-felt spirituality that emerges vividly in the commentary on the Fourth Gospel, and that provided a foundation for the rather astonishing critique of the status quo that defined Gore-Booth’s life and mission.
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Inability to Do the Right Thing and Other Ethical Themes in Johannine Texts
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
WITHDRAWN: Ismo Dunderberg, University of Helsinki
While scholars have since long deplored the lack of positive ethical instruction in John's gospel, efforts have more recently been made to disclose what is called "implicit ethics" in it. Most importantly, it has been argued that the character of Jesus serves as a moral example to be followed by the audience. The ensuing, more constructive picture of Johannine ethics has become quite popular but it hasn't gone unchallenged. This paper argues that the work on John's implicit ethics has dismissed some explicit claims related to ethics, such as that of the inability of some people to do the right thing due to their wrong kind of ancestry (John 8:42-47).
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Multilingual Annotated Electronic Parallel Corpus-Based Edition of the Georgian Translation of the Book of Tobit
Program Unit: Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies
Natia Mirotadze, Georgian National Center of Manuscripts
The presentation deals with the results of the project financed by Rustaveli National Foundation. In the frame of the project a complete parallel electronic edition of the Greek (three textual forms), Armenian and Georgian versions of the Book of Tobit were prepared, which, at the same time, were annotated. The digital edition was prepared according to the standard of scientific electronic edition of the text – TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). In the frame of the project encoded files of the mentioned manuscripts (their metadata and text) were prepared in XML format, on the basis of which a database and website was constructed for the parallel texts. The redaction focus of the parallel corpus-based edition of the Book of Tobit is determined by the doctoral research, consequently, the digital edition demonstrates the findings of the research. XML coding of each manuscript, apart from the standard minimum requirements of encoding (metadata and text), are enriched by linked data and extensive linguistic annotation.
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Ambrosian Influences on Hippo’s Pulpit? Job 14, 4 and Ps 50, 7 in the Sermons of Augustine of Hippo
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Anthony Dupont, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
More than 400 times the name of Ambrose is mentioned, or is he quoted, in Augustine’s oeuvre. It is certain that Augustine in Milan was influenced by Ambrose - to whose sermons he listened, by whom he was baptized. However, the extent to which Ambrose permanently influenced Augustine’s writing and thinking is a matter of debate.
It was not until late in Augustine’s life, especially in the Pelagian controversy, that he began to quote Ambrose frequently [E. Dassmann 1989]. Augustine’s appeal to his Milanese teacher fits into the broader rhetorical strategy of the auctoritas patrum that he is deploying against the Pelagians [E. Rebillard 2000, A. C. Chronister 2014]. Augustine argues that his notion of peccatum originale is Biblically founded and has already been developped by his venerable predecessors, Ambrose par excellence. That Augustine quoted Ambrose in support of his rejection of the so-called pelagian thesis of impeccantia is beyond dispute [V. Grossi 2004, M. Lamberigts 2010]. Using quotes from Ambrose, he defended his doctrine of original sin as orthodox. However, whether, vice versa, Ambrose would agree with Augustine’s interpretation of these Ambrosian fragments remains to be seen [compare, for instance, J. Huhn 1993 and P. F. Beatrice 1978]. In my paper, I will establish whether Augustine used Ambrose – faithfully or not – in his preaching on the theme of original sin.
Recently, great interest has arisen for the presence of the themes of divine grace, (original) sin and predestination in Augustine’s sermons. Does his preaching agree with what he wrote in his anti-Pelagian treatises? I will apply this question to Augustine’s recourse on Ambrose. Although Ambrose is frequently quoted as an anti-Pelagian auctoritas, his name or writings cannot be discerned in Augustine’s preserved sermons (at least according to a CAG search). That role belongs to Cyprian, popular in North Africa, and often mentioned in Augustine’s homilies (J. Yates 2005). An indirect way to check whether there may be a Milanese influence on the pulpit of Hippo is a scriptural study. Two biblical topoi frequently used by Ambrose to write (and especially to preach) on the subject of (hereditary) sin are Job 14, 4 and Ps 50, 7. Ambrose’s commentaries on these two pericopes are often quoted by Augustine against the so-called pelagians, especially against Julianus van Aeclanum. These two verses are also present in Augustine’s homiletic corpus (Job 14, 4: en. Ps. 50, 10; en. Ps. 103, 4, 6; Io. ev. 41, 9; s. 181, 1; s. 246 , 5; s. 293, 11 // Ps. 50, 7: en. Ps. 31, 2, 9; en. Ps. 50, 10; en. Ps. 142, 8; Io. ev. 4, 10; s. 170, 4; s. 351, 2). Hence the research question of my presentation is: to what extent do Job 14, 4 and Ps 50, 7 in Augustine’s preaching function as anti-Pelagian arguments and to what extent is he faithful to Ambrose’s hermeneutics of these verses.
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The “Economics” of Roman Religion
Program Unit: Religious Competition in Late Antiquity
Andrew Durdin, Florida State University
Clifford Ando opens his essay “Subjects, Gods, and Empire, or Monarchism
as a Theological Problem” noting that while recent scholarship on religion and the Roman empire has rejected Christian triumphalist narratives, “[a] more appropriate goal might have been to shift the units of analysis altogether—to ask, in other words, what entitles us to speak of plural ‘religions’ and to understand them as historically autonomous and thus in competition in the first place.” That is, for whatever analytic benefits were achieved by moving away from triumph narratives toward a civic model of religion, certain fundamental assumptions about “religion” and how these religions “compete” were left untroubled. Recent studies have addressed the problems with religion, emphasizing the difficulties of conceiving various ancient social affiliations in terms of the modern category of religion. However, less attention has been paid to competition. While the subject itself is often discussed, the anachronistic economic language that motivates these discussions is not.
This paper explores how scholars of antiquity have utilized economic language to situate Roman religion in late antique religious history. Specifically, I argue that far from lacking “currency” in rendering ancient religions (per Engels and Van Nuffelen), economic language has played a dominant role in orienting the academic study of Roman religion and accounting for its changes and adaptations, especially from Republic to Principate. Yet, this mode of description has, at best, been deployed in weak analogies and, at worst, in explanatory models framed around anachronistic concepts drawn from modern liberal economics.
I propose that economic speak has taken two forms in the above scholarship. The first is expressed in the above language of a “marketplace” of religions in the Roman empire and the second is the idea that Roman religion (and ancient religion more broadly) was “embedded.” Exploring how both are used, I show that each one draws, more or less directly and explicitly, on sociological models designed to explain change in religion and modern society. In principle, there is nothing wrong with employing an explanatory model forged from modern data. However, with a few notable exceptions, scholars of antiquity who use this language do so evocatively and without making explicit and necessary adjustments before applying this idiom to Roman data. In other words, redolent analogies rarely rise to the rigor of sociological models. It is in the slippage between analogy and model that Roman religion tends to be read on the anachronisms of modern liberal economics.
Drawing on James Rives’s discussion of the bureaucratization of cult as well as Clifford Ando and Jörg Rüpke’s respective considerations of the “effects of empire” on ancient cultural differentiation and social belonging, I suggest that an emphasis on the structural effects of legal and institutional change offer an alternative explanatory idiom. Rather than naturalizing ancient cults as commodities in competition for adherents in a deregulated market, a focus on large shifts in Roman religious governance might help account for the sociological and material conditions that created various collective affiliations and the possibilities for how they interact.
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Ritual and Rhetoric of the Deathbed in Late Antique and Medieval Syriac Hagiography
Program Unit: Syriac Studies
Reyhan Durmaz, University of Pennsylvania
Syriac hagiographers narrated the deathbed as a lively space bringing together numerous opposites: Grief for the imminent demise of the saint combined with the joy of leaving this world of suffering; penitence for the past and hope for the future; constant movement of ritualized bodies surrounding the stillness of the saint… Deathbed, liminal between life and burial, was an important space for the hagiographical drama in many saints’ lives. The authors of saintly lives often creatively used this space to comment on life and afterlife, establish spiritual networks, and prescribe funerary rituals. Building upon the voluminous scholarship on late antique mortuary practices and on conceptualizations of death, in this paper I explore the various discursive traditions and ritual practices related to the deathbed. Through an analysis of a group of Syriac saints’ lives, including the Life of Simeon the Stylite, the Life of Rabbula, the Life of Gabriel of Qartmin, and others, I argue that the deathbed was a rhetorical tool to describe body, family, and community.
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The Cult of the Saints as Cultural Theology
Program Unit: Lived Religiousness in Antiquity
David L. Eastman, The McCallie School
Although social historians have made great contributions to the study of early Christianity, particularly in the wake of the work of scholars such as Peter Brown and Elizabeth Clark, there remains a tendency to tell history from the perspective of the elite. Narratives continue to be dominated by the writings of Cyprian, Athanasius, Augustine, and others. When attention is turned to the experiences of the wider populace, this is referred to as “popular theology.” But “popular” as opposed to what? “Popular” in this context seems to be juxtaposed with “proper” theology, as if the practices of the populace are somehow inferior or illegitimate. In this paper I will push back against this tendency and its accompanying nomenclature through an analysis of the cult of the saints. Reading the cult of the saints in light of patron-client relationships, I will argue that the hierarchy assumed within the cult was a more authentic reflection of the everyday lives of ancient peoples than the arguments of bishops and theologians. Therefore, practices such as commemorative banquets, pilgrimage, the veneration of relics, etc., should be interpreted not as “popular theology” but “cultural theology.”
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Ageing, Shame, and Psalm 71
Program Unit: Psychology and Biblical Studies
Michelle Eastwood, University of Divinity, Melbourne
References to old people in the bible are limited and usually restricted to examples of decrepitude or exhortations to honor elders. This makes developing a biblical theology of ageing difficult and perhaps explains the lack of scholarship in this area. In terms of specific texts, Psalm 71:9 is often drawn out as an exemplar of the Bible’s perspective on ageing without engaging the rest of this text.
Psalm 71 is the only psalm presumed to have been written by an old person. However, the notion of ageing in this psalm may be overlooked in preference for more obvious themes of refuge and praise. This failure to notice the old psalmist is reflective of a modern failure to see old people in our midst, particularly older women. In fact, the two dominant themes of Psalm 71 – shame and ageing – are both issues that are often ignored, which explains the relative neglect of this psalm in the literature.
June Price Tagney and Rhonda L Dearing’s 2003 book, Shame and Guilt, provides an overview of the developments in shame research which demonstrate that the common notion of positive shame perpetuated in Christian pastoral care texts is not borne out in the empirical research. Rather, shame is positively correlated with all indices of psychopathology, in contrast to guilt which can have positive connotations. Shame in old age is linked to a loss of physical and mental capacity, a loss of independence and agency, and for women is linked to barrenness and the loss of conventional beauty. Shame is a gendered issue that is linked to societal expectations and mores, and this must be considered in any analysis of the topic.
Perspectives on ageing are a growing area of interest as contemporary society wrestles with the additional burdens an ageing population demands from our capitalist societies. The notion that individuals are most productive as part of the paid workforce has implications for how to deal with the growing number of retirees. Further, the increasing number of ‘old-old’ individuals places stress on health-care systems, aged-care facilities, and unpaid carers.
From a faith perspective, there is a common cry that the church is dying out because the older members are not being replaced by a new generation of believers. This has led to a concentration of resources towards children and families ministry, and a relative neglect of the old people – mainly women – who are left in the pews. Theologies of aging are often focused on spirituality and individual meaning making, or are general theologies with a passing reference to ageing.
This paper will discuss the intersection of shame and aging through a consideration of Psalm 71. It will consider the way empirical research and emerging understandings can assist with developing contemporary readings that take these two issues seriously. It will make reference to the findings of the Centre for Human Ageing, based at Catholic Theological College, which is focused on ageing from the perspectives of theology, spirituality, ethics and pastoral care.
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Human Responsibility and Verification of Divination
Program Unit: Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature
Ruth Ebach, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
Prophecy and divination in general are of special importance for the religious practices and systems of the Ancient Near East and Greece and, especially, for political decision-making processes. Therefore, procedures of verification played an important role and the texts (letters and ritual texts) show the human actors’ responsibility within the acts of communication. Extispicy has been repeated several times, several variants of divination have been combined (e.g. ARM 26, 239), and the prophetical person itself has been evaluated. For example, the sending of hair (šartum) and garment (sissiktum) mentioned in the Mari-letters (ARM 26, 200; 201; 215; 217 a.o.) mirrors aspects of responsibility. In addition, examples of older – and successful – prophecies have been used for new situations. Herodotus shows in his Histories cases of oracle testing in Greece (cf. Croesus; Hist. 1.46). The paper reevaluates the multifaced mechanisms of these processes of verification in the Ancient Near East – especially in Mari, where such cases are well attested, and Assyria, where you can find traces of similar processes – and Greece and, thereby, sheds new light on the motif and treatment of false prophecy outside the Old Testament. These possibilities or criteria for recognizing true prophecy and successful understandings of oracles and signs will be compared, in a second step, with key-texts of the OT. In Deuteronomistic texts, other aspects of divination except prophecy have been excluded (cf. the Law of the Prophet in Deut 18) and, as a result, only the prophets can recognize if they really speak Yhwh’s words. Therefore, the motif of prophetical self-testing plays an important role as can be shown by a modified interpretation of Ezek 13:1–16. Every prophet bears a crucial part of the responsibility for his sayings. In addition, learning from history – the real impact of the deuteronomistic ex post-criterion of fulfillment – enables another type of prophecy.
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The Nature and Function of Deut 12:1–26:15 in the Book of Deuteronomy
Program Unit: Book of Deuteronomy
Diana Edelman, University of Oslo
The unit of ḥuqqîm and mišpāṭîm comprising Deut 12:1-26:15 is typically described as the deuteronomic law code or legal collection. Yet by ancient Near Eastern standards, these chapters do not belong to the same genre as the other collections that have survived. Three factors distinguish it from them. The others are written in third person, with a hypothetic case presented and a verdict given( if…. then), and only two have a handful of motive clauses between them, and no paranetic material. The material in Deuteronomy has 65 conditional if-then formulations, but only 15, 23% are in third person, with the rest in second person. In addition, the unit has more unconditional statements in second person than the combined types of conditional “case law” formulations, and almost 50% of both types of materials have motive clauses immediately following.
In the story world, these chapters function as the stipulations for a covenant being made on the plains of Moab between the people of Israel and YHWH Elohim, consistent with the description of the ḥuqqîm and mišpāṭîm as miṣwâ/ miṣwôt (Deut 5:31, 6:20, 7:11; 11:1) and ‘ēdōt/‘ēdut, ‘a document containing stipulations’ (4:45, 6:20). At the same time, however, these ḥuqqîm and mišpāṭîm are collectively described as tôrâ, ‘teaching’ (4:8). This latter category can help explain the anomaly of having third-person conditional formulations among stipulations that normally are in second person and framed both conditionally and unconditionally.
Moses’s function as a teacher, recalling instructional material in what is commonly called sapiental literature, allows the third-person conditional segments to be seen as his augmentations of the “set” or “given” list of “divine” examples to help the audience, his “pupils,” grasp the core principles. The ancient Near Eastern legal collections are recognized to have functioned instructionally rather than practically. The subject matter covered in the ḥuqqîm and mišpāṭîm presumes a world view predicated on a divine preference for order vs chaos, which in terms of societies, includes the unbiased administration of justice. Thus, the framing of the narrative as Moses’s own simultaneous teaching about the divine regulations he is tasked to present as the conditions for the covenant being made on the plains of Moab accounts for the collection of conditional and unconditional statements in second and third person in 12:1–25:6.
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Divine Providence in Philo and Josephus: Legatio ad Gaium and Antiquities 18–19
Program Unit: Philo of Alexandria
David R. Edwards, Florida State University
This paper will compare the usage of the concept and terminology of “divine providence” (πρόνοια) in Philo and Josephus in two of their works which give parallel accounts of the same events. Both Philo’s Legatio ad Gaium and Josephus’ Antiquities 18–19 narrate the events of the Jewish embassy to the emperor Gaius in the wake of the civil unrest between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria, and the emperor’s subsequent attempt to erect his image in the Jerusalem temple. Each author also appeals to divine providence multiple times in their narratives to explain the outcome of events which gravely threatened the Jewish nation.
While Philo’ usage of divine providence in Legatio and In Flaccum departs from his technical philosophical employment of this concept and terminology elsewhere in his works, Josephus employs it in a uniformly non-technical and non-philosophical fashion throughout AJ as a consistent explanation for the vicissitudes of the Jewish people and of prominent characters in his account. Because Josephus is known to have consulted Philo at other points in AJ, and since Philo is likely his source for much of AJ 18–19, it is useful to compare Philo and Josephus here to determine the extent to which they employ divine providence in similar or diverging ways. In particular, this study will seek to determine the extent and nature of Josephus’ conceptual and literary debt to Philo in presenting the events of AJ 18–19 as the result of divine providence. Attention will be paid both the explicit terminology of divine providence (πρόνοια), but also to the concept as operative in the narratives even where the terminology itself is absent.
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“Taken Up in Glory”: Early Christian Traditions of the Ascension of Jesus in Light of 1 Tim. 3:16
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
David R. Edwards, Florida State University
The hymn of 1 Tim. 3:16 initially appears to follow a chronological sequence which moves from incarnation (“revealed in flesh”), resurrection (“vindicated in spirit”), and exaltation of Jesus (“seen by angels”) to the expansion of the early Christian movement into the non-Jewish Mediterranean world through kerygmatic proclamation (“proclaimed among Gentiles, believed in throughout the world”). However, the interpretation of the hymn as a simple chronological sequence has been frustrated by the last line (“taken up in glory”), which appears to refer unambiguously to the ascension of Jesus, thus placing it chronologically after the gospel preaching and early missionary activity. A chronological reading has, therefore, widely been regarded as impossible. However, this judgement appears to be founded upon the presumption of the normativity of the narrative sequence presented in Luke-Acts, in which the ascension takes place either immediately following the resurrection (Lk. 24) or forty days afterwards (Acts 1), but in any case well before the movement’s missionary activities and expansion.
This study will reconsider a chronological reading of the hymn in 1 Tim. 3:16 and argue that it is evidence for early Christian traditions which understood the ascension of Jesus to have taken place after the earliest missionary activities and expansion among non-Jewish peoples beyond the confines of Judea. I will survey the evidence of the creed in 1 Cor. 15 and the narrative of Luke-Acts in order to ascertain the sequence of events which a later reader might infer on their basis. 1 Cor. 15 is chronologically ambiguous in that, although it refers to multiple appearances of the resurrected Jesus over a long period of time, and places Paul last in that sequence of appearances, it does not explicitly refer to an/the ascension, and says nothing of the timing of the sequence of events in relation to early missionary activities. Taken on is own, therefore, it is insufficient to produce the sequence in 1 Tim. 3:16. While the narrative of Luke-Acts is generally read as restricting the ascension to the period immediately after or forty days subsequent to the resurrection, I will argue that the two ascensions of Lk. 24 and Acts 1 could have been approached by a later reader as narrating multiple resurrection appearances and multiple ascensions during an ongoing period of time—just as in 1 Cor. 15. I conclude, therefore, that 1 Tim. 3:16 reflects an attempt by early Christians to harmonize and piece together the creed of 1 Cor. 15 and the narrative of Luke-Acts. The former makes clear that there were many ongoing post-resurrection appearances by Jesus, with Paul being the very last and quite late, though otherwise of unspecified timing; Luke-Acts narrates two distinct appearances and ascensions, and additionally clarifies that Paul’s post-resurrection appearance (Acts 9) occurred subsequent to the initial missionary proclamation and expansion among non-Jews (Acts 8). A harmonized reading of two early Christian texts explains the chronological sequence of events in the hymn of 1 Tim. 3:16, wherein ascension is placed subsequent to kerygmatic proclamation and missionary activity.
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John Chrysostom against History
Program Unit: Biblical Exegesis from Eastern Orthodox Perspectives
Robert Edwards, University of Notre Dame
Because John Chrysostom is an Antiochene, it is usually assumed that he is concerned with history. But what does historia mean for John? And what work does it do for his exegesis? Is his understanding of the term the same as that of Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia—the great touchstones of the so-called school of Antioch? This paper will argue that while John is indeed interested in historia, his use of it differs from these other Antiochenes in a variety of ways. Rather than being concerned with establishing the historical facta which lie behind the biblical text, John’s interpretation centers on the narration of events, which allows him to develop theological and ethical teaching to benefit his audience. His use of to historikon also serves a different interpretative purpose than it does for Theodore: the historical facta are not adduced for their own sake—or for demonstrating the historicity of the story—but, again, for demonstrating theological and ethical dogmata. As is often mentioned, a major difference between the works of John and Theodore is the divide between the scholar-commentator and the preacher. But John’s homiletical approach to exegesis is not merely a rhetorical veneer over the sort of “scholarly” exegetical work that Theodore does. Rather, John understands biblical historia to be fundamentally about divine activity and human activity, and his task in reading this historia is to elucidate this activity. In order to discover the divine oikonomia and human virtue, John focuses on the minutiae the stories’ narrations, in a variety of aspects. This precise attention to the narratives of scripture is in large part where John’s famous moral teaching comes from: biblical historia is full of characters whose virtue is put on display. But historia is also where John comes to learn of divine activity: he carefully reads the same historiai to come to a vision of God’s providential economy. In order to demonstrate John's particular approach to historia, this paper first examines John's use of the term throughout his extant corpus; it then compares John's approach to that of Theodore, through several small test cases, drawing especially from their respect interpretations of the Gospel of John (Theodore’s Commentary and John's Homilies).
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Additions and Variants: Vestiges of Palestinian Targums in the European Textual Tradition of Onqelos
Program Unit: SBL International Meeting Presentations
Shlomi Efrati, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
The critical study of Targum Onqelos, the “canonical” Jewish Aramaic translation of the Pentateuch, is intertwined with the study of other Aramaic translations, commonly referred to as Palestinian Targums, which were preserved and transmitted both as continuous texts and as various collections of fragments. The study of these collections, some of which are called “tosefta” (addition(s)), others known today as “Fragment Targums”, has raised numerous questions: Why, when, and by whom were these collections created? What are the reasons, if any, for inclusion or exclusion of certain fragments in each collection? How do these collections relate to each other, to the continuous Palestinian Targums, and to Onqelos?
In this paper I will focus on the latter question and examine it from a somewhat neglected angle: The presence of “Palestinian” additions and variants of various kinds in the European Textual Tradition of Onqelos, which I collated as part of the ERC ‘TEXTEVOLVE’ project which explores new methods and approaches for collating and analyzing the textual traditions of the Targums. First, I will present several instances of small-scale “Palestinian” variants in manuscripts of Onqelos, and examine how they may contribute to the understanding of the Fragment Targum collections. Next, I will analyze a couple of Targum expansions attested to in a broad range of Palestinian Targums and in a relatively large number of manuscripts of Onqelos. I will show that the additions to Onqelos represent a distinct textual group, and will evaluate its importance for understanding the transmission of (fragments of) Palestinian Targums in medieval Europe on the one hand, and the early textual history of the Palestinian Targum traditions themselves on the other.
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Old Wine in New Skins: The European Tradition of Targum Onqelos Reconsidered
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Shlomi Efrati, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
The critical study of Targum Onqelos, the “canonical” Jewish Aramaic translation of the Pentateuch, has from its inception been concerned with the reliability of the Targum’s text. A comprehensive analysis of the complicated textual traditions of Onqelos is crucial for a proper evaluation of its language and meaning, as well as its history and its cultural value. The intensive study of Targum manuscripts has been going on for more than a century, yet it has been mostly focused on the identification of genuine textual witnesses and the recovery of alternative, non-Onqelos Targum traditions. The textual analysis of the overwhelmingly intricate medieval European transmission of Onqelos, on the other hand, has been all but neglected.
In this paper I will present initial findings from the study of a large group of European witnesses of Targum Onqelos, undertaken as part of the ERC ‘TEXTEVOLVE’ project which explores new methods and approaches for collating and analyzing the textual traditions of the Targums. The European textual tradition of Onqelos is usually considered late and inferior, yet the examples I analyse suggest an intriguing correlation between variants preserved in European witnesses and readings suggested by ancient lists of annotations on Onqelos. Certain annotations can be properly understood only when considered against a broad range of textual witnesses. Others attest to unique readings preserved solely in late European manuscripts, raising the possibility that some variants in the European text witnesses actually reflect ancient alternative forms of Onqelos. Thus, the examples investigated in this paper offer a more nuanced understanding of the textual development of the Targum and demonstrate the complicated routes of its transmission, preservation, and modification.
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“Sacred Tokens of the Idols?” The Use of Protective Objects in 2 Maccabees 12:40 and Antiquity
Program Unit: Hellenistic Judaism
Seth M. Ehorn, Wheaton College (Illinois)
The expression ἱερώματα τῶν ἀπὸ Ιαμνείας εἰδώλων in 2 Maccabees 12:40 has generated scholarly discussion about the meaning and function of protective objects in antiquity. Some scholars argue that ἱερώματα refers to the spoils of war, specifically the idols of the gods, and that the word never means “amulet” (e.g., D. Schwartz, Goldstein). Others, such as Lévy and Abel, argue that ἱερώματα refers to amulets used to secure protection in battle. In addition to examining the reception of the Greek terminology in the daughter versions of 2 Maccabees (e.g., the Latin versions in de Bruyne’s edition), this paper will examine the function of amulets within the Hellenistic period and suggest that the use of protective objects by Judas’s men represents for the epitomizer their adoption of Hellenistic culture. In this sense, 12:40 reflects one of the larger concerns of 2 Maccabees: the negotiation of Jewish culture and identity.
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From Chance to Responsibility: Ancient Greek "Hope" in Historical Texts
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Esther Eidinow, University of Bristol
How should we understand the sense of the ancient Greek term elpis? There has been much recent interest in this term, and the ways in which it does or does not conform to its most common modern translation, as ‘hope’. Of course, the modern meaning of ‘hope’ is also itself much debated, but recent analyses of the ancient term elpis have established a number of specific, significant meanings in which it differs from its modern counterpart, drawing attention, for example, to how this ancient term often focuses on expectations or intentions.
In ancient poetic, dramatic and philosophical writing, scholars have noted, it is often used to signal misguided opinions or overweening ambitions, which lead mortals astray. In that context, it has been acknowledged that elpis indicates a facet of human relations with what is ‘other than human’ and/or the divine; it is (as Cairns 2020) part of ‘a traditional body of thought that emphasizes the limitations of human foresight, the vanity of human wishes, and the inability of human beings to secure their own happiness’.
In turn, examinations of elpis in historical prose, specifically Herodotus and Thucydides, have tended to focus on its perceived use for emphasising ‘human incapacities and inclinations’ (e.g., Lateiner 2018). In that context, it has been understood as a signal of the ancient writer’s own disapproval of any kind of belief in other-than-human entities. For example, In the context of Thucydides’ history, it has been argued, references to elpis are used to reinforce the ancient writer’s indication that a particular character’s approach is ‘inextricably linked with superstition and a naïve, groundless belief in the divine’ (Tsoumpra 2018 on Thucydides 7.77.1-3).
But such approaches risk reinforcing particular perceptions of the ancient writers, closing down the possibility of more nuanced interpretations of their work in general and their use of this term, elpis, in particular. This paper suggests, in contrast, that we approach the use of elpis in these texts as part of the larger semantic network of concepts relating to the ancient Greek comprehension of humankind’s relationship to the future, including chance, foresight—and divination. By doing so, it argues, we may gain a more sophisticated understanding of these ancient writers’ approach to their histories and to ancient Greek cultural models of fate, luck and fortune, cause and responsibility.
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Is Jos. AJ 14.148b an Archival Fragment, and What Does It Imply about the Date of the SC Valerianum (AJ 14. 145–8)?
Program Unit: Hellenistic Judaism
Claude Eilers, McMaster University
In mid-47, as thanks for aid during the Alexandrian campaign, Caesar recognized Hyrcanus as high priest, granted to Antipater authority over the region, and sent his decisions to Rome to be displayed on the Capitol. Thus Josephus in the Bellum (1. 199-200). The presentation in the Antiquities (14.143-4) is almost identical, but Josephus adds a decree of the Roman senate (the SC Valerianum) that he presents as implementing these decisions (14. 145-8) and then follows up with a decree of Athens (14. 149-55) honouring Hyrcanus. Josephus is mistaken to include these documents here; both date to the second century, as is (almost) universally accepted.
Between the two documents, however, are these eleven words (14. 148b): ταῦτα ἐγένετο ἐπὶ Ὑρκανοῦ ἀρχιερέως καὶ ἐθνάρχου, ἔτους ἐνάτου μηνὸς Πανέμου (‘These things happened during the rule of Hyrcanus the high priest and ethnarch, in the ninth year and the month Panemus.’)
Although these words aim to clarify the chronology, they have baffled commentators, and a wide variety of dates have been extracted from it: arguments have been advanced that it refers to 134, 127, 106, 47 and 46 BCE. Much of commentary behind these words begins with the premise that they are an "archival tag" that had been added to the SC Valerianum (or, according to others, the Athenian Decree) when it had deposited into the Hasmonean archives in Jerusalem. The implicit assumption is that a date has been buried here and that it, once disinterred, might yield something historically revelatory, including a date for the SC Valerianum (which would indeed be useful).
But are these eleven words in fact an archival tag? Extant examples of such tags can be found in documents quoted elsewhere by Josephus as well in those surviving in Greek epigraphy, but they share certain features that are absent here.
My paper will argue that these words are not, in fact, archival. Rather, they are Josephus’ words who aims not to date not one or the other of these documents but the important historical moment that these documents are (mis)quoted to illustrate: that is, they date Caesar's confirmation of Hyrcanus and returned to Ju daean control the territories that Pompey had stripped it of. The date of the SC Valerianum must focus on its relation to the letter quoted at First Maccabees 15.15ff., which implies a date under Simon.
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What Can the Correspondence between Jonathan and the Spartans (AJ 13.163–170, 12.226–7) Tell Us about Josephus’ Documentary Method?
Program Unit: Josephus
Claude Eilers, McMaster University
One striking feature of Josephus’ Antiquities is its documents: it quotes almost fifty; the Bellum, by contrast, none. Some of these Josephus merely takes over from his sources. For example, Josephus’ retelling of the Letter of Aristeias replicates the documents found there, as does his version of First Maccabees. But his handling of one pair of these documents is especially interesting: an exchange of letters with Sparta. This began, we are told, when Jonathan wrote to Sparta reporting the discovery of a letter written by the Spartan king Areios to the high priest Onias. Both First Maccabees 12. 6-19 and Jos. AJ 13.163-170 quote Jonathon’s letter; both versions of the letter mention that a ‘copy’ (ἀντίγραφον) of Areios’ letter has been appended to it.
Only First Maccabees, however, actually includes that copy; in the Antiquities, it appears a full book earlier, at 12.226-7, where Onias III accedes to the high priesthood. This is methodologically significant: Josephus has moved the documents from its documentary context to a chronological one. This is something that he does elsewhere in the Antiquities, most clearly in his retelling of biblical narratives, which he recasts “according to the proper order” (Ant. 1.17: κατὰ τὴν οἰκείαν τάξιν).
That Josephus has moved the letter of Areios to fit what he regarded as its correct chronology is obviously telling, as is the fact that he clearly got that chronology wrong. The Spartan letter-writer can only be Areus I, who ruled 309—265 BC, which requires that his correspondent must be the high priest Onias II (or, just possibly, I). Josephus, however, has assigned it to Onias III (c. 198—171): a straightforward case of mistaken identity, with one Onias having been confused for another.
In practical terms, it is not surprising that an attempt at chronological organization has misfired because of a confusion of homonyms: ancient documents were typically dated by the names of local officials and modern arguments about dating hinge on prosopographical criteria more often than any other factor. The same thing seems to have happened elsewhere. At 14. 150-5, to choose the most obvious case, a decree of Athens honouring Hyrcanus I is cited as evidence of the high regard that Hyrcanus II was held in.
The mistake, however, is less telling here than underlying motive: the principle that chronology takes precedence. Invoking such a principle helps explain what has happened with the Caesarian fragments found 14. 196-8, 199, 200-1, and 202-10. These, it has recently been argued, had once been part of the text of the lex Cornelia Antonia (§§219-22), which had collected earlier unenacted decisions and then embedded them into its text. Josephus, it seems, has physically moved this material away from its documentary provenance (the lex Antonia) to a chronological context immediately following Caesar’s letter to Sidon (§§190-1) and its appended edict (§§192-5). In doing so, he applies the same methodology as with the letter of Areios.
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Contesting Female Power in Q 53
Program Unit: The Qur’an and Late Antiquity (IQSA)
Emran El-Badawi, University of Houston
The classical exegetes believed Muhammad was haunted by the influence of the pagan goddesses—Allat, al-‘Uzza and Manat—even after his prophetic ministry. Islamic tradition blames the sole episode of ‘false prophecy’ experienced by Muhammad on Satan’s distortion of Q 53:19–22. The story goes that Satan caused Muhammad to condone rather than condemn the cult of the daughters of Allah. This episode is known as the “story of the cranes” (qissat al-gharaniq); and it was reimagined and popularized in Salman Rushdie’s modern adaptation called The Satanic Verses. What medieval scholars and modern authors neglect is that this scandal is tied to the appropriation of female power by the new cult of the Abrahamic God.
The locus of female power in the Qur’an, and its confrontation with male power, is Q 53. Its title, “The Star” (al-najm), evokes the long tradition of late antique Arabian astrology and star gazing, referenced elsewhere in the corpus, and which otherwise shape the complex qur’anic worldview, especially its cosmology, prophetology and apocalypticism. It is the only surah to explicitly list the pagan goddesses—Allat, al-‘Uzza and Manat—while addressing its audience. Q 53 is a unique source fusing together female power and male prophecy. This is because it is simultaneously a literary text and a documentary witness. There is, of course, ample scholarship on the many fascinating and rich dimensions of this chapter. It links the celestial and terrestrial, pagan and Judeo-Christian, historical and metaphysical, female and male; and it therefore serves as a sort of window into female power in late antique Arabia.
This paper examines Q 53’s form and content. I tentatively present its composition in four units: a series of two prophetic traditions, an alternate prophetic vision, and a “priestly” interpolation. I explore these four textual units, its conversation with biblical and Near Eastern traditions, its connection to the demise of ancient Arabian peoples (esp. ‘Ad and Thamud), and then demonstrate its role in demoting the ubiquitous Arabian cult of high goddesses to “daughters of Allah.” They were likely successors to the “daughters of Il” worshipped in various pre-Islamic urban Arabian communities, as demonstrated in Old South Arabian and Palmyrene inscriptions. However, I argue the encroachment of Abrahamic religions, notably Christianity, made their demotion inevitable. This was a necessary part of the campaign to promote and endorse the cultic veneration of a single male God.
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The Diminution of the Moon: Midrashic and Kabbalistic Perspectives
Program Unit: Midrash
Gilad Elbom, Oregon State University
From a kabbalistic point of view, midrashic episodes that portray an imperfect God are particularly troublesome. Such is the famous rabbinic scene that tells the story of the belittled moon (b.Chullin 60b). Saddened by its inferior position, especially in relation to the sun, the moon protests against the obvious injustice of having to share the sky with a superior star. After all, why would the cosmological narrative of the fourth day of creation (Genesis 1:16) refer to both the sun and the moon as the great lights, then immediately demote the moon and designate it as a lesser light? The moon approaches God and initiates a long argument, at the end of which God is forced to admit that the small size of the moon, not to mention its cyclical waning, is his own fault. "Bring an atonement for me," God says, "for I have diminished the moon." The nation is commanded, therefore, to sacrifice, with each new moon, a special monthly sin offering on behalf of God (Numbers 28:15; b.Shevuot 9a). Later rabbinic texts — for example, Samuel Yaffe Ashkenazi (1525–1595) in his commentary on Genesis Rabbah 6:4 (פירוש יפה תואר) and Abraham Aaron Broda in his 1838 commentary on Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer 51 (ביאור הבית הגדול) — reaffirm the possibility of a divine error, stating that although God had every right to make certain celestial objects smaller than others, it was nevertheless his duty to acknowledge the fact that by doing so he had hurt the moon. Consequently, it was also his duty to make repeated and sincere efforts to appease the moon. According to kabbalistic hermeneutics, on the other hand, the smallness of the moon, and especially the fact that it has no light of its own, means that the intimacy between Israel and God — or humanity and the divine — is diminished. In exile, when the nation is afflicted by witlessness, displacement, and impermanence, the human and the divine are back-to-back, so to speak. Through prayer, the keeping of the commandments, acts of loving-kindness, and laboring in the Torah, these deficiencies are rectified and transformed into a face-to-face reunion. This kind of rectification (tikkun), according to Menahem Nahum Twersky of Chernobyl (1730–1787), will remedy the three major predicaments of Israel and humanity: limited consciousness, exile, and mortality (Light of the Eyes: Bereshit). More specifically, limited consciousness is the smallness of mind with which we are born. Rectified by the acquisition of wisdom, it is an inherent imperfection that signifies a potential for growth, whereas exile is a historical catastrophe that will be rectified by freedom from the bondage of outside oppressors. Mortality, particularly in this context, is both a congenital and external threat. Rectified by the resurrection, it signifies the potential of the lower worlds to excite the supernal realm into offering freedom from the angel of death. This reciprocal process foresees a future in which the moon will shine as brightly as the sun (Isaiah 30:26).
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From Gospel to Book to Account to Document: The Paratextual Self-Presentation of the Gospels
Program Unit: Synoptic Gospels
Nicholas A. Elder, University of Dubuque Theological Seminary
All four canonical gospels are paratextually self-conscious about their medium, though each expresses its textuality differently. The Synoptic Gospels indicate what kind of text they are in their opening lines. Mark and Matthew do so with the first word of their title and text: “gospel” and “book,” respectively. Luke does so using a preface that intimates the discourse is an “account” addressed to an individual, namely Theophilus. Like the Synoptics, the Fourth Gospel is paratextually self-conscious about its medium, designating itself as a “document.” Differing from the Synoptics, though, John’s paratextual self-designation appears near its end, in the first colophon.
In this presentation, I argue that the gospels’ paratextual self-designations indicate that they are different kinds of texts that made for different kinds of reading events. The canonical gospels are diverse with respect to their media.
As a discourse that was textualized from antecedent oral events, Mark existed at the borderland between orality and textuality and this is reflected in its self-designation as “orally proclaimed news” or “gospel”. Once it existed in physical form, the narrative Jesus tradition could be literarily altered and developed by later authors.
Using the Markan text, Matthew created something more bookish, designating the text as such from its first word, “book.” Matthew develops the written Jesus narrative by imitating and presenting itself as other authoritative texts had. These books, like Matthew, are meant to be read and studied not only by individuals, but in a communal, synagogue setting.
Luke likewise utilized Mark’s innovative text to write something new and more literary. The Third Gospel’s preface notes that other written Jesus traditions exist and that this new “account” is in the same orbit as them. The very existence of the preface establishes Luke as a different kind of text than its predecessors, which both possess titles. The preface presents the narrative that follows as a text written first for an individual, namely Theophilus. While dedicating a text to an individual is a literary affectation, I argue that this does not completely obscure the social reality behind it. Theophilus was intended as Luke’s initial reader. Presenting a text as written for an individual does something different than does presenting it as a “book” or as “good news.”
John is not as explicit about the existence of other written Jesus traditions as Luke is. Rather, the Fourth Gospel presents itself as one “document” amidst other hypothetical written traditions about Jesus. John presents itself as a complement to Jesus traditions and texts that might be written in the future. By doing so, the Fourth Gospel justifies its own existence. The reason it does so, I propose, is because its author is well aware of existing written Jesus traditions in the form of the Synoptic Gospels.
Recognizing that the gospels all present themselves differently than each other attunes us to the development of early Christian literary culture, which consisted of different kinds of texts that were used in various ways.
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The Sociality of Writing Letters by Hand
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Nicholas A. Elder, University of Dubuque Theological Seminary
Questions about handwriting in the Pauline epistles typically gravitate around one of two poles. The first is the apostle’s education and his attendant ability or inability to write an entire discourse by hand. The second is which words in a given Pauline text, especially Philemon and Galatians, were penned by Paul himself. Often missing from these discussions is attention to the sociality of writing letters by hand. This presentation addresses that aspect of letter writing, making two central arguments. First, contrary to the common notion that antique authors avoided writing in their own hands, either because doing so was difficult or it was stigmatized, I argue that the practice was common at varying social strata, especially with respect to letters. Second, I demonstrate that a handwritten text has a dramatically different social impact than does a text dictated to or copied by an amanuensis.
To make these arguments, I engage three different kinds of handwritten letters: those from elite literary figures; imagined letters in the Greek romance novels; and personal papyri letters. The elite letters come from two sets of correspondence. The first is Cicero and Atticus and the second Marcus Aurelius and his tutor, Fronto. The normal practice for all of these men was to handwrite their letters to one another. In the Greek romance novels, both men and women handwrite missives and as a result there is an imagined sentimentality attached to the physical text. The third kind of handwritten text, personal papyri letters, actualizes the imagined sentiment constructed in the novels. I present four different letters handwritten by their sender that demonstrate it was not just the Frontos and Marcus Aureliuses of the ancient world that sentimentalized their friends’ and family’s handwritten correspondence. The otherwise unknown individuals of antiquity did as well.
The presentation then moves from wholly handwritten correspondence to letters that were partially dictated and partially written by hand. In some cases, particularly in the papyri, a change in hand reveals that a letter was a mixed composition. In other cases, an author explicitly calls attention to a change in compositional mode, just as the author of a Pauline letter does on five occasions (1 Cor 16:21; Gal 6:11; Col 4:18; 2 Thess 3:17; Phil 18). The presentation concludes by surveying the social reasons that a letter-sender might produce a partially-dictated, partially-handwritten missive, and how these reasons map onto Pauline references to handwriting.
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“The Anointed Ones of Aaron and Israel”: An Import from 1QSa into 1QS
Program Unit: Qumran
Torleif Elgvin, NLA University College, Oslo
In the Community Rule, the eschatological clause “until there shall come the prophet and the anointed ones of Aaron and Israel” (1QS IX 11) appears as a later insertion, interspersed between two sets of regulations, for the men walking in perfection (VIII 20–IX 10), and then for the Instructor (IX 12–25).
Apart from this clause, 1QS reflects a collective messianism, where redemption occurs through the action of the people of God, not by individual mediators of salvation—the same may be said about 1QM.
In its description of the eschatological banquet, 1QSa II 11–22 relates to the time when God “fathers the messiah among them” (=the men of the Yahad). The meal is presided by the Priest, who is ranked above the messiah of Israel in the table liturgy.
The Rule of the Congregation appears in a fragmentary papyrus copy in cryptic script (4Q249a), with some textual differences compared to 1QSa (Ben-Dov, Stökl ben Ezra, and Gayer 2017; Bloch, Ben-Dov, and Stökl Ben Esra 2019). 4Q249a testifies to an earlier and shorter text compared to 1QSa I. Thus, the textual tradition of 1QSa (as that of 1QS) had been under development for some time before the penning of the archival or “librarian’s copy” of 1QS around 100 BCE—when 1QS in the scroll was followed by two appendices written by the same scribe. The Cave 4 Serekh scrolls did not include 1QSa and 1QSb, which demonstrates the special character of 1QS as a master scroll.
Since 1QSa had a literary prehistory (and 1QSa II 11–18 is paralleled in 4Q249a), I suggest that it was the joining of this appendix to the Community Rule that caused the scribe to add “until there shall come the prophet and the anointed ones of Aaron and Israel” to the prescriptions in 1QS VII–IX, prescriptions known from the wider Serekh tradition. Thus, 1QSa II is no sequel to 1QS IX 11 as hypotext, it is rather 1QSa that causes the introduction of this clause into 1QS. During this literary process, the terms “the Priest” and “messiah of Israel” were rephrased into “the anointed ones of Aaron and Israel.” Further, the tradition of three end-time figures, known from 4QTestimonia, caused the scribe to include also the eschatological prophet in the short clause of the last days.
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A "Stoic" Mother: Gendered Grief in Midrash Mishlei 31:10
Program Unit: Children in the Biblical World
Shira Eliassian, Yale University
The midrashic commentary on the verse in Proverbs, “What a rare find is a capable wife” (31:10), narrates a story about the death of Rabbi Meir’s sons. His wife demonstrates stoic strength in the face of death and criticizes her husband for his own emotional display of grief. This paper attempts to understand why the Midrash would use a story about the death of children to exemplify paradigmatic domesticity. In doing so, it lays bare the Midrash's implicit critique of overly feminized Greco-Roman rituals of mourning, as well as a critique of the rabbis' failure to cultivate an embodied theology.
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Linguistic Developments in Classical Biblical Hebrew
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Yoel Elitzur, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
A topic that has preoccupied many scholars in recent decades is the distinction between Standard Biblical Hebrew (SBH) or Classical Biblical Hebrew (CBH) and post-exilic Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH). Most of the research world is convinced of the correctness of this distinction. I argue that even within SBH there were processes of development and change, as happens in all languages at all times. In a series of articles that I have published and am about to publish, I have collected dozens of examples of this phenomenon. As a starting point I examined the books of the Bible, with an emphasis on the Torah and Former Prophets, in the order in which they present themselves. The first area I dealt with was divine names (Elitzur 2015, 2018, 399-408 [Hebrew]; 2019, 428-442). According to my findings, the tetragrammaton and the name Elohim, on which the classical documentary theory has built an elaborate structure, do not contribute to the discussion, because the two names are found side by side in all books and in all literary genres. Instead, I dealt with the name אל שדי, which appears in direct speech in the book of Genesis and not later, and especially with the common divine name צבאות (x285), all of whose mentions come only from the Book of Samuel onwards. I have also traced the gradual increase of names containing the theophoric element יהו/יה/יו from one deliberate case in the Torah (the personal name יהושע) to more than 50 percent at the end of the days of the First Temple. A special discovery, which, to the best of my knowledge, had not been previously discerned, is the change that took place concerning the name אדנָי. I have showed that until Amos, Isaiah, and Kings, it was not actually a divine name, but an address of honor, similar to אדנִי 'my lord!' addressed to a man, always in direct speech and never in the words of the narrator. From Amos, Isaiah, and Kings, onwards אדנָי becomes an objective divine name (Elitzur 2015, 87-106). In other studies I have dealt with various words or expressions that were born, died, or changed during SBH (Elitzur, forthcoming). Two particularly challenging groups include expressions in which I have demonstrated a clear distinction between the Pentateuch and subsequent books, such as the spellings הִוא ‘she’ and נַעֲרָ ‘young woman’ or the demonstrative הָאֵל (2018, 81-101), and cases where there is affinity between the linguistic evidence, on the one hand, and realia and archaeology, on the other (e.g., -בַּעֲלֵי 'the aristocracy of' only before the Monarchy; Elitzur 2018, 129-147). I am currently preparing for publication a study in which I argue that the semi-plene spelling of the Masoretic biblical tradition is not the work of late editors. In my lecture at SBL I intend to bring examples from all the above studies and hear the opinions of colleagues and scholars.
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The Genre of the Deir ‘Alla Plaster Inscriptions: A Reappraisal in Light of Advances in Genre Theory
Program Unit: Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature
Bryan Elliff, University of California-Los Angeles
In his groundbreaking work, Obituary for “Wisdom Literature”, Will Kynes attempts to replace the traditional taxonomic and form critical approach to genre with an intertextual approach. He argues that genre is “a formalized version of intertextuality” (p. 110). He deems his theory of genre an emergence theory in which genres emerge as readers perceive similar features inherent in texts. Moreover, he employs conceptual blending to bring Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes (the focus of his book) into conversation with biblical and extra-biblical texts outside the standard “wisdom” corpus. He contends that literary texts necessarily participate in multiple genres and, therefore, scholars should aim to identify the many genres in which they participate in order to understand them. In this paper, we apply Kynes’ method to the Deir ‘Alla plaster inscriptions (Combinations I and II) to test the utility of Kynes’ method and to enhance scholarly understanding of the plaster inscriptions.
Scholars have typically compared the Deir ‘Alla plaster inscriptions with a narrow set of textual analogues, usually the biblical Balaam texts (Num 22-24; 31:8, 16; Deut 23:5-6; Josh 13:22; 24:9-10; Micah 6:5; Neh 13:2) and prophetic biographical texts (1 Kings 22; 2 Kings 8:6-13; Amos 7). In this study, we attempt to move beyond these readings by evaluating a wide variety of comparanda in the literature of the ancient Near East from the Late Bronze Age through the Iron Age. We argue that the Deir ‘Alla inscriptions participate in at least 8 textual “constellations” (to borrow a metaphor from Kynes), including prophecy, ritual incantation, curse, prayer, lament, dream narrative, divine council narrative, and “masa” (burden) texts. We also argue that, within the texts at Deir ’Alla, these intertextual resonances work together in a hierarchy in which some stand out as prominent and others serve in a supporting role.
In this paper, we demonstrate how previously-unconsidered genres are embedded within the highest genres of the hierarchy (i.e., prophetic narrative in Combination I and ritual incantation in Combination II). For example, Combination I embeds a dream narrative, “masa” text, and lament within the prophetic narrative. This idea of a hierarchy of embedded genres both draws upon and advances Kynes’ model. By situating the Deir ‘Alla plaster inscriptions within this larger textual world, we uncover the many genres of these inscriptions and dispute some of the generic claims about the Deir ‘Alla plaster inscriptions offered by previous scholars (e.g., the contention that Combination I is a wisdom text).
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Chrysostom's Identification of the Rule of God with the Lordship of Christ in His Homilies on Acts
Program Unit: Biblical Exegesis from Eastern Orthodox Perspectives
Mark W Elliott, University of Glasgow
In his treatment of Gamaliel in Hom 14 on Acts 5 Gamaliel preaches the gospel malgré lui: God is clearly using him as he mildly arranges Scripture to make a persuasive case concerning God's action in light of prophecy. The overall point Chrysostom draws concerns not this historical figure but the nature of Christian discipleship: as preferring to be punished unjustly for in that matter souls are purified. Socrates (according to Diogenes Laertius) thought the same.) In Hom 38 on Acts 17 however Chrysostom is much happier to tarry on the issue of providence, which on the previous opportunity he ignored. If God is as unknown as the Athenians claim, then they need to clear their minds and be open to the conclusion that if God is akin to humans he cannot be material and as immaterial can be ubiquitous. Also God is not in remote heaven but is neighbour to the human race as not just life-giver but substance provider, including physical healing--illustrated by a recent story and a more curious one about almost being caught in possession of a magical book by a soldier; relief and deliverance is thanks to the very present God. As with what he observed of Gamaliel, Chrysostom's Paul proceeds carefully and rationally. His God envelopes those gods of superstition and invites humans to be his workplace.
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The Christianization of Marriage in Visual Art
Program Unit: Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism
Mark D. Ellison, Brigham Young University
This paper sets forth a methodology for approaching visual art and physical artifacts as evidence for the development of early Christian discourses and practices related to marriage, and summarizes findings resulting from such an approach. It examines the corpus of 3rd-4th century Christian artifacts at Rome and its environs (sarcophagus reliefs, grave slabs, gold-glass medallions, catacomb frescoes, items of jewelry, mosaics) containing portraits of married Christians, inscriptions indicating commission by/for married Christians, surrounding images and symbols, and depictions of biblical couples or models of marital fidelity. The interpretation of this iconographic and epigraphic evidence yields insights on the Christianization of marriage by: (1) identifying intentionality via alterations to conventions of pre-Christian Roman art, in a way analogous to redaction criticism and form criticism; (2) employing visual culture theory and considering iconographic programs as visual rhetoric with multiple purposes and audiences — images perform tasks such as eulogizing, idealizing, constructing/maintaining identity, asserting theological commitments, and contesting rival socio-religious ideas; (3) contextualizing marital imagery within the broader early Christian conversation about the religious merit of marriage, ascetic renunciation of marriage, and the place of married Christians within the faith community, as well as the development of early forms of marriage liturgy such as the nuptial blessing. The evidence suggests that a relatively wealthy, assertive, lay clientele in 3rd-4th century Rome employed images of their own commission and use to oppose ascetic extremes and to promote the concept of a religious merit in marriage in continuity with an anti-encratist, moderate strand of early Christian tradition. Concepts of a marital bond formed by deity, a nuptial blessing, an eschatological reward associated with Christian marriage, and a way of life in continuity with biblical role models find expression in the visual evidence. Considering these physical artifacts that were commissioned and used by rank and file Christians yields appreciation of lay influence on the development of a Christian theory of marriage — Christian ideas and practices were not merely imposed upon masses of people from above by religious elites, but were developed in community with assertive, enthusiastic participation of the laity (Lisa Kaaren Bailey, The Religious Worlds of the Laity in Late Antique Gaul [2016], 3). The iconographic programs surveyed constitute a visual form of “family discourses” that, “like ascetic discourses, could effectively construct Christian reality in antiquity” (Andrew S. Jacobs and Rebecca Krawiec, Journal of Early Christian Studies 11.3 [2003], 262).
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Twin Stories of Brothers: A Comparative Analysis of Jacob and Esau with the Maasai Legend of Senteu and Olonana
Program Unit: Comparative Method in Biblical Studies
Beth Elness-Hanson, Johannelund School of Theology
The Maasai people group of East Africa have a legend of the twin brothers, Senteu and Olonana (Sankan 1973:79–81; Kipury 1996:165), which holds many intriguing parallels to the Jacob and Esau narrative in Genesis 27. How do these similar accounts influence understandings of the concepts of fraternal conflict and reconciliation within intercultural biblical interpretation? Because the comparative approach is so prevalent in African biblical studies (West in de Wit 2008:37), this examination integrates the tripolar interpretive model developed by Cristina Grenholm and Daniel Patte (2000:7–54) as a theoretical framework for analyzing and utilizing this approach in an ethically strong and culturally sensitive manner. This appropriation of Grenholm and Patte’s framework is also in dialogue with Gerald West’s tripolar model (2018:247–248). In addition, this exploration also draws upon the broader biblical Jacob narrative, ethnographic discussions of Senteu and Olonana, and the writing of the Maasai theologian, Gabriel Kimirei, in a constructive intercultural analysis of these conflicts among brothers and issues of reconciliation.
Key words: Genesis 27, Jacob and Esau, Senteu and Olonana, Maasai, Cristina Grenholm, Daniel Patte, Gerald West, Gabriel Kimirei, intercultural biblical hermeneutics
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Praying the Gay Will Stay: Queer Assumption and Pre-named Desire in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas
Program Unit: LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics
Sarah Emanuel, Loyola Marymount University
The promise of queer pedagogy is to disrupt hierarchical and/or essentializing ideologies, including modes of meaning making within the classroom. Conversations concerning self, attraction, and romance are not excluded from this; both exposing and deconstructing ostensible impartialities, including those centered around heterosexual dominances, are integral parts of the queer pedagogical project. In this teaching exercise, I will invite participants to analyze the Infancy Gospel of Thomas with what I will term a “pre-queer romance” lens. This “pre-queer romance” lens stems from the biases of the teacher; I, as a lesbian professor, would like the gay the stay between the text’s young Jesus and unnamed “young man.” Asserting such a desired yet also likely unactualized same-sex romance onto these characters will create space for participants to question the sexual roles we place upon pre- and/or non-identifying sexual humans. It will also, in turn, bring to light the hypocrisies heterosexual dominances place upon our societal understandings of pre- and/or non-sexual beings.
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Paul within Judaism: Wrestling with Particular Universalism in Paul’s Eschatology
Program Unit: Paul within Judaism
Sarah Emanuel, Loyola Marymount University
Much of current scholarship understands Paul as a Christ-confessing Jew of the first century CE. Rather than seeing Paul as having converted from Judaism to Christianity--an interpretation that held until the mid-twentieth century--newer scholarship asserts that Paul maintained his Jewishness as he moved from being a non-Christ-confessor to a Christ-confessor. This essay situates Paul’s theology within this understanding--that is, within a first century Jewish context. In doing so, however, it argues that Paul’s infamous declaration in Romans 11 (a text often read as a summation of Paul’s eschatology regarding Jews and Gentiles) that “all Israel will be saved” in the eschaton reflects a particular universalism. In other words, while situating early Christ-centered writings within a context of ancient Judaism is historically sound--and while Paul’s statements concerning fellow Jews can also be understood within a context of ancient Jewish difference and debate--I suggest that his understanding of the “right” kind of Jewish worldview is still Christ-centric. When Paul claims that “all Israel will be saved” in the end of days, his “all” still refers to a Christ-centered “all” (i.e., all Christ-centered Israel, whether Jew or Gentile, will be saved). Ultimately, this essay pushes against the grain of apologetic interpretations by arguing that, in situating Paul within Judaism, readers must address more honestly--must wrestle with indeed, if we engage further a Jewish entryway--the exclusivity of Paul’s claims. And if it requires saying: I, as a Jewish New Testament scholar, am more ethically and historically comfortable with this entryway than an apologetic one. Situating Paul within Judaism means that we must engage the complexities of Paul’s Jewishness, including those that make us struggle.
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The Role of the Antichrist in a Byzantine Apocryphal Apocalypse of John
Program Unit: Apocalypse Now: Apocalyptic Reception and Impact throughout History
Emanuela Valeriani, Aelac-IRSB Losanne
This paper analyzes the Apocryphal Apocalypse of John – better known as the First Apocryphal Apocalypse of John – starting from the comparison with the canonical one in order to define its social and cultural context that is still rather neglected among scholars together with its different textual forms.
The new critical text that I’ve established within my Ph.D project at the University of Geneva - forthcoming in the Series Apocryphorum (CCSA) - that takes into account the entire manuscript tradition, gives a very important contribution in order to identify the context of the origin of the Apocryphal Apocalypse of John.
The investigation starts from the analysis of the literary genre, the symbolic language and the eschatological theology and immediately puts in evidence both, its predilection for the oracular dialogue, rather than visions, as a means of the divine revelation; and a theological position, based on the idea of a single universal resurrection, which introduces an antimillenarian eschatological representation.
The absence of any reference to the Millennium, as it is represented in the canonical Apocalypse, and the absence of the devil, as one of the protagonists of the final events, are peculiar elements of this text in which the eschatological enemy is represented by the antichrist. The detailed description of its appearance occupies the central part of the narrative and combines typical elements of the portraits of the antichrist widely used in ancient Christian apocalypses, buti it also seems to take into account the Legend of the Antichrist used in some byzantine apocalypses.
There is a narrative framework consisting in two narrative element at beginning and the end of the book: 1. the description of the moment when the revelation takes place – that is when John is taken up to heaven from Tabor mountain on a brightly-shining cloud after seven days of prayer on Tabor mountain; once he has passed through the otherworldly dimension, he can see the heaven opened, but he is not taken on a heavenly journey. This is the very starting point of revelation later mediated through dialogue between John and the ascended Christ. 2. The second one is the concluding sections of the narrative in which John is first told to report to the believers what he has seen and heard, so that they won’t walk in darkness, and then he’s brought back to Tabor mountain where he listens to a voice proclaiming macarisms.
Due to the lack of clear historical, political and social references within the narrative, the dating of this text is still an open question. Taking into account all the proposals put forward until now, it seems convincing to consider the VII-VIII century as the reliable period of composition, basically as a result of the use of a terminology which is not attested before the Iconoclasm, σεπτὴ εἰκών, but which is widely used during the controversy in defense of the veneration of the icons, but expecially after a comparison with some texts pertaining to the byzantine apocaliptic tradition.
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Biblical Theology, Canonical Shape, and Chalcedonian Christology
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Matthew Y. Emerson, Oklahoma Baptist University
Accepted paper for the IBR Research Group on Biblical Theology.
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Re-forming Romans 8: First Reformed and Reversing the (Eco)Hermeneutical Flow
Program Unit: Bible and Film
Grace Emmett, King's College London
This paper brings First Reformed (2017) into conversation with Romans 8:18–25 to examine what each can offer the other using ecological hermeneutics. The film tells the story of Protestant minister Ernst Toller and his encounter with environmentalism after meeting a couple (Mary and Michael) who are new to his church. As the film progresses, Toller begins to despair of the harm being done to the world around him. Yet this despair exists in tension with the hope he experiences in relation to Mary, through whom he eventually finds redemption. The film is rich with biblical allusions: both Toller and Mary evoke different biblical figures through their mosaic character constructions, and Romans 8:23 is explicitly cited in a pivotal scene towards the end of the film. Using this scene—in which Toller and another character debate the Church’s responsibility to act to prevent further climate breakdown—First Reformed’s broader narrative can be read as a longform exegesis of Romans 8:18–25, with the film’s key intertwining themes of suffering and hope mirroring the logic Paul expounds in the Romans passage.
The passage has become a cornerstone text in discussions of ecological hermeneutics (e.g. Braaten 2006, Horrell, Hunt, and Southgate 2010, Byrne 2010, Bauckham 2011, Tonstad 2016), and by adopting Larry Kreitzer’s approach for reading biblical texts through film in order to ‘reverse the hermeneutical flow’ (1993), the film can elucidate three particular dynamics of Romans 8. First, Toller’s embodiment of ‘groaning’, both on behalf of his own ailing body and also for the fate of the world around him, depicts a kind of ‘solastalgia’—a term coined by Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher, to describe contemporary climate grief as ‘the homesickness you have at home’ (2019). The concept of solastalgia can then be read reciprocally alongside Romans 8 as a way of exploring the connection between human and non-human creation. Second, and in conjunction with a recurring question posed throughout the film about whether God will forgive humanity’s contribution to climate breakdown, we can consider the role of knowledge in relation to creation’s groaning. This knowledge is presumed on a corporate scale by Paul in Romans 8:22 (οἴδαμεν ὅτι), but is nuanced by the film; who knows what about climate breakdown, and how do they act on that knowledge? ‘We know that’ thus resonates quite differently today, both in terms of what we know about climate breakdown, but also who chooses to participate in the ‘we’ and who is willing to excuse themselves from the responsibility such knowledge entails. Finally, the film allows us to challenge Paul’s rhetorical question about hope in 8:24, because in fact Toller both passionately despairs and hopes for the physical world around him, as well as for Mary—there must, in fact, be hope for what is already seen. Ultimately this paper invites a fresh perspective on both First Reformed and Romans 8, making each other strange through the use of ecological hermeneutics.
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Symbolic Language in the Hymns of Ephrem and Early Piyyutim
Program Unit: Syriac Studies
Michael Ennis, Harvard University
The importance of symbolism in the poetic works of Ephrem the Syrian has been the subject of ample scholarship. Murray and Brock, and more recently Bou Mansour and den Biesen, have shown that symbols and figurative language are not incidental features of Ephrem’s poetic style, but a central structure of his theology. Modern scholarship has also shown that Ephrem’s connections with his Jewish contemporaries are not merely incidental, but that certain elements of rabbinic exegesis find echoes within his work.
Understudied up to this point, however, has been the comparison between Ephrem and roughly contemporary Jewish religious poetry. The work of Rodrigues Pereira on late antique Aramaic poetry juxtaposed Ephrem’s madrashe with Jewish Aramaic poetry of the same period, but few similar treatments have been forthcoming. This paper offers another attempt to read the great Syrian poet against late antique Jewish poetry, choosing in this instance the body of pre-classical and early classical piyyutim— a genre of Hebrew liturgical poetry, dating from roughly the 5th to 7th centuries CE.
Although differing in their linguistic and religious context, piyyutim share several crucial similarities with Ephrem: a liturgical context, a didactic function, and a highly developed verbal artistry (employing acrostics, internal rhymes, and puns). This paper will address another similarity: both corpora share a dense symbolic and figurative vocabulary, drawing and expanding upon scriptural language. The animating questions will be first, how does figurative language “work” in each case (what images are drawn upon, how does the poet adapt or expand symbols and figures found in the scriptural text); and second, what do these differing methods in employing figurative language reveal about the role of symbolism in the thought and “world-view” of the poets?
While the nature of the evidence does not permit absolute statements, this study will generally observe that Ephrem is more likely to coin “new” symbols and figures, drawing upon his particular theological view of nature, while the payyetanim are more likely to “limit” their figurative language to expressions with scriptural warrant—while nevertheless being entirely willing to expand these images, to chain figures from disparate verses together, and otherwise to elaborate their sources. To the second question, we will suggest that Ephrem regards symbols—both scriptural and natural—as God’s own method of revealing himself to limited human minds; symbols are important because they draw the mind analogically toward God. For the payyetanim, meanwhile, symbolism makes the language of scripture new, and newly-relevant, for contemporary listeners. This is not merely an ornamental feature: rather, it draws Biblical narrative into a new historical context, and reasserts continuity between the ancient and late antique communities of Israel.
The academic study of piyyutim, like Syriac studies, is young, especially outside of the Hebrew-speaking world. Although scholars like Yahalom and Münz-Manor have probed the question of figurative language in piyyutim, relatively little comparative work has yet been done. This presentation aims to contribute modestly to this exciting question, by tracing parallel developments in Semitic-language religious poetry in late antiquity.
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Midrash on the Shekinah and Indwelling of Christ according to Theodore of Mopsuestia
Program Unit: Midrash
Michael Ennis, Harvard University
Rabbinic literature flowered in the wake of an enormous loss: the destruction of the second Temple. Voluminous scholarship has traced the ways in which, deprived at a stroke of the cultic center of Jewish religion, the rabbinic religion sought to keep the memory of the temple alive, by allusions in midrash and through continuous exegetical elaboration on temple law and ritual. But the Temple was, in addition to a cult center, the dwelling-place of God on earth and the special site of his divine presence. With its destruction, God had, in some sense, disappeared.
This problem posed a greater challenge for the rabbinic mind. While eager not to compromise God’s transcendence—and certainly, desiring equally not to compromise their commitment to monotheism or to introduce “two powers in heaven”—nonetheless, the rabbis developed several means of expressing their confidence that God was still present in a special way with the Jews. One of these means was the Shekinah, or God’s special “dwelling presence” with the people of Israel.
At roughly the same time that the rabbinic conception of the Shekinah was evolving, their Christian contemporaries were heatedly disputing questions of Christology, attempting to answer the fundamental question: in what way was Christ both human and God? One great fourth century thinker of the Antiochene school, Theodore of Mopsuestia, answered, against the idea that God “fused” with a human, that Christ was a man in whom God “dwelt” by his good pleasure.
My paper examines these two developments in parallel. Beginning with an examination of some of the oldest midrashic strata on the Shekinah, I extrapolate some of the major functions and qualities of this rabbinic concept in its earliest stage. I demonstrate that the Shekinah expresses a special presence of God by his good pleasure, one that is exclusive to the people of Israel and which has a strong moral dimension. I further contend that these rabbinic teachings hinge on interpretive work; that is, they are grounded in midrash. Turning then to the Christology of Theodore of Mopsuestia, especially as it survives in certain Syriac translations of his work, I show that many of these same qualities—the expression of God’s pleasure, its unique association with a single person, its moral quality—also relate to the Antiochene position on God’s “dwelling” in Christ. I then argue that Theodore, too, grounds his Christology not in some philosophical prior, but in a set of interpretive positions on contested Biblical texts.
The thrust of my argument is not that Theodore’s Christology is directly dependent on the early rabbinic midrashim on the Shekinah (nor the reverse.) Rather, I hope this paper illustrates the way in which both communities were struck by similar sets of doctrinal issues, betraying the same fundamental question: what does it mean for God to be “present”? Moreover, their parallel deployment of similar techniques of interpretation and similar priors about divine particularity and divine unity led to similar solutions, however inflected by the specifics of their respective religions.
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True Prophets and False Prophets: The Pseudoprophetai in JerLXX
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
WITHDRAWN: Johanna Erzberger, Jerusalem School of Theology
The translation of neviim (prophets) by pseudoprophetai (pseudo-prophets) wherever the context implies a negative evaluation in the Septuagint version of the book of Jeremiah has often been quoted as one of the characteristics of the translator’s translation technique. The rendering of neviim (prophets) by pseudoprophetai (pseudo-prophets) implies a valuation, which has already been introduced by the context itself. Eight of nine occurrences of pseudoprophetai (with the exception of 6:13) appear in few successive chapters, in Jer 33-36, in Jeremiah’s temple speech, in the story about the sign act of the yoke and Jeremiah’s confrontation with Hananiah and Jeremiah’s letter to the exiled in Babylon. The interesting phenomenon is not so much the translation as such, but why it is chosen only here. The paper will discuss the perception of those chapters, in which the pseudoprophetai almost exclusively appear, as a textual unit by the Septuagint. It will furthermore discuss the specific dynamics that a rendering that introduces an explicit evaluation, which would otherwise have stayed implicit, introduces into the so formed narrative.
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People Living with Disabilities Re-translating Job’s Lament: For a Better Life
Program Unit: African Biblical Hermeneutics
Nathan A. Esala, University of KwaZulu-Natal
The bodies of people living with disabilities are often “translated” by theologies in Sub-Saharan Africa which operate according to the health and wealth gospel, or according to the mainline developmentalist gospel. They are treated as passive agents. Similarly, the translation of biblical texts assumes people living with disabilities will be passive members of the translation audience. However, African translation theology as described by Sanneh and Bediako argues that the sites of a translation’s reception are more decisive than its sites of production. Since sites of reception are not abstract, but include real bodies in time and space, a post-colonial and emancipatory translation theology suggests people living with disabilities must re-interpret the Bible from their own embodied and sectoral sites of reception. More than that, I will be arguing in a theoretical and embodied way for bringing a site of the Bible’s reception into dialogue with its sites of production such that people living with disabilities in northern Ghana re-translate the Bible and in the process rework the ideo-theologies that are bringing death to them and their contexts. The case study explores how people living with disabilities in northern Ghana participate in re-translating Job’s lament governed by an alternative post-colonial logic of re-translation for social and theological liberation.
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A Fragment from Ahiqar and Old Testament Wisdom Literature Reexamined
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Bryan Estelle, Westminster Seminary California
Regrettably, the sayings of Ahiqar have been neglected as a source of comparative information in studies of the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible. Most of the attention has turned to Egyptian writings as the background for biblical wisdom. And yet Ahiqar is one of the very few ancient Near Eastern wisdom compositions that can claim to be contemporary with the development of Old Testament wisdom literature. Such a close contemporary witness, one that had close proximity to Israel during the formation of her own wisdom literature, surely is a desideratum and therefore warrants closer examination.
This paper reexamines an important fragment of Ahiqar from Elephantine, a hymn from column 6, line 79 (Porten and Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt, vol. 3, Literature, Accounts, Lists [Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1993], hereafter, TAD C).
The paper follows Porten and Yardeni’s reordering of the columns based upon the identification of a palimpsest. Paleographic problems exist here in this fragment. This paper accepts Kottsieper’s reconstruction (Die Sprache der Ahiqarsprüche, BZAW [Berlin, de Gruyter, 1990) followed by Weigl (Die aramäischen Achikar-Sprüche aus Elephantine und die alttestamentliche Weisheitsliteratur [De Gruyter, 2010]). High-resolution photographs have been consulted (thanks to Bruce Zuckerman and the West Semitic Research and Inscriptifact Projects at the University of Southern California).
Although convergences between this fragment and motifs in Old Testament Wisdom literature, particularly Proverbs 8, have been noted in the past; nevertheless, a careful intertextual study of other important Old Testament texts, particularly Job 28, Daniel 7, and Sirach 1 and 24 are examined in this paper. This paper takes into consideration the research of Greenstein who notes that not a single verb or derived noun refers to digging, excavating, or mining can be found in Job 28 as has often been assumed in the past. The result of this intertextual analysis is that the past attempts to find cross-connections with the theme of personification fade in significance and more plausible connections and distinctions with regard to temporal and spatial aspects between these wisdom texts surface.
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A Tree with Leaves That Heal? The Root of the Leaf Imagery in Rev 22:2
Program Unit: Nature Imagery and Conceptions of Nature in the Bible
Douglas Estes, South University
A long-standing puzzle of arboreal imagery in the NT occurs at the end of John the Seer’s Apocalypse: A tree with leaves that can heal. While people often ascribe healing properties to plants and herbs, the same is not true of tree leaves.
During his vision of the new Eden, John sees the tree of life as an echo of the original creation story: A tree of life bearing fruit by a river where people dwell within proximity to God. One notable difference in symbolism between John’s vision and the original creation story is the mention of the leaves on the tree—explicit in John but implicit in Genesis. What to do with the leaves in Revelation was a question not lost on the first interpreters of the text; some early interpreters such as Ephrem the Syrian and Oecumenius treated the leaves in a somewhat straightforward manner, whereas other interpreters such as Ambrose and Victorinus of Pettau saw the leaves in a fully symbolic or allegorical vein. This confusion over the interpretation of the leaves raises several questions: What kind of tree produces healing leaves? What kind of leaf is able to heal people? Why does John add these leaves to his version of the tree? What kind of healing do the leaves provide?
There seems to be at least three initial areas for investigation into this puzzle, each of which I briefly develop at the beginning of this presentation: first, ANE sacred tree imagery with references to leaves; second, OT imageries of trees with leaves (Ps 1:3; Ezek 47); and third, earliest interpretations of the Apocalypse with comments about the leaves (Ephrem the Syrian, Eusebius, Ambrose, Jerome, Victorinus of Pettau, Oecumenius). From this foundation, I argue that while each of these are cast important light on the puzzle, none are a direct parallel on which John relies. I argue that there is an often overlooked area for investigation: The theology of the “Johannine School” (specifically the Gospel of John). I argue that it is the unique Johannine perspective on healing-salvation-life that, filtered through OT imagery, theologically animates and is the actual ‘root’ of the symbol of the healing leaves. In doing so, I argue that the Seer’s intentional ambiguity about the tree and the leaves is the cause for the widely varied interpretations found among the earliest interpreters. The tree of life in the Apocalypse may be a completely polyvalent image, but it is still one based on OT imagery and rooted in Johannine theology.
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“Claiming that Faith Alone Can Suffice for the Baptized Person...”: Identifying the Targets of Pelagius’ Fifth-Century Critiques Concerning the Sufficiency of Faith and Baptism for Life-Long Salvation
Program Unit: Inventing Christianity: Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, and Martyrs
Erik Estrada, Texas Christian University
Historians of Late Antiquity have long since known about the following statement in Pelagius’ Commentary on Romans (3:28) (ca. 405-409): “Certain people are twisting this passage in order to abolish the works of righteousness, claiming that faith alone can suffice for the baptized person.” In attempts to identify the targets of Pelagius’ statement, scholars have taken three approaches. First, the majority has simply noted this intriguing comment but has not attempted to identify its targets. Second, another group led by Yves-Marie Duval has posited that Pelagius had in mind the supporters of Jovinian. Third and last, another group led by Henri Rondet has suggested that Pelagius was speaking about the same opinion within the Catholic Church mentioned by Augustine in his book On faith and works. To date, neither the second nor the third group has supplied any significant evidence or argumentation to defend their respective positions, aside from noting a few parallels.
In view of this impasse, I will argue that Pelagius targeted certain Christians within the Catholic Church who were defending not only a belief in salvation by faith alone but also the sufficiency of baptism to guarantee a Christian’s entrance into eternal life. This challenging understanding of faith and baptism, I will argue, was the same theological and interpretive perspective challenged by Augustine, which he attributed to “our merciful ones” (i.e., a subgroup within a larger perspective that leaned toward mercy).
To demonstrate this thesis, I will first review the pertinent statements in Pelagius’ Pauline commentaries where this theological perspective was addressed. Thereafter, I will not only demonstrate that Pelagius did not have the Jovinians in mind but I will also show how Pelagius’ descriptions match parallel descriptions of this merciful perspective provided by Augustine and others.
In the end, this paper will show that the sufficiency of faith and baptism for salvation was heavily contested in the early fifth century. This finding is significant for two reasons. First, this conflict over faith and baptism has been largely ignored by historians. In Ferguson’s magisterial book on baptism, for example, one does not find any discussion about Pelagius’ conflict with this perspective. Information about this controversy will instead help scholars gain more context for the insistence on morality in the baptismal homilies of this period. Second, this paper will obviate the similarities between these late antique conflicts over the sufficiency of faith and baptism and those of later ages. Recent scholars such as Thomas Schreiner have claimed that the Reformation’s soteriological concerns were not those of earlier ages. In this conflict over baptism, however, I will show, that there was indeed a similarity of theological concerns shared between these ages. In addition to solving this conundrum as to who Pelagius was speaking about, this study opens the larger question: what was the later impact of these late antique conversations on early modern scholars? Identifying Pelagius’ targets is one major step to answering these historical questions about the longevity of early Christian debates over baptism, faith and their sufficiency.
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Reading Paul with Pelagius: Augustine’s Use of Pelagius’ Commentary on Romans in His Sermons on the Psalms
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Erik Estrada, Texas Christianity University
Caroline Bammel argued in one of her path-breaking studies on Augustine and Origen that in an engagement with various theological opinions circulating in Africa, the bishop did not use the work of Pelagius. Instead, Augustine used the Latin translation of Origen’s Commentary on Romans. Augustine delivered sermon 32 on the Psalms, Bammel maintained, before reading Pelagius’ Commentary on Romans. If correct, argued Bammel, this non-use of Pelagius would effectively place this sermon before the composition of the treatise De peccatorum meritis (ca. 411), one of Augustine’s earliest critiques of Celestius.
But does this sermon exhibit no “influence of Pelagius”? I will argue that to the contrary, in at least one clear instance, and perhaps even two, readers can indeed detect the presence of Pelagius’ Commentary on Romans. Although Augustine used Origen’s Commentary on Romans to address various soteriological questions, he also looked to the insights of Pelagius from his recently finished commentary on the same Pauline epistle.
To demonstrate this thesis, I will show that in at least one instance, Augustine directly used certain comments of Pelagius on Romans 3 and 4. A textual comparison between Augustine’s interpretation of a passage in Romans in sermon 32 and Pelagius’ Commentary on Romans, I believe, reveals a direct, though unacknowledged, borrowing from the work of Pelagius. I will also show that Augustine did not borrow these comments from other commentators on Romans available or possibly available to him such as Origen, Ambrosiaster or the Anonymous Budapest Commentator.
Augustine’s borrowing from Pelagius was partly due to the fact that the sermon was most likely delivered in Carthage around the year 412. During this time, many immigrants from the City of Rome had fled to Carthage because of Alaric’s invasion of the Eternal City. Some members in the audience were interested in the soteriological topics discussed by Pelagius and his disciples. As a way to address the hotly debated soteriologies circulating in North Africa at this time, Augustine used Pelagius’ comments to support his interpretations of Paul, a strategy used in the treatise De peccatorum meritis.
This study will have a threefold benefit. First, it will show that sermon 32 was actually penned at the time of or shortly after after the composition of book 3 of the De peccatorum meritis. By demonstrating the use of Pelagius at this stage, we can now be certain that this important sermon was not penned before the De peccatorum meritis, as Bammel maintained. Second, this paper will demonstrate that Augustine indeed used Pelagius for sermon 32, again contrary to Bammel’s assertion. This borrowing will provide yet another instance of an early engagement with Pelagius’ thought. Third, with this additional evidence, we now have a more expansive picture of the various ways in which Augustine used the work of Pelagius. This paper will show that Augustine continued to leverage Pelagius’ comments on Paul in his own favor in areas of mutual agreement. In sum, this paper opens new areas of potential investigation between these two early Christian scholars.
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Honoring the Gods: Affective Discourse for Images in the Ancient Greek Novel
Program Unit: Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World
Marshall Evans, University of California-Santa Barbara
In this paper, I will argue that two ancient Greek novels show how τιμή, honor, is a helpful indigenous category for understanding pious behavior around ancient Greek and Roman images of the gods, and the affective relationships that worshippers formed with these images. When we recognize the participation of images of the gods in the ancient Greek and Roman social systems of honor, we can pay particular attention, as Robertson Smith's work emphasized, to the affective consequences of this participation, the hope, fear, dread, euphoria, and everything in between that people felt around and because of images of the gods. The category of honor, situated in its ancient context, illuminates this affective realm, the realm of the emotions, as Carlin Barton demonstrated in her work Roman Honor, and helps explain why images of gods existed simultaneously as inanimate objects and instantiations of the gods themselves, capable of dispensing as well as receiving honor.
Clear evidence from the late Republican and early Imperial ages for illustrating the ways the honor due images of the gods assumes an emotional, personal context, comes from both literary and archaeological sources. While there may be no late Hellenistic or early Imperial Hesiod who takes up relationships between mortals and immortals, and between immortals with each other, as his primary subject, Chariton's Chaereas and Callirohe and Xenophon's Ephesian Tale corroborate the suggestion that honor is a category which we might profitably use to illuminate the roles of these images in the lives of the ancient Greeks who lived, loved, worked, and died around them.
The works by Chariton and Xenophon insist on the significance of their characters' relationships with particular gods, relationships unfolding without any compulsory act of animal sacrifice. These novels therefore demand that the do ut des paradigm long used to characterize ancient Greek religion through its emphasis on animal sacrifice be strictly qualified, if not abandoned altogether. Chaereas and Callirohe assumes the efficacy of encounters with the image of a god even in the absence of a sacrificial offering. These personal encounters with the god, to use Julia Kindt's language, therefore emphasize the mutual affection of worshipper and divinity. In Chariton there is no governing concept of do ut des here which satisfies a god's need for sacrifice to extend concern to a worshipper. These encounters, ranging emotionally from the reserved to the histrionic, signal not only watershed moments in the plot, but affirmations of the god responding to affective behavior directed towards the god's image. Xenophon's narrative, practically ignoring sacrifice altogether until the end, suggests it is the lack of respect paid to the image of one god, Eros, and the plaintive, humble appeals of the lovers to another, Isis, which first ignites their love and then persuades Isis to offer the divine assistance necessary for their love to flourish. She responds to Anthia and Habrocomes because she listens to them and takes pity on their suffering.
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Soldiers, Slaves, Sons, and Brides: Expectations of Fidelity in Paul’s Letters
Program Unit: Redescribing Christian Origins
Jennifer Eyl, Tufts University
This paper is part of an ongoing project that reexamines the language of pistis in Paul’s letters. The paper argues that, rather than instilling “belief” in his followers, Paul was constructing relations of trust, fidelity, and faithfulness—toward himself and toward his Judean deity. The paper examines four categories of people in antiquity who were expected to demonstrate fidelity (or faithfulness) toward a superior, and to the social web of which they were a part: soldiers to their unit and command, the enslaved toward their owners, children to their fathers, and virgins who were soon to be wives. Throughout his letters, Paul refers to these categories of people and the expectation of their faithfulness in order to exhort the fidelity and obedience of his gentile followers. Notably, Paul does not draw on the image of subjects being pistoi toward a king or emperor. Casting his followers as sons of God, soldiers of Christ, slaves of Christ, and betrothed virgins being offered to Christ, Paul rhetorically outlines the parameters of singular devotion he demands from gentile followers. This rhetorical strategy is central to building what John Kloppenborg has recently called “networks of trust” in Pauline Christ groups.
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The Short Chronographic Paleya: New Contributions to Paleya Studies
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Sabine Fahl, University of Greifswald
This presentation offers reflections on Paleya studies which emerge from Die Kurze Chronographische Paleja [Gütersloh, 2019].
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Hands in Blood and Plundering: Competing Accounts of Cyril’s Installation in Sokrates’s Ecclesiastical History
Program Unit: Religious Competition in Late Antiquity
Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos, Amherst College
It is no secret that competitions surrounding high-profile episcopal succession during late antiquity were intense, often leading to occasions of violence in the moment and subsequent efforts to control the narratives of succession. In some cases, the competitions endured long afterward, with successive revisions in the historical record. One such example is found in Socrates’ account of Cyril’s accession as bishop of Alexandria (Eccl. Hist. 7.7). As narrated, upon the bishop Theophilos’s death, two candidates (his nephew Cyril and the archdeacon Timothy) were put forth as his successor, one receiving the support of the local military commander, Abundantianus, the other that of the people. Here, however, accounts of the succession diverge. According to one manuscript tradition, found in the received Greek text of the History, Abundantianus supported Timothy, but his attempt to install the man was prevented by the people’s insistence on Cyril. A different version of the incident appears in the Armenian translation of the History. There, it is Cyril whom Abundantianus forcefully installed against the people’s choice of Timothy as their new bishop.
As early as 1909, Matthias Gelzer argued that the Armenian translation, made during the first half of the sixth century, preserves a reading closer to Sokrates’s original text, and it was this variant that Günther C. Hansen and Manja Širinian advanced in the 1995 GCS critical edition of Sokrates. Subsequent scholars (e.g., Hans Van Loon, 2014) have challenged the Armenian reading, arguing that Cyril’s attacks on heretics and Jews following his election align with his standing opposition with secular authorities. However, these arguments focus on the immediate narrative circumstances of Cyril’s ordination and overlook a motif repeated throughout Sokrates’s history, namely, that bishops who had been installed with armed support from governmental authorities historically acted as tyrants. This motif surrounds several other high-profile bishops in Sokrates’s History, most notably, Makedonios, John Chrysostom, and Nestorios, each of whom relied on imperial backing for their positions and were later removed due to abuses of power. The repetition of circumstances, along with Sokrates’s general disdain for Cyril, provides additional support for retaining the Armenian reading of the passage. If this is correct, Sokrates’s presentation of Cyril’s episcopal usurpation appears to have caused some discomfort for later readers who regarded the Alexandrian bishop as one of the foremost champions of orthodoxy (as previously noted by Susan Wessel, 2001).
In this paper, I will explore the competitive aspects of this episode on two levels. First, following Hansen, I will examine Sokrates’s narrative construction of episcopal succession, arguing that the author is engaging in competitive discourse against Cyril’s supporters. Second, I will consider the revision of this passage as a continuing act of competition. While the revision—which appears fairly early in the Greek manuscript tradition and adopted in subsequent Latin and Syriac translations—does not completely mask Cyril’s tyranny, it does offer a cover of legitimacy for his actions, a cover not extended to similarly tyrannical bishops.
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The Composition and Date of Ezra-Nehemiah
Program Unit: Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah
Elelwani Farisani, University of South Africa
This paper examines different theories concerning the composition of Ezra-Nehemiah and the possible date of the composition of Ezra-Nehemiah. This will be done in three parts. First, the paper examines the compositional relationship between Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah. This part argues that Ezra-Nehemiah was composed by a different author from the one who composed Chronicles. Second, it discusses the question of the possible date(s) of both Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s arrival in Palestine. This section discusses three possibilities here, namely the traditional order, the reversal order and the intermediate order, before proposing the arrivals of Ezra and Nehemiah as 458 BC and 445 BC respectively. Finally, once possible date(s) of both Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s arrival have been suggested, the paper suggests some possible date(s) for the composition of Ezra-Nehemiah. This section argues that the composition of the text of Ezra-Nehemiah probably took place in two stages. The first stage was probably the writing, in 440 BC and 432 BC of the Ezra and Nehemiah memoirs respectively. The second stage was probably the compilation of the memoirs, with additions of several sources by the final author, probably an unknown Jew who belonged to or sympathised with the returned exiles, in about 300 BC.
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Status Quaestionis on the Quest for Scribal Habits
Program Unit: New Testament Textual Criticism
Alan Taylor Farnes, Provo, Utah
This presentation will survey the current state of affairs in the quest for Scribal Habits and a way forward. I will begin by giving a historical overview starting with Griesbach, will then move to Westcott and Hort, continue to Colwell, will culminate with Royse, and then discuss those who have built upon Royse’s work in recent years. It has been fifteen years since Royse’s Scribal Habits was published. I will therefore consider whether Royse’s methods have stood up to recent scrutiny and their proper role as we continue in the quest for Scribal Habits. We will discuss the Ausgangstext, the singular readings method, the shorter reading criterion, and other topics that play a role in determining scribal habits before discussing specific critiques to Royse’s method and a way forward. In the end we will discuss whether Royse’s methods should live on or if Royse’s methods were prolific stepping stones toward other methods better suited for the Quest for Scribal Habits.
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Making a Case for Trauma: Cultural Trauma, Group Identity, and Interest Convergence in Ezekiel
Program Unit: Biblical Literature and the Hermeneutics of Trauma
J. Christiaan Faul, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York
The book of Ezekiel has long been recognized as a text that is closely connected to trauma. However, trauma-informed readings of Ezekiel tend to focus on the individual actions of the prophet or on the insights that literary theories of trauma can offer for the text. Less often are the traumatic elements of Ezekiel connected to a potential attempt at communal identity construction. Furthermore, the recurring theme of self-blame in the prophetic book is often merely regarded in light of the self-blame prevalent amongst individual trauma victims. However, such an explanation for the communal self-blame present in the text relies on applying individual notions of trauma to a text that was formed out of community and functioned within community. Instead, this paper will use a theory of communal trauma, along with a central tenet of Critical Race Theory (CRT), to better understand the relationship between trauma, identity, and self-blame in the book of Ezekiel.
Following a brief overview of identity construction in Ezekiel, primarily informed by Jean-Phillipe Delorme, this paper will explore how this identity construction may have been part of an effort to establish the exile as a traumatic event in the history of the exilic community. Here I will rely primarily on the sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma, focusing in on his fourth dimension of traumatic representation: attributing responsibility. By utilizing aspects of interest convergence theory, a theory born out of CRT, I will illuminate the various intersecting interests (imperial and otherwise) that impacted the prevalence of self-blame as a means of attributing responsibility for the exile. Finally, I will demonstrate how viewing Ezekiel through this new lens can shed light on seemingly out-of-place passages such as 47:22-23 – presenting the verses as the result of interest convergence between the gēr and the Ezekielian returnees.
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The Pedagogical Power of Maternal Imagery in the Dura Europos Synagogue Paintings
Program Unit: Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism
Sari Fein, Brandeis University
The Dura Europos synagogue provides a rich site to mine in the study of ancient literacy, pedagogy, and cross-cultural interactions in antiquity. In her 2018 book Jewish Children in the Roman World, Hagith Sivan writes that “the ingenuity of the Durene synagogue designers lies in the patent juxtaposition of the remote past and the concrete present to generate a perfect pedagogical tool” (260). Sivan was speaking specifically about pedagogy for Dura’s children, for whom the synagogue wall paintings depicting biblical narratives functioned as a sort of visual scripture. These paintings, especially those which featured children, complemented what the children learned from the scripture they heard read in the synagogue, as well as the lessons they learned at home and through the social experience of childhood. Using Sivan’s framework, I argue that paintings featuring mothers or women in maternal roles functioned as pedagogical tools for the women members of the Dura synagogue community. For Dura’s women, these images provided models of how to use their roles as mothers to preserve and transmit their Jewish identity in the multireligious, multiethnic environment of Dura Europos--a garrison town within the Roman Empire with a significant and visible Roman military presence, an ever-present reminder of the Jewish community’s minority status.
I consider three images as examples of visual pedagogy for women in the Dura Europos synagogue community. First, “Elijah Restores the Widow’s Child,” which constructs an image of a foreign, widowed mother who challenges the authority of a prophet in order to save her child; second, “The Infancy of Moses,” in which several women, from Israelite slaves to an Egyptian princess, work together to protect the infant Moses, the future leader of the people of Israel; and third, “The Purim Panel,” in which Queen Esther models both semi-divine leadership and maternal care for the vulnerable population of Shushan’s Jews. Each of these images presents a pedagogical model for Dura’s Jewish women, and invited them to emulate the behavior of the biblical figures in their own social context.
These images and the community which created them did not operate in a vacuum. I follow Anabel Jane Wharton, who calls the interplay between the visual images of scripture and the sharing of written scripture within the synagogue context a “narrative bricolage” (“Good and Bad Images,” 15-16). Written scripture, the so-called canon of the Torah, Prophets, and Writings, by no means occupied a privileged space in this bricolage. The paintings of women in the Dura synagogue drew on alternative narratives found in Aramaic translations (targumim) of the Tanakh, as well as from narratives in collections of rabbinic midrash. They also mimicked contemporaneous visual models such as images of women in Dura’s other religious buildings, or in nearby cities like Palmyra. The result is images of women in maternal roles that reflect a multiplicity of interpretive voices showing diverse cultural influences. The mothers or maternal figures in the Dura synagogue paintings thus present for their viewers a model of Jewish motherhood that is both hybrid and complex.
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Reading Deuteronomy with Qumran Phylacteries
Program Unit: Book of Deuteronomy
Ariel Feldman, Brite Divinity School
This paper addresses several Qumran phylacteries (tefillin) illuminating the transmission and reception of Deuteronomy in the late Second Temple period. Qumran phylacteries are often divided into two types according to the scope of scriptural texts they contain. Those that have been dubbed Type 1 include, as far as Deuteronomy is concerned, Deut 6:4-9 and 11:13-21, while Type 2 features Deut 5:1-6:9 and 10:12-11:21. These phylacteries, particularly those of Type 2, offer a plethora of variant readings, including substantial additions, omissions, and rearrangements. This paper looks into three examples of such scribal interventions from Type 2 phylacteries: the long addition found in the wording of Deut 5:1-3 in 4QPhyl G, the short text of Deut 5:31-6:2 in several 4QPhyl A, B, J, and the rearranged text of Deut 10:13-11:12 in 8QPhyl. A close analysis of these texts within their wider textual context, particularly other Qumran copies of Deuteronomy, sheds further light on the extent of textual variation, scribal techniques, and implicit exegesis in Deuteronomy manuscripts in this period.
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The Sensorial Landscapes of Sacrifice in Second Temple Jewish Literature
Program Unit: Israelite Religion in Its Ancient Context
Liane Feldman, New York University
Among the corpus of Second Temple Jewish literature, there is a subset of texts with a focus on sacrifice and sacred space. Traditionally these texts have been analyzed with respect to texts we now identify as part of the Hebrew Bible, especially the Pentateuch. This focus on comparison however, and specifically on the supposed diachronic development of legal or ritual thought, has artificially flattened and obscured the distinct ideologies and concerns present within Second Temple literature about sacrifice.
In this paper, I propose a step back from these diachronic models and argue for reading these texts for what they are: works of literature in their own right with their own specific ideologies and aims. One of the most intriguing and distinctive ideas in these texts is their focus on the sensorial landscape of sacrifice, especially as it relates to the bodily experiences of the priest and of the worshipper. Across texts such as the Aramaic Levi Document, the Letter of Aristeas, Ben Sira, Temple Scroll, and Bel and the Dragon, authors describe sacrifice and ritual practice in ways primarily oriented to sensory perception. In this paper, I will explore the sensory language and imagery deployed by these authors and analyze the ways in which these texts theorize sacrifice from a position of embodiment. For example, from the insistence on visually bloodless, spotless sacrifice in Aramaic Levi to the description of sacrifice as “entirely silent” in the Letter of Aristeas, these texts construct their own sensorial landscapes of sacrifice that are unapologetically disconnected from the messy and cacophonous realities of sacrificial worship. Following this, I will suggest that the focus on the sensorium offers one piece of evidence that these texts are best understood as literary works, and not simply representations of historical practice or interpretations of earlier texts.
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Exegeting Phrase-Level Parataxis as a Grammatic Unit: Colossians 2:16 for a Test Case
Program Unit: Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics
Jônatas Ferreira, Andrews University
This article presents a theoretical model for exegeting phrase-level parataxis as a discrete category of biblical Greek. Although Greek textbooks engage grammar at phrase level—prepositional, adverbial, infinitive, et al.—there is general oversight of the paratactic phrase. This typical omission is due to structure: paratactical enumerations have no syntax as words list side-by-side with no grammatical hierarchy and leaving relationships between members undefined. Notwithstanding, an analysis of circa 2,500 phrases of intertestamental Greek reveals consistent principles of application that warrant phrase-parataxis a distinct section of study in textbooks and which significantly expand the fields of grammar and lexicography. Regarding the latter, the meaning of words and conjunctions in parataxis stems from the grammatic and rhetorical roles they play in their immediate paratactic system. Colossians 2:16 is taken for test case. In its paratactic design, the sentence makes the running translation: “Let no one judge you in matter of eating and drinking, that is, generally, in a given share from a feast, new moon or Sabbaths.” Rendering Col 2:16 as a unit defies a centennial exegetical tradition that has perpetuated the sentence as bipartite. The model proposed in this article additionally informs circa 170 other paratactic phrases found in the NT alone.
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Reading, between Text and Artifact: Egyptian Excavations and the Ambivalences of Object Distributions
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Gregory Fewster, University of Toronto
The textual scholarship of Mediterranean antiquity is currently undergoing a significant shift regarding our proper object of study, from the idealized text to the artifactual text. Newer approaches, often labelled “new” or “material” philology, constitute new scholarly modes of reading that leverage the artifactual status of a text-object in order to better understand and appreciate ancient modes of reading and other forms of textual engagement. In fact, these approaches rely heavily on the researcher’s ability to gain first-hand access to the text-objects they wish to study. For some of us, these textual artifacts are Egyptian papyri, many of which were excavated around the turn of the 20th century under the auspices of the British Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) and distributed to public institutions across the globe. While papyrologists are somewhat familiar with this practice of papyri distributions, fewer are aware that it coincided with the distribution of thousands and thousands of Egyptian antiquities – objects in an uncontested sense.
Drawing together original research on the papyrological collections at the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum and archival documents of the EEF, along with recent scholarship on the distribution of Egyptian Antiquities by the EEF (Stevenson 2019, Johnson 2012), this paper historicizes current discussion about the artifactual status of texts and its implications for our modern and scholarly modes of reading. Excavators and scholars often valued Egyptian papyri – especially literary papyri – as texts (in an idealized sense). Nevertheless, the papyri experienced the practicalities of artifact transportation, were subject to the legal obligations of excavated Egyptian antiquities, while appearing distinct from and intermingled with other Egyptian antiquities in EEF bureaucratic documents. By drawing out these tensions in the historical and archival record, this paper shows one way in which the distinction between text and artifact has haunted textual scholarship for over a century.
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I Have Put My Words in Your Mouth: The Democratization of the Prophetic Task in Deutero-Isaiah
Program Unit: Performance Criticism of the Bible and Other Ancient Texts
Chadd Feyas, Asbury Theological Seminary
Interpreters have long recognized the dramatic nature of the Deutero-Isaiah (DI) corpus (Isa 40– 55). In this paper, I examine the roles of the speakers and addressees in the drama with the aid of performance criticism. To what does DI summon its audience? The invocation of DI is for its audience to announce YHWH’s redemption—first to Zion and then to the world. Through the themes of the herald, servant, and witness, the prophetic task becomes democratized to the whole of the corpus’s audience. Following the example of the Servant, the addressees may accept the prophetic mission and apply themselves as instruments for YHWH’s purposes in the world. They embody the prophetic role as a witness of YHWH and a light to the nations. Coincidently, by accepting the prophetic calling to announce YHWH’s redemption, the addressees bring this very redemption to fruition in Zion and unto the nations. Thus the audience accepts this invocation through both announcing and participating in its own redemption and restoration. Considering these performative features of DI promises continued discussion not only within Isaiah studies but also for performance criticism on the Hebrew Bible and especially the prophets.
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The Fourth-Century Trinitarian Controversies in Syriac Sources
Program Unit: Syriac Studies
Emanuel Fiano, Fordham University
This paper will discuss the contribution of Syriac sources to the reconstruction of Greek and Latin fourth-century trinitarian debates (commonly known as “Arian controversy”). The first section will deal with the chronology and conciliar history offered by sources exclusively extant in Syriac, focusing a) on Constantine’s letter summoning the council of Nicaea of 325 (Urk. 20 = Dok. [2007] 22); b) on the summary chronicon introducing the Syriac collection of Athanasius’s Festal letters; and c) on the scholarly dispute concerning the encyclical letter (carried by mss. Par. Syr. 62; Vat. Syr. 148; Mingana Syr. 8) allegedly produced by a council at Antioch in 324/325 (Urk. 18 = Dok. [2007] 20), first controversially published by Eduard Schwartz in 1905.
Zooming in on the latter text, the paper will interrogate the transmission of the Antiochene letter in Syriac canonical sources, where it is normally placed between the canons of the Dedication council of Antioch (341) and those of the council of Laodicea (363). I will compare the texts contained in the six manuscripts by which the letter is attested—belonging to recensions “C/D” (ms. Mardin Orth. 320) and “E” (mss. Paris BnF Syr. 62, Mardin Orth. 309, Mardin Orth. 310, Birmingham Mingana 8), as well as to an unknown recension (Vat. Borg. Syr. 148)—in particular with regard to the well-known variant Eusebius/Ossius. Then, I will ask questions concerning the synodal letter’s original transmission and propose hypotheses about the circumstances of its inclusion in canonical collections.
The paper will conclude by providing some general reflections on the Syriac transmission and reception of canonical sources related to the trinitarian controversies, devoting particular attention to the Syriac version of an interpolated recension of the creed of the Easterners’ council at Sardica in 343 (carried by Paris. Syr. 62).
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Ortholalia: On Christian Derogations from Truth
Program Unit: Religious World of Late Antiquity
Emanuel Fiano, Fordham University
During the trinitarian discussions of the fourth century, the elevation of the Nicene homoousios to the status of a shibboleth for correct belief (a process initiated in 340 and consumed by the mid-350s) imposed a transformation not only on the matter of the trinitarian dispute, but also on its manner. Increasingly generalized preoccupation with lexical exactitude—the akribeia of which anti-Nicene thinkers did not tire of speaking—led to the proliferation of theological parties identified by one or another byword and to the development of ortholalia. The latter may be defined as the discursive device whereby formulary ways of correctly confessing theological truths functioned not only as keys to accessing appropriate beliefs, but also as tools to promote the grouping of different factions around a particular credal definition. Remarkably, such ecclesial rearrangements would occur in strategic derogation from what the actors themselves perceived as theologically appropriate, and in joint opposition to a belief cast as heretical and functioning, from the standpoint of discourse analysis, as a master signifier. Ortholalia was crucial to the fourth-century dogmatization of theological discussion, and could work in unsuspected ways. Its capacity as an aggregator was extended, for example, to non-literal adherence to a formula: while the signifier was still regarded as the litmus test of orthodoxy, more subjects than those willing to utter the phrase could pass the test. This paper will demonstrate the dialectical productivity, ecclesiological implications, and ideological import of ortholalia through an examination of the reception history of a phrase contained in a fragment attributed to Eustathius of Antioch. The corpora interrogated will include Jerome's Correspondence, Epiphanius's Panarion, and a Letter of the Marcellan clergy of Ancyra.
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Childhood Morbidity and Mortality in Jesus' Galilee
Program Unit: Children in the Biblical World
David Fiensy, Kentucky Christian University
There is a heart-warming scene in the Synoptic Gospels in which mothers bring their children to Jesus for blessing (Mark 10:13-16 and par.). The moment is pictured in western society as robust and playful little ones gathered about the great rabbi-prophet. Whether the scene is historical or not, the pathological question remains. What was the reality? How would such a scene have happened? Jesus research has for over one hundred and fifty years labored to craft a theological/religious background to Jesus’ ministry. More recently, historians have proposed various socio-economic backgrounds. Few, however, have offered a paleopathological background. Knowledge of ubiquitous and endemic disease can serve as important context for a movement. This paper proposes to sketch the evidence for widespread malaria in the Galilean region during the time of Jesus and then to show its effects, at least partially attributable to this disease, in terms of childhood mortality. I will examine geographical evidence (both ancient and pre-modern), literary references, and archaeological remains (surveys, amulets protecting against fever, and human skeletal remains that show pathology and length of life) for the Galilee region. In the concluding paragraphs, I hope to suggest some insights into the lives of children in Galilee and the Gospels’ presentation of the ministry of Jesus based on my results.
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Situating the Apostolic Constitutions in Antioch of the 380s
Program Unit: Jewish Christianity / Christian Judaism
Ari Finkelstein, University of Cincinnati
The Apostolic Constitutions is a significantly understudied text. When it is compared to anything it is usually to the third century Christian document, the Didascalia Apostolorum. Yet its likely provenance, Syrian Antioch, and its date, some point in the 380s, is the very setting and moment that John Chrysostom, then priest of one of three Nicene factions there, writes his Against the Judaizers. It is also in this period that the Pseudo Clementine literature is circulating in Antioch. The uptick in the production of Christian writings in this period is likely a result of Theodosius I’s promulgation of the Cunctos Populos of 380 which sought to impose Nicene orthodoxy on the Roman empire. His effort would have caused significant turmoil in Antioch where there were three homoousian factions vying for power and another homoian faction, not to mention other Christian groups with varying relationships to Jewish law. In this talk I will situate the community represented in the Apostolic Constitutions among these various factions and their texts and examine the compiler’s strategies in attempting to qualify as a homoousian orthodox party including its relationship to Jewish law, its deployment of various interpretive strategies, and its use of canonical laws to establish itself as orthodox.
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Yhwh: "Travelling Glory" or "Weeping King"?
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
Georg Fischer SJ, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck
Jeremiah and Ezekiel share many motifs (D. Vieweger), also theological concepts, e.g. God as shepherd (Jer 23:3; Ezek 34:11–16), divine love and empathy (Jer 31; Ezek 20), repeated announcements of bringing the people back from exile, etc. This invites to reflect on their mutual relationship (D. Rom-Shiloni). Comparing their theological differences, one can notice specific emphases in the respective portrayals of Yhwh. Whereas Jer depicts God as weeping, as incessantly, eagerly acting (שׁכם hiphil), and as “fountain of living water”, Ezek accentuates his holiness, his life-giving רוח and his ‘travelling’ כבוד, leaving the temple and returning to it. This points to distinct focalizations in the perception of God, noted also by H. Leene. Based on the comparison of the theologies of Jer and Ezek, I want to address anew the question of the links between these two prophets.
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Prolonged Rivalry
Program Unit: Genesis
Georg Fischer, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck
Rivalry among siblings is a pervading motif throughout the Book of Genesis (L. Alonso Schökel). Interestingly, one can often find genealogies in the immediate context, e.g. after Cain’s murder of Abel the descendants of the former and those of Seth in Gen 4 and 5 (T. Hieke), or after Ham’s seeing of his father’s nakedness the genealogies in Gen 10 and 11, thus continuing the contrasts between Noah’s sons. This paper argues that the doubling of תלדות (see also Gen 25 and 36–37) serves to underline the differences between siblings apparent in the preceding narratives and in this way prolongs their rivalry with additional motifs.
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A Dynamic Image of God: The Book of Hosea and Conceptual Metaphors
Program Unit: Book of the Twelve Prophets
Stefan Fischer, University of Vienna
This paper investigates metaphors of God in the prophet Hosea and uses the paradigm of conceptual metaphor and blending theory. By this approach from cognitive linguistics, different fields of metaphors and metonymes used to sketch an image of God are analyzed. It shows how metaphors are based on an incongruity between different ideas and presents God as a figure, shaping an image of a personality with sarcastic and ironic characteristics and explores, how the sustained metaphors used, shape a dynamic and coherent image of God.
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Christian Zionism at 10,000 Feet: Bible Reading and the Geopolitical Imagination of Neo-Pentecostals in the Peruvian Andes
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Bruce N Fisk, Westmont College
As Latin America increasingly embraces Protestantism, which is to say neo-Pentecostalism, we are seeing a corresponding rise in Latino Christian Zionism and in conservative, pro-Israel geopolitics. Explanations of this trend have included Protestantism’s historical resonance with capitalism; the high value Pentecostals attach to individualism; and Pentecostalism’s “spirit-filled geopolitics” (W. Gerard), i.e., an ontology comprised of an apocalyptic time frame, a binary (light/dark) worldview, and an experience of spiritual beings (e.g., Jesus, God; Satan, demons) as immanent and active political agents. One corollary of this ontology would be the belief that God bestows blessings upon the faithful and intervenes on their behalf, especially when they in turn act on behalf of Israel.
In this paper we explore the salience of another factor: the extent to which, and means by which, Bible reading is shaping the geopolitical imaginations and global allegiances of Latino Pentecostals. Pentecostal Christians in Peru -- in both major centers and Andean villages -- are people of the Book: they read the Bible aloud in services, hear it quoted in sermons, mark up their copies with hi-liters, and regard it as the very words of God.
Do close-up encounters with Old Testament episodes strengthen affinity between Latino Christians and the ancient Israelites, inspire philosemitism, fuel Christian Zionism and foster ideological support for the modern state of Israel? Which biblical verses, narratives, genres and reading strategies have been most influential in shaping the Latino-Pentecostal political imagination? How large a role does Bible study--personal and communal--play in forging the Christian Zionist geopolitics of Latino-Protestants? Do lay people in these churches connect their prospects for material prosperity with their obedience to Biblical injunctions to bless Abraham (Gen 12:3)?
This paper will address these questions, with particular attention to the relationship between “prosperity theology” and Christian Zionism, by reviewing the secondary literature and rehearsing my encounters and conversations across an assortment of neo-Pentecostal churches in Peru.
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The Continuing Relevance of A.D. Nock's Scholarship for Early Christian Studies
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
John T Fitzgerald, University of Notre Dame
This paper will explore the contribution as well as the continuing importance of Arthur Darby Nock's scholarship for early Christian studies.
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The "Third Race" in the Preaching of Peter: An Argument for Removal
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Ryan Austin Fitzgerald, St. Edward's University
The early 2nd century Preaching of Peter is often considered one of the earliest examples of Christian apologetic literature. Its claim for the “Christian third race” has become a standard benchmark for scholars to trace the development of early Christian self-consciousness (particularly “racial” self-consciousness). Not only is the Preaching of Peter considered one of the earliest texts which proclaims itself to be explicitly “Christian,” but the unequivocal threefold division of humanity into “Greeks,” “Jews,” and “Christians” would be the earliest clear statement of the paradigm that became standard in later centuries. I argue that this famous passage of the “Christian third race” is not actually contained in the Preaching of Peter. Since the text itself is not extant, scholars must reconstruct it out of citations from later Christians, primarily Clement of Alexandria. I demonstrate the unlikelihood that the passage is Clement’s citation of the Preaching of Peter; it is more plausible that Clement was adding his own interpretation influenced by Justin Martyr. Furthermore, I show how the current standard text of the Preaching of Peter was largely cemented through the efforts of Adolf Harnack, who had theological motive for the passage’s inclusion.
By recognizing that the “Christian third race” is Clement’s contribution, we push the Christian worldview which delineates three types of humanity to later in the second century. This alters our timeline of Christian self-consciousness and its mutual exclusivity with either Jews or non-Christian Gentiles (the “parting of the ways”). Three important alterations of our reading of 2nd century Christianity are the result of my argument. First, the nature of the Preaching of Peter must be reassessed, as it can no longer be assumed to be a self-consciously “Christian” text. Second, Clement of Alexandria becomes a pioneer rather than a parrot, whose interpretation of the Preaching of Peter would have to be re-examined. Third, we would need to rethink our view on literary dependencies among the Greek apologists. Clement clearly knew the Preaching of Peter, but without the anchor of the “Christian third race,” the dependency of Aristides of Athens on the Preaching of Peter is heavily eroded. Along with recent scholarship which has demonstrated the priority of our Syriac version of Aristides’s Apology, we are justified in asking whether Aristides knew the Preaching of Peter at all. Finally, it has been periodically suggested that Justin Martyr knew the Preaching of Peter on the basis of such “racial” terminology, but by removing this passage from the Preaching of Peter, verbal similarities between Justin and Clement become bolder to the extent that it is reasonable to conclude that Clement knew Justin’s work, if only his Dialogue with Trypho. If Clement knew Justin’s work, this opens new lines of questions about Clements relationship with Justin, particularly given Clement’s polemics against Tatian, whom Irenaeus calls a student of Justin. In short, when we see the “Christian third race” as Clement’s innovation a century after the Preaching of Peter, our overall picture of 2nd century Greek apologetics is shifted.
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Social Identity, Post-colonial Theory and Post-Traumatic Growth
Program Unit: Biblical Literature and the Hermeneutics of Trauma
LeAnn Snow Flesher, Berkeley School of Theology
Twenty-five years after the 1994 100 day genocide in Rwanda Caroline Williamson Sinalo has published a ground breaking analysis entitled Rwanda after Genocide: Gender, Identity and Post-Traumatic Growth. ‘Post traumatic’ growth is a term frequently used to describe positive changes after a traumatic event. Sinalo has chosen to focus her attention on the post-traumatic growth of Rwanda instead of the effects and impact of the trauma itself, a topic that has been covered by many others in a variety of ways. The purpose of her study is to analyze how – not how much – post-traumatic growth occurs in Rwandan survivors. Similarly, an analysis of social identity, hybridity, and leadership in Ezra-Nehemiah evidences Israel’s testimony of post-traumatic growth. Through the use of social identity and socio-literary reading strategies coupled with post-colonial theory and Sinalo’s trauma growth theory, this paper will seek to ferret out evidences of Israel’s post-traumatic growth as evidenced in the Ezra-Nehemiah corpus.
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Dark Humor and Irony in the Judges Narrative
Program Unit: Joshua-Judges
AJ Fletcher, Fuller Theological Seminary (Pasadena)
The importance of storytelling is often overlooked in the Hebrew Bible. This is particularly true within the book of Judges, since it is known for its notorious violence and unparalleled abuse. This paper seeks to address the use of dark humor and irony that take place throughout the Judges 19-21 narrative. The story conveyed throughout these chapters is a devastating tragedy; however, the author makes use of comedic features in order to make the tale more palatable for the audience while also providing subversive societal commentary.
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Old Transcriptions and New Readings in P45
Program Unit: New Testament Textual Criticism
David A Flood, II, University of Edinburgh
Few papyri have influenced the field of New Testament textual criticism like Chester Beatty Biblical Papyrus I (CB BP I), which is better known by its Gregory-Aland designation, P45. This fragmentary papyrus codex contains portions from each of the four Gospels and from the book of Acts. The art of transcribing fragmentary witnesses involves judgement and approximation. We ought not to be surprised, therefore, that the available transcriptions of P45 differ from each other and that all can be improved.
There are at least five complete transcriptions of the entire text of P45 by scholars or institutions: (1) The editio princeps by Frederic Kenyon in 1934, (2) Philip Comfort and David Barrett, (3) Karl Jaroš, (4) Reuben Swanson, (5) and the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung.
In addition to these, several transcriptions of smaller sections have been published: (1) Hans Gerstinger, Günther Zuntz, and Wendy and Stanley Porter have published transcriptions of a fragment held apart from the rest of the surviving codex at the Austrian National Library in Vienna; (2) The International Greek New Testament Project published a complete collation of Luke and a complete transcription of John; (3) Kyoung Shik Min published a transcription of Matthew.
The first part of this paper evaluates the editio princeps and surveys the history of transcribing P45, including an evaluation of each attempt. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the IGNTP and INTF transcriptions are the best available. The second part of this paper presents new readings in P45 in the Gospels that are not present in any other published transcription. This paper concludes by observing that published transcriptions are more likely to err in the Gospel of Mark than in the other three Gospels. One reason for this may be that the text of Mark in P45 is the most idiosyncratic of the Gospels in the papyrus. Larry Hurtado has established that P45 and GA032 (W) are each other’s nearest neighbors with no other close relationships i.e., they are a family of two. Even if one transcribes Mark in P45 with a standard critical edition and the majority text at hand, P45 is likely to present readings that are unfamiliar to the editor.
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P.Utah.Ar.120: A Late-7th/Early-8th-Century CE Qur’anic Quotation on Papyrus
Program Unit: The Qur’an: Manuscripts and Textual Criticism (IQSA)
Adam Flowers, University of Chicago
Belonging to the University of Utah’s Arabic Papyrus, Parchment, and Paper Collection, P.Utah.Ar.120 is an eleven-line papyrus document that exhibits a late-7th/early-8th-century CE Arabic script. The structure of the document suggests that it is a personal letter between two individuals, and, most intriguingly, lines seven and eight include a near complete quotation of Q al-Zukhruf 43:69-70. The document’s potentially early dating combined with the inclusion of Q 43:69-70 position P.Utah.Ar.120 as one of the earliest known qur’anic quotations in papyrus. This presentation will begin with an introduction to P.Utah.Ar.120 complete with a full transcription and translation of the text. It will proceed to argue for a late-7th/early-8th-century CE dating for the document based on orthography and literary conventions; additionally, the presentation will argue that the document, based on its overall structure, is a personal letter. Having established the appearance of an extended qur’anic quotation in an early-Islamic letter, the presentation will explore how P.Utah.Ar.120 both elucidates the ways in which the Qur’an was used by early Muslims in non-devotional contexts and confirms the existence of a standardized and widely-known edition of the Qur’an text by the early 8th century CE.
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The Power of Her Luxury: Gender and Economic Exploitation in Revelation 17–18
Program Unit: John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern
Hilary Floyd, Drew University
The Apocalypse of John has long been a contested site for women. Recent feminist and womanist scholarship has called attention to the complexities of the characterization of the woman Babylon as a “whore” (pornē), along with the dangerous implications of the violence done to her for real women. Others have argued that because the destruction of Babylon the woman/whore signifies the apocalyptic destruction of Rome the city, there are no dangers intended for real women. The violent destruction of Babylon in Revelation 17 is followed immediately by descriptions of the mourning of the kings, merchants, and seafarers, who weep because “all of [their] wealth has been laid waste!” (Rev. 18:17). Although some commentators have highlighted the specifically economic critiques of Rome in Revelation 18 and used this text as a resource for critiquing economic exploitation in the present, no significant work has been done that connects the depiction of Rome as a prostitute to the economic critiques of Rome and the Roman empire. Yet, this connection is crucial, both for the way that John constructs his critique of Rome and for readers that want to construct a critique of John’s critique.
John’s repeated use of the Greek word pornē (prostitute) to describe Babylon/Rome seeks to deepen the shame of the critique. A pornē most likely referred to a brothel slave, or the lowest class of prostitute. Yet, John also describes Babylon/Rome as accumulating great wealth and living luxuriously. Although commentators have offered thoughtful ways to reconcile these two seemingly conflicting representations, they do not take seriously the possibility that John intended to deploy divergent representations of Babylon/Rome as a prostitute because he needed them to construct his critique. I argue that John needed some aspects of the experience of a pornē (prostitute, brothel slave), namely degradation and multiple sexual partners, as well as some aspects of the experience of a hetaira (courtesan), specifically the perception of wealth and luxury provided by others, in order to disparage and denounce Rome as thoroughly as possible. Thus, John critiques the economic exploitation perpetuated by the Roman empire, but he fails to see that the primary image or metaphor that he uses – a prostitute or brothel slave – was also a victim of exploitation.
In portraying Babylon/Rome as a pornē who lives luxuriously, John is trying to have the best (or worst) of both worlds – the multiple, anonymous partners of the degraded brothel slave and the perceived wealth of the rich courtesan. Only by focusing on the social and economic lived realities of prostitutes can we fully challenge John’s construction and critique of Babylon/Rome and the problematic gender ideology that undergirds it. In this paper, I call attention to the intertwined constructions of gender, sexuality, and economics present in Revelation – and the ways that commentators have often reinforced these constructions rather than challenged them – in order to highlight the dangers of these constructions and their implications for women throughout the ongoing history of interpretation.
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A Heard Cry Is an Answered Cry: James's Appropriation of Old Testament Lament in James 5:4
Program Unit: Letters of James, Peter, and Jude
Grant Flynn, Wheaton College (Illinois)
James 5:1–6 contains piercing language against the rich. With the denunciatory tone of a prophet, James condemns rich landowners for hoarding their wealth (vv. 2–3), exploiting poor harvesters (v. 4), living in luxury (v. 5), and condemning and murdering the righteous (v. 6). Verse 4 depicts an ongoing struggle between the landlords and the harvesters––the landlords withhold wages from the harvesters, and the harvesters respond by crying out to God. The verse ends with the statement that the harvesters’ cries “have reached to the ears of the Lord of Hosts.” Although some commentators have rightly recognized an allusion to Ps 17:7 LXX in this statement, the significance of the allusion remains largely unexplored. Consequently, no commentator has sought to explain why the verb James carries over from Ps 17:7 LXX is modified from the future tense (εἰσελεύσεται) to the perfect tense (εἰσεληλύθασιν), or the implications of the interplay between the two texts. This paper thus seeks to explore the allusion to Ps 17:7 LXX in Jas 5:4 and unpack the layers of implicit meaning embedded in the textual interplay. I suggest that James intentionally modifies the verb from Ps 17:7 LXX for Christological and eschatological reasons, and that the allusion characterizes the harvesters, the landlords, and God according to the portrayal of the righteous lamenter, the unrighteous enemy, and Yahweh in OT laments.
This paper consists of three main sections. In order to appreciate James’s allusion to Ps 17:7 LXX, it is first necessary to grasp why the harvesters are crying out to God by briefly examining the historical situation behind Jas 5:4. The second and third sections of the paper analyze James’s appropriation of Ps 17:7 LXX. In the second section, I offer three options for explaining the tense change of the verb from Ps 17:7 LXX to Jas 5:4 before suggesting that James shifts the temporal register of the action to represent a more theologically accurate depiction of God’s answer to lament in the time after Jesus’s resurrection. In the final section, I unpack the layers of implicit meaning embedded in the allusion. I propose that, through the lens of Ps 17:7 LXX, James characterizes the three participants in Jas 5:1–6 in the light of their OT lament counterparts, so that the reader conceives of the harvesters as righteous lamenters, the landlords as unrighteous enemies, and God as the omnipotent Lord who vindicates the righteous and punishes the unrighteous. I conclude the paper by showing how the allusion impacts two scholarly debates in Jas 5:1–6: the identity of James’s addressees and the identity of “the righteous one” in v. 6.
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“We Are Not Like Moses:" Philological Observations on 2 Cor 3:13 in Context
Program Unit: Paul within Judaism
Hans Foerster, Universität Wien
Standard translations like the Good News Bible offer at the beginning of 2 Cor 3:13 an emendated text: “We are not like Moses, who had to put a veil […]” Such a translation puts Paul and Timothy in direct opposition to Moses. This might be one of the instances where the title of a recent contribution holds true: “The Good News Bible: Is It Good News for the Jews? Methodological Observations on Translational Choices in GNB” (Cf. Förster, BiTr 69 (2018) 383–401). It appears that the translation offered by GNB is interpretive and might misconstrue the syntax thereby missing also the point of what Paul intends to say. There is (among others) no relative clause in the Greek text of this passage. Consequently, there might be no indication whatsoever in the Greek text which would put Paul and Timothy in direct opposition to Moses. This has consequences for Paul’s relationship to Judaism. The contribution will analyse the syntax, offer an alternative translation and evaluate the consequences of this translation for understanding Paul’s relationship to Judaism.
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Forgive Us This Day: Augustine on Anger in the Catechetical Sermons on the Lord’s Prayer
Program Unit: Prayer in Antiquity
Alex Fogleman, Baylor University
Anger was a topic carefully considered in late antique rhetorical and philosophical education, one which carried over into early Christian teaching. In this paper, I consider the relationship between anger and desire as it was expressed in late antique educational settings and in Augustine’s teaching on anger in sermons to catechumens on the Lord’s Prayer (s. 56-59). Following Aristotle, the philosophical schools of the Peripatetics, Stoics, and Epicureans considered anger in close connection with desire—particularly, the desire for revenge—but with different evaluations of its value in the philosophical life. Augustine, meanwhile, incorporates yet transposes this education in anger therapy to catechumens, inviting catechumens to envision prayer as the “form of desires.” I organize Augustine’s teaching on anger to catechumens into five rhetorical strategies or “spiritual exercises”: providing a theological understanding of prayer; a therapeutic analysis of anger; encouraging the contemplation of one’s shared humanity with one’s neighbor; employing biblical models for imitation; and inducing his hearers to inner dialogue. Altogether, these sermons reveal a focused effort to re-create educational settings in which rhetorical and philosophical agendas were translated into Christian settings, and greatly foster our understanding both of prayer in antiquity and its relation to the emotions.
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How Spelling Analyses Assign Objective, Relative Dates to Biblical Texts
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Dean Forbes, University of the Free State
In 1992, Andersen and Forbes published a rudimentary text-portion timeline based on the incidence patterns of matres lectionis in the Hebrew Bible. They found that use of a mater lectionis for a given vowel token depends on its type, its stress, and its text portion. Using the resulting timeline does not require knowledge of the underlying statistical methods because two accessible analogies allow one to visualize the sources and goals of the analysis. Although updating of older spellings during text transmission could have been so complete as to make it impossible to recover an instructive timeline, the spelling data indicate that complete updating did not occur. Nonetheless, the inferred timeline does harbor oddities. This paper shows, without resorting to deep statistical arguments, that such oddities can often be resolved, or lacking that, accounted for convincingly. Better, there are strong indications that use of evolving noise-robust methods holds the promise of eliminating the oddities.
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The Troubled Argument-Adjunct Distinction
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Dean Forbes, University of the Free State
Deciding whether a clause constituent is an argument (a part of the semantic core) or an adjunct (a peripheral constituent) remains a stubborn challenge. Unfortunately, existing solutions lack coverage and consistency, whether they are obtained by local improvisation, by manual valency dictionary construction, or by algorithmic valency frame inference. While some grammarians have abandoned the distinction between argument and adjunct, it is quite useful pedagogically and operationally. Hence, others have suggested recasting the distinction by treating the argument and adjunct categories as the prototypical endpoints of a gradient scale. My argument-adjunct gradient estimator seeks to encompass the grammatical characteristics of Biblical Hebrew. Using clause features, the estimator evaluates the degree of argumenthood exhibited by each clause constituent in the BH corpus.
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Unearthing a Politics of Forgiveness among Contemporary Readers of Matthew 18:15–35? A Reflection upon a Four-Year Project in Empirical Contextual Bible Reading among Un-reconciled Black and White Chr
Program Unit: Contextual Biblical Interpretation
Dion Forster, Stellenbosch University
This paper will reflect upon some unexamined contexts that inform readings of a text of forgiveness among Black and White Christians in post-apartheid South Africa. It will do so by reflecting upon the method and findings of a study in contextual biblical interpretation, conducted with groups of Black and White South African readers over a period of 4 years. The findings stem from an empirical contextual Bible reading research project that involved contextually diverse readers who engaged in a series of Bible studies in which they read Matthew 18:15-35 and reflected upon the ‘politics of forgiveness’ in post-apartheid South Africa. South Africa is a deeply religious nation, and conflicting interpretations of the Bible remain a source of struggle. 84% of persons profess Christian faith. Research shows that readings of biblical texts play a significant role in forming moral, ethical, and political identities. The participants in this study read Matthew 18.15-35 in ‘in- group’ (mono-racial, and mono-cultural), and ‘out-group’ (multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural), social identity settings in order to extrapolate their varying hermeneutic perspectives on forgiveness. The data shows that context plays a central role in informing hermeneutic positions. Social identity, race, economic status, gender, life’s experience, and the age of the readers influence the hermeneutic perspectives of forgiveness that emerged from the readings and interpretations of the text. The study finds that Black readers in South Africa tend to understand forgiveness in social and political terms – these readers accentuate economic restitution for the wrongs of colonialism and apartheid, and emphasise the need for social, economic and political transformation in their interpretations of the text. While, on the other hand, White South African readers, understand forgiveness in largely personal and spiritual terms – once the sin and wrongdoing has been confessed to God, the matter is settled. Forgiveness, from their perspective, does not necessarily require any engagement with the offended party. It only requires God’s ‘unmerited grace.’ The paper will present some insights into the methodological considerations that informed the design of the empirical contextual Bible studies. The empirical component of the contextual Bible studies allowed the researcher to gain deeper, richer, and more textured understandings of how the readers’ contexts informed their hermeneutic perspectives on the ‘politics of forgiveness’ in post-apartheid South Africa. The paper will also reflect on how this approach allowed for the explication, clarification, and naming of ‘hidden’, ‘unquestioned’ and ‘unexamined’ contexts in the participants’ hermeneutic engagements with Matthew 18:15-35. Finally, the paper will offer some suggestions on the possibilities, and pitfalls, that empirical contextual methods present for contemporary Biblical scholarship as it intersects with issues of ethical concern.
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Not to Be Served, But to Serve: The Moral Aims of Roman History and Biography and the Gospel of Mark
Program Unit: Rhetoric of Religious Antiquity
Robert L. Foster, University of Georgia
This study follows the lead of Ronald Mellor’s introduction to Roman history, biography, and autobiography, which highlights the moral purposes of these narratives in providing examples for future generations of political and military leaders. This paper will compare the moral discourses related to Augustus across varieties of narrative literature, using Velleius Paterculus, Suetonius, Pliny, and the Res Gestae, and compare the moral discourse of the Gospel of Mark to these and the way the evangelist presents Jesus as a moral exemplar for future generations.
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Touching and Feelings in Corinth
Program Unit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible
Arminta Fox, Bethany College
In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul responds to the Corinthian assertion that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman” (1 Cor. 7:1). While some in Corinth argue that celibacy is best, Paul fleshes out his reasons for wanting people to get married: to account for cases of porneia and that it is better for them to marry than to burn with passion. Thus, in spite of the Corinthians’ own feelings regarding sexual touch, Paul’s rhetoric is a forceful attempt to persuade the Corinthians to marry and have sex for the sake of passions run amok, for the sex abusers in the community. Antoinette Wire and others have argued that this debate in Paul’s letter addresses male sexual immorality by enticing would-be celibate women to marriage and sex for the good of the community. In thinking with the affect theory of Ann Cvetkovich and others, this paper asks to what extent interpreters should imagine a communal feeling of sexual violence or assault in this early Christ community? How would such a feeling interact with other communal feelings, such as a communal sense of grief, as argued by Laura Nasrallah via the archaeological remains in Corinth? What are the gendered implications of such affective logics? After briefly exploring the methodological hurdles of such questions, this paper argues that this sort of affective approach to 1 Cor. 7 broadens the possible visions of intersectional figures in this Christ community. It is possible that reading this text in the era of the #MeToo movement requires attention to burning rage moreso than other burning passions.
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Conditional Freedom and the Power of Christ
Program Unit: Slavery, Resistance, and Freedom
Arminta Fox, Bethany College
The apostle Paul uses the metaphor of being a slave to Christ at various points throughout his letters. In 1 Corinthians 7:21–24 Paul states that if someone were enslaved when called, they now are a freedperson belonging to the Lord. In addition, he asserts that all are bought with a price. What does it mean in the ancient world to be a freedperson who has been bought and belongs to a god? This paper aims to explore this question by considering ancient manumission inscriptions, focusing particularly on one from the theater in ancient Delphi. According to this inscription, manumission often involved sale to a god, whose purchase would signify freedom from slavery. Yet, this freedom was often only granted conditionally, where the formerly enslaved person was still required to serve the former enslaver or his/her family. To explore the affective implications of living in a liminal state between bondage and freedom for a modern reading context, this paper will think with Monika Fludernik’s Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy and Reuben Jonathan Miller’s Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. This paper’s contextual reading of 1 Corinthians 7:21–24 and this manumission inscription argues that there is rhetorical power, for good and for ill, in the claiming of divine authorization and belonging, both in the experiences of the enslaved in antiquity and for those in the criminal justice system today.
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"Reading Leads to Translation": Code-Switching in the Private and Public Performance of Targum
Program Unit: Rabbinic Literature and Culture
Steven D Fraade, Yale University
This paper will analyze and discuss a set of early rabbinic texts that either narrate or legislate the recitation of alternating scriptural verses in Hebrew (miqraʾ) and Aramaic translation (targum), and the relation of this performative code-switching to the other branches of the rabbinic “curriculum” of “oral Torah" (e.g., talmud/midrash, halakha, and aggada), which, in a sense, will be shown to derive from it. Emphasis will be placed on the difference between code-switching in the private domain of scriptural study and the public domain of scriptural lection. A text from the Palestinian Talmud will be introduced that both thematizes miqraʾ/targum code-switching and exemplifies it in its own text by switching between the Aramaic story frame and its Hebrew speech acts. Finally, it will be shown how medieval manuscripts graphically continue the linguistic code-switching between miqraʾ and targum, Hebrew and Aramaic, that originates in the tannaitic practice and tradition.
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Intentional and Unintentional Sin in Hebrews
Program Unit: Hebrews
Michael Francis, John Brown University
This paper will consider the significance of the distinction between intentional and unintentional sin in Hebrews. Recognition of some such distinction at certain points in the epistle is common among interpreters of Hebrews, unsurprising given the distinction’s significance within the sacrificial provisions of Priestly law, and the author’s comparative concern with Jesus’ sacrificial and priestly accomplishments. Specification of how the distinction functions within—if, indeed, it is truly significant for—the argument of the epistle has proved more challenging, however. Does the author really make this distinction under the influence of scriptural law as often as is sometimes claimed? How does the distinction between intentional and unintentional sin map onto the author’s comparison between the scriptural cult and Jesus? Is the distinction itself fundamental to the seemingly dire warnings found in the epistle? The paper will proceed in four stages. First, the paper will provide an overview of the data concerning intentional and unintentional sin in Hebrews. Second, the paper will survey the various ways in which these data have been interpreted within the epistle as a whole. Third, the paper will offer an assessment of the data in Hebrews, and that by means of comparison with the way the distinction between intentional and unintentional sin functions in Priestly law. Fourth, these findings will be situated within a wider interpretive context, that of the significance of the distinction between intentional and unintentional sin in the writings of, first, the Dead Sea sect, and, second, Philo of Alexandria.
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The Curse of Canaan in Redaction-Critical Perspective
Program Unit: Genesis
David Frankel, Schechter Institue of Jewish Studies
The story of Noah’s drunkenness (Gen 9:20-27) is famously plagued with prominent difficulties. First, why does Noah pronounce such a severe curse in response to the seemingly minor crime of seeing nakedness? Second, why does Noah curse his grandson Canaan, when it was his son Ham that committed the crime? Finally, why does verse 24 refer to Ham as “his youngest son” when, according to the simple implication of the passages that refer to Noah’s three sons, Shem, Ham and Japhet (Gen 5:32; 6:10; 9:18; 10:1), Japhet was the youngest son, and Ham was the second son? Scholars have offered various theories concerning the evolution of the text in order to account for these anomalies. In this paper I will offer a critique of these theories, and suggest a new redaction-critical analysis of the text. Following this analysis, the story of Gen 9:20-25, in its original form, was an etiological tale about the drunkenness of Ham, not Noah. Whereas Noah was remembered as the hero of the flood, Ham was remembered as the first vintner. Similarly, the original offender was Canaan, not Ham (removing the words “Ham, father of” in verse 22). According to Gen 10:6, the sons of Ham were Cush, Mizraim, Put and Canaan. Thus, it was Ham who was violated in his tent by his “youngest son,” Canaan, and this is why it is Canaan who is cursed. The tale originally accounted for the indentured status of Canaan and the Canaanites vis-à-vis the other “sons of Ham,” who essentially personify the Egyptian empire (and note the phrase “the tents of Ham” at Psalm 78:51). The curse of Canaan to subordination to “his brethren” (verse 25) – Cush, Mizraim and Put - broadly corresponds to the historical reality of the territory of Canaan in the second millennium B.C.E. At a later stage in the transmission of the text, the point of the etiology was transformed. The offended father was identified with Noah so that the Canaanites could be given over to the domination of Noah’s oldest son, Shem, representative of the people of Israel. The analysis concludes with a brief reflection on the historical problems surrounding the exodus myth and the possibility, suggested by the development of Gen 9:20-27, that it is ultimately rooted in early memory regarding the political subordination of Canaan.
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Solving the Enigma of Samaria’s Water Supply
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible, History, and Archaeology
Norma Franklin, University of Haifa
The ancient city of Samaria (Hebrew Shomron) is perched on the summit
of a rocky hill, located in the central mountain area of the Land of
Israel. According 1 Kings 16:24, Omri, king of the northern Kingdom of
Israel purchased the hill from Shemer in order to build his new
capital city. Archaeological research has shown that the hill was not
barren in the 10th c BCE it was fertile farm land that supported olive
trees and other crops. The Omride kings totally remodelled the summit
of the hill, creating a level area in order to build the royal palace
and ancillary administrative buildings. The new city, founded in the
9th century BCE, served as the capital until the kingdom was defeated
by the Assyrians in 722–720 BCE. The city of Samaria withstood the
fall of the northern kingdom, and despite many vicissitudes, it
continued to be inhabited for nearly a thousand years. Herod renamed
the city in 30 BCE, calling it Sebastia in honour of the Emperor
Augustus, and the city continued to flourish, becoming a Roman colony
under Septimius Severus in ca 210 CE. Yet, despite its glorious
history, John Crowfoot the director of the Joint Expedition to
Samaria-Sebaste (1931-1935) declared that “Samaria… though it had a
long history, never grew into a very big city.… A serious drawback was
the want of a good water supply; the nearest good springs are a mile
away on the far side of a deep valley and they would have been cut off
whenever the city was closely beleaguered; the cisterns inside the
walls could not have been sufficient for many thousand inhabitants
plus their horses and donkeys” (Crowfoot et al. 1942: 1). The entry in
the New Encyclopaedia for Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land
reads “Samaria… was chosen as the capital of the Kingdom of Israel,
even though it lacked an adequate supply of water,” and that “the
water supply of the Israelite city… was limited to rainwater which was
collected in cisterns” (Avigad 1993:1300, 1308). The idea that any
large city, particularly one that was the capital of the northern
kingdom, could have existed without its own water supply is untenable.
A study of the unpublished excavation diaries from the Harvard
excavations (1908-1910), pilgrims’ accounts, maps, old photographs,
and recent data from the local water authorities, show that
Samaria-Sebaste did, and still does, have its own water source. That
is, Samaria had its own water system as complex as the water system in its sister-capital Jerusalem.
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The Invention of a Genre in Lactantius’ Divine Institutes
Program Unit: Rhetoric of Religious Antiquity
Peter Fraser-Morris, University of Virginia
In an important and revealing section of book V of the Divine Institutes, Lactantius lists and evaluates Christian writers who have come before him. He suggests these authors generally had the same literary goals as him and proceeds to describe their strengths and weaknesses. While this passage has been regularly analyzed and discussed, the tendency has been to focus on the specific content—what Lactantius commends or criticizes about earlier writers. In this paper, I will instead look at the reason for this passage’s inclusion in the Divine Institutes and the rhetorical import of creating a literary pedigree. I will argue that Lactantius, by naming and discussing his predecessors, should be read as creating a genre of Christian literature. In so doing, he aims to create literary context for his work and to invent rhetorical space for imagined, future Christian intellectuals.
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“Seeing Him from Afar:” Haptic Vision and Embodied Memory in John Chrysostom’s Homily on Saint Meletius
Program Unit: Religious World of Late Antiquity
Michelle Freeman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
My research abandons our modern mind-body dualism and notions of abstract visuality for a more integrated approach to embodied sensory perception in late ancient Christian homiletics. In particular, I examine the processes of vision and memory in John Chrysostom’s Homily on Saint Meletius. Preaching in Antioch from 386 to 398 amid a four-way schism among the Homoian, Anomoian, and two Nicene parties, Chrysostom lays claim to the holiness of Saint Meletius as a previous bishop, deceased for five years, of his Nicene faction. He utilizes the sainted body in his ecclesiastical politics by referring frequently to his congregation’s visual experience of Meletius when he was alive and their resulting memory of him. My work situates Chrysostom within the ancient medico-philosophical milieu that considered vision to be a material, haptic process involving either the intromission of particles and impressions into the eye or the extramission of a visual ray toward the visible object. It also draws on studies of ancient Christian rhetoric that used sensory imagery to produce ambiguous bodies and embodied cognition in listeners. I argue that Chrysostom employs philosophical theories of vision as an embodied, haptic perception in order to assert the physical contact between Saint Meletius and his congregants and, therefore, the holiness of his Nicene faction. Furthermore, Chrysostom’s ekphrastic descriptions appeal to his audience’s memory of Meletius and rematerialize the saint, beyond the mere presence of his remains in their church, in such a way that his words produce bodily effects in his listeners, creating an embodied sense of holiness. With this materialist approach to Christian homiletics and the cults of the saints, my work shows that paying attention to the sensory modalities of ancient people that differ from our own can help us understand the ways in which ancient Christians constructed sanctity in late antiquity. It also demonstrates that even in high theological controversies such as that of the Arian dispute, we see power dynamics deployed not only among elite theologians, but also in interactions between regular Christians and clergymen, who construct communal and doctrinal holiness through popular notions of embodied sensory perception.
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Priestly Self-Critique in Num 15:22–31: Theological Implications of an Unforgivable Sin
Program Unit: Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures
Vincenz Heereman, University of Notre Dame
Lev 4 and Num 15:22–31 are concerned with the same issue: how to atone and obtain forgiveness for unintentional offenses (šǝgagah). While the structural similarities and lexical proximity between both passages cannot be overlooked, the two texts nevertheless differ significantly from each other in length, style, scope, and halakhic details. How can the differences be accounted for? Ancient readers (11QTemple, Rabbinic sources), averse to the idea that two sets of biblical laws might contradict each other, sought to resolve the problem by assigning them to different types of transgressions. Modern interpreters have either seen the texts as unrelated and reflecting different periods and practices, or considered one to be a re-elaboration of the other.
Arie Toeg has convincingly argued that Num 15:22–31 is a halakhic midrash on Lev 4. The daršan, he claims, dispenses with ritual detail and simplifies the categories of šǝgagah. The most jarring halakhic discrepancy between the two passages (different animals for the public ḥaṭṭaʾt and the unusual order Ꜥolah before ḥaṭṭaʾt) Toeg shows to be the result of a process of normalization common in midrashim (in later terminology: supplying a new sêp̄aʾ for the rêšaʾ and vice versa). In good homiletic fashion, Num 15 expands on the theology implicit in Lev 4: atonement can be gained for these sins precisely because they were committed inadvertently. Most importantly however, Num 15 introduces the treatment of a new category: that of the brazen sinner who sins defiantly (bǝ-yad ramah). No sacrifice can atone for this type of sin and the sinner must be cut off (karet) from the people.
Toeg’s article, published in Hebrew, has been treated in only a few later publications, some of which I review in my paper. I show that Jacob Milgrom’s dismissal of his proposal cannot stand up to scrutiny, leaving Toeg’s account of the relationship between the passages as the most convincing explanation at hand. Most importantly, I show that, if Toeg is right, Num 15:22–31 is a remarkable and unusual piece of priestly self-criticism. Against the rabbinic interpretation (reprised by Milgrom) according to which wanton sins (Num 15:30–31), when repented, can be atoned for by the High Priest on the Day of Atonement, it must be maintained that the homilist of Num 15 sees the cultic system of atoning sacrifices at the end of its wits when it comes to sins of particular gravity. Thus, an author of the priestly school, in a language that can be shown to echo prophetic criticism as found in Ezekiel, seeks to provide a safeguard for God’s transcendence against all temptations of priestly/cultic presumptuousness. Israel’s cult is not a well-oiled system prepared for any contingency where priests know how to diffuse divine anger at will. In every sacrifice it honors a God whose holiness and righteousness evades human manipulation. Num 15:22–31 is proof that some members of the priestly school were keenly aware of this.
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The Utilization of Qumran Evidence in Jesus Research: Aims, Effects, and Hermeneutical Implications
Program Unit: Qumran
Jörg Frey, Universität Zürich
Since the mid-20th century, Jesus reseach and Scrolls research both underwent considerable transformations, in various stages. In all those stages, the evidence from the Scrolls was related to the inquiry about the Jesus of history. The paper will analyze some of the connections established and ask for the hermeneutical function Qumran evidence had for the respective images of Jesus. After briefly discussing selected parts of the evidence, the question will be raised where we stand at present an how we can develop an appropriate hermeneutical awareness for scholarly and societal debates.
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The Gospel of John in History-of-Religions Perspective
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
Joerg Frey, Universität Zürich
The paper will discuss various approaches of contextualizing John in Platonic, Gnostic, Jewish-Apocalyptic, Hellenistic-Jewish, and Early Christian contexts and propose paths towards a textually adequate solution.
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Notions of Democracy in Philo and Josephus
Program Unit: Josephus
David A. Friedman, University of Cambridge
Philo and Josephus are the only two ancient Jewish sources to use the term δηµοκρατία, but neither use the term in the usual way. Instead, each use the term idiosyncratically; both may refer to Rome: Philo to the principate and Josephus to something like the Republic. Philo describes democracy as the best form of government in both the Exposition and the Legum Allegoria. In Deus 173–176, Philo observes that the divine plan which most men call τύχη dances in a circle with the end that oikoumene will become as one polis lead by democracy, the best of all politeiai. De Agricultura 45 compares mob-rule, the worst of evil politeiai, to democracy, the best. Similarly, in Conf. 108, Philo comments that the better kind of soul-city adopts democracy, which honors equality and is ruled by law and justice. Spec. 4.237 notes that democracy keeps the “order of equality” and is the best of all constitutions. Although Philo praises “democracy,” he derides the distribution of authority by voting, which depends on “the impetuosity of the mob” (Spec. 2.231) and notes that many votes produce many evils (Legat. 149). Comparing Philo’s description of “democracy” with his depiction of Joseph in De Iosepho and with the discussion of kingship in Ep. Arist. suggests that Philo’s “democracy” may be an ideal monarchy. Moreover, Philo may conceive of ίσότης, a principal virtue of “democracy,” as “geometric equality” where each receives what he is due. This is a important virtue that Philo ascribes to Augustus in Legat. 147. Philo’s idea of an earthly “democracy” may therefore be the Roman principate. Josephus refers to democracy in three different contexts. According to War 4, the brigands’ outrageous decision to appoint the high priest by lot (4.153-4) impels Ananus, one of the principle high priests and a man who could have saved Jerusalem (4.151), to address the masses in assembly and incite them against the Zealots (4.162-192). Josephus’ encomium for Ananus emphasizes his εὐγένεια, his love of liberty, and describes him as an “enthusiast
for democracy” (4.319). The account of the assassination of Gaius in Antiquities 19 thrice uses democracy to describe the regime before the principate, which must therefore be the Roman Republic (Ant. 19.162, 173, 187). Josephus’ summary account of the types of Jewish politeiai in Ant. 20 describes the government between the return of Ezra and the rise of the Hasmoneans as democratic (20.234), although Ant. 11.111 has already referred to it it aristocratic and oligarchic because the priests were in authority. Josephus’ tour of Jewish polities in Ant. 20 may echo the account of Gaius’ death in Ant. 19 and Polybius’ definition of democracy as a community where people revere the gods, obey the law, the will of the greater number prevails (Plb. 6.4.4–5). “Democracy” in the encomium of Ananus and Ant. 20.234 may refer to the orderly, law abiding, traditional rule of the most qualified people—the priests—and to something like the Roman Republic.
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From Theatron to Synthronon: Performance and Ritual in Classical and Byzantine Greece
Program Unit: Lived Religiousness in Antiquity
Courtney Friesen, University of Arizona
On the south slope of the Athenian acropolis beneath the Parthenon, the Theater of Dionysus remains a fixed monument attesting to the era that produced some of history’s most renowned playwrights at the zenith of Athens’ political power and cultural production. Less evident to contemporary visitors is the religious legacy of this theater, for instance, that it was originally in the sacred precinct of Dionysus Eleuthereus, and that its plays were staged in honor of the god amidst festivals, ritual processions, and sacrifices. Even less well known, sometime in the sixth century CE, a basilica was constructed at the eastern parodos of the Theater, and the orchestra functioned as the church’s courtyard with a phiale built into its floor. This architectural move reflects a Christian impetus to erase the legacy of “pagan” performances; this was achieved, however, by re-appropriating the very structure where classical drama was once produced. And basilicas were similarly built atop theaters at Priene and Tegea.
Continuity in ritual performance spaces is also evident in the “synthronon,” the semi-circle stepped seating in the apse behind the altar that became a standard architectural feature of Byzantine churches. Celebrated examples in Constantinople include the Hagia Eirene, wherein the sythronon still survives in roughly its sixth-century form, and the Hagia Sophia. Although the latter’s synthronon no longer remains, it is described in detail by Paul the Silentiary in a poem where he explicitly compares it to a theater (Description of the Hagia Sophia 411–15). Moreover, at roughly the same time on the island of Paros, eleven seats from the Hellenistic theater were transferred and redeployed in the sythronon of the newly constructed church, Panagia Katapoliani, where they remain in situ. These adaptations of theatrical spaces and of their architectural elements for reuse in Christian ritual have profound implications for the relationship between performance and religion. In their words and gestures, priests assumed the role of Christ and re-enacted Gospel scenes as drama for a new era, now staged in honor of a new patron deity.
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Labors of the Saints at Work, at Home, in the Assembly, and on the Road: Paul’s Jerusalem Collection
Program Unit: Social Scientific Criticism of the New Testament
Steven Friesen, University of Texas at Austin
In recent years scholars have begun to pay more attention to the types of labor that made Roman imperial society possible, but we have barely begun to examine the connections between labor and religion. In part this is a problem of the formulation itself, since the terms ‘labor’ and ‘religion’ are both contested. As a first step in moving past the essentialist formulation ‘labor and religion,’ I take a particular case study and analyze it in terms of exchanges rather than in terms of essentialist categories. The case study is Paul’s collection for Jerusalem, with a primary focus on his instructions to the Corinthian saints in 1 Cor 16:1-4 about how to gather and deliver funds for saints in Jerusalem. The paper charts Paul’s attempt to mobilize labor in the workplace, in the home, in the assembly, and in the proposed journey to Jerusalem to deliver the funds. Paul’s unorthodox mobilization of labor would have entailed the construction of an unorthodox network of exchanges and the effort probably failed. But a network analysis of the failure allows us to examine the roles of exchanges and labor in the evolution of groups connected to a particular deity in the Roman Empire, and it does so without invoking anachronistic distinctions such as religious labor, secular labor, or domestic labor.
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Model or Mirror? Cognitive Dissonance in the Critical Study of Apocalyptic Thinking
Program Unit: Social Scientific Criticism of the New Testament
Christopher A. Frilingos, Michigan State University
A series of influential studies in the 1970s and 1980s put social-scientific models to work in the historical research of early Christianity. Did the use of social-scientific perspectives shed light on the dark corners of human behavior and consciousness? Or did it instead fill in historical gaps with modern-day assumptions, reflecting back to us our own beliefs of how the mind works and what experiences it can tolerate? Perhaps the picture is more complex. To be sure, the use of social-scientific models has proven illuminating in many instances. But when should we pause to ask what precisely is being illuminated? When, as if in a Venn diagram, do our own perceptions of reality overlap with those of our historical subjects? And when do such perceptions belong to separate spheres? How can we tell the difference?
In this paper I will investigate a specific case study. The compelling analysis of the book of Revelation in Adela Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis (1984), assimilates a range of social-scientific insights — none more important than a social-psychological model of conflict between expectation and reality that is best known as cognitive dissonance. My remarks will be organized around three points. First, I will show what made Crisis and Catharsis such an important work of biblical scholarship in 1984, and why it remains so today. Second, I will describe the strange origin of the theory of cognitive dissonance, which emerged from fieldwork conducted in the 1950s on a North American group expecting the arrival of UFOs and a catastrophic flood. My paper will discuss the description of the project in Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (1957), as well as describe the results of archival research of Festinger’s papers at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. In the archive is a record of the development of Festinger’s thinking about cognitive dissonance, captured in correspondence, notes, and memos. Third, I will place the example of Crisis and Catharsis within the framework of ongoing critical reassessments of the theory of cognitive dissonance. Is belief-persistence, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith asks in Natural Reflections (2009), a phenomenon found only among those expecting the end of the world? Or, do we – the scholars who study such groups, beliefs, and texts – likewise tend toward what Herrnstein Smith calls “cognitive conservatism”?
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The Relationship between the MT/Old Greek of Jeremiah in Light of the Parallel in 2 Kings
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
James Frohlich, Dallas Theological Seminary
Jer 52 largely parallels 2 Kgs 25, and Jer 40–43 contains various sentences that are also found in 2 Kgs 25:22–26. This presentation compares these parallel texts, in order to determine the relationship between the Masoretic text of Jeremiah and the book’s Old Greek translation. The conclusion is that the agreements between the Greek text of Jeremiah and the Hebrew text of Kings support the view that the Old Greek of Jeremiah reflects an early Hebrew version of the book.
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Telling the Story of Trauma: Judges 19 as Chosen Exilic Narrative
Program Unit: Violence and Representations of Violence in Antiquity
Alexiana Fry, Stellenbosch University
Trauma is never simply personal. Trauma lives on and on in the lives that itself violently touches, and always asks to be reckoned with. When trauma effects whole cultures and people groups, however, there is a process of how that trauma will be interpreted. Using Jeffery Alexander’s book, Trauma: A Social Theory, this paper will seek to consider the horrific text of Judges 19 as a narrative used in order to explain the realities and events of exile and displacement of Israel and Judah. As the rape and dismemberment of the Levite’s concubine in the Scripture leaves us dumbfounded, the words asked as the reader bears witness is not to look away, but to “consider it, take counsel, and speak. (v.30)”
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Psalm 137 and Its Contribution to Book V of the Psalter
Program Unit: Book of Psalms
Tyler Fulcher, Baylor University
Scholars whose primary interest revolve around explicating the Psalter’s rhetorical agenda advance numerous theories about its structure, but the Psalter’s broad range of theological motifs displayed in the individual psalms make the task of synthesizing the book’s message difficult. Psalm 137 and its contribution to Book V provides a prime example of the difficulty interpreters face when they try to tease out the Psalter’s narrative structure. This paper argues that the very features which scholars identify as problematic provide the means by which one can appreciate the psalm’s contribution to Book V. Both Psalm 137’s dark imagery, which contrasts the euphoric themes explored in Psalm 136, and its ambiguous genre (communal lament, Zion psalm, or complaint?) help ground the psalm, and Book V, in a post-exilic worldview. Read in this light, the psalm’s question hovers just below the surface of Book V’s emphasis on praise: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (Ps 137:4). Consequently, rather than stand out as an outlier in a book of praise, Psalm 137 anchors the entirety of Book V in the people’s lived reality.
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Isaiah 27–28: A Rationale for Their Juxtaposition
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
Tyler Fulcher, Baylor University
This paper performs a literary reading of Isaiah 27-28, focusing especially on the ways Isaiah 5 illuminates the rationale behind their juxtaposition. Though general scholarly consensus suggests Isaiah 27-28 end and begin their respective units with little apparent connection, the argument proposes numerous reasons to reexamine the units’ relationship from a redactional perspective. Most importantly, lexical, thematic, and structural connections between Isaiah 27-28 and Isaiah 5 offer avenues by which one can see editorial activity in the book’s formation. While Isaiah 27 and 28 certainly exhibit a dramatic shift in material and apparently entered with different redactional layers within the book of Isaiah, their respective connections with Isaiah 5 suggest intentionality behind the chapters’ juxtaposition. The proposed links between Isaiah 5, 27, and 28 take on more significance if Isaiah 24-27 represents one of the final redactional insertions to the book of Isaiah. The recapitulated vineyard song (27:2-6) and its expanded reflection (27:7-13) serve as both the conclusion to the Isaiah Apocalypse and the introduction to the woe oracles of Isaiah 28-33, with an emphasis on Isaiah 28’s rebuke of Jerusalem’s leaders. Thus, the paper’s argument illustrates the need to reevaluate a common position held in the secondary literature: namely, a hard break exists between Isaiah 27 and 28, and, therefore, the two units have little to do with one another.
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The Difficult Heritage of Antisemitism: Discriminatory Language in the Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Russell E. Fuller, University of San Diego
The rhetoric of textcritical scholarly literature is not immune to the ideologies and cultural polemics. Since historical criticism of the Hebrew Bible evolved, textual criticism was as much a child of its times and cultures. The rhetoric of textual critics reflects bias against and hatred of Jews as much as other scholarly literature. As textual criticism is mostly regarded as an objective “science” this difficult heritage has not yet been sufficiently addressed in the field. This presentation will address this gap by discussing select examples of antisemitic discriminatory rhetoric in publications of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will also make constructive suggestions for more appropriate terminology.
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Mapping Mana: Biblical Hermeneutics, Food Justice, and Humanities GIS
Program Unit: Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies
Amanda Furiasse, Hamline University
This paper presents a collaborative digital humanities project, “Mapping Mana,” between faculty, students, and community organizations at Morgan State University and Hamline University as a framework for exploring biblical hermeneutics’ potential to yield new approaches to Humanities GIS and digital storytelling techniques. GIS and digital mapping technologies have facilitated what historians have termed the “spatial turn” and increased recognition of space’s influence on history, culture, and memory. In biblical studies, the spatial turn has been particularly fruitful and yielded new insights into traditional fields, such as sacred space and pilgrimage, as well as new ones, including embodiment, subjectivity, praxis, and mobility. While yielding new insights, the spatial turn has also raised growing concerns over the reduction of biblical scholarship to instrumental analysis as scholars adapt digital technologies into their methodologies and risk reducing complex material conditions into one-dimensional data visualizations. Wendy Chun (2011), for example, cautions against using digital mapping technologies in the humanities without critically reflecting on the notions of governmentality which underlie them and calls upon the digital humanities to produce multifaceted, layered, and pluralistic mapping actions which complicate computation’s potential for static or fixed spatial configurations. This is the central challenge that motivated us to create a collaborative digital mapping project which approaches GIS mapping from the perspective of biblical hermeneutics and refines a spatial-critical GIS strategy around the interlocking material conditions of food insecurity, holiness, and urbanization. In particular, our approach was informed by the spatial-critical work of Ernest Van Eck and Meshack Mandla Mashinini who studied South African communities dealing with food insecurity and observed that they read the parables in the Gospels as mapping a food security network among towns and cities near Jerusalem that are experiencing food shortages. Informed by Eck and Mashini’s spatial-critical approach to the Gospels, we used GIS as a mechanism to trace the linkages between food security and holiness in the cities of Baltimore and the Twin Cities where Morgan State University and Hamline University are located. The mapping process revealed the historical elimination of once crucial food infrastructures and recent innovations of urban gardens, food distribution centers, and renewed collaborative partnerships between religious communities and neighborhood organizations. Of particular importance was the map’s ability to visualize the Black Church’s historical significance in the Twin Cities and Baltimore and trace the evolution of decentralized and decolonized food networks in urban centers. Ultimately, we argue that Mapping Mana exposes the capacity and need for biblical hermeneutics to yield new approaches to GIS and move beyond instrumental analysis to unlock what Miriam Posner (2015) has described as “the radical unrealized potential of the digital humanities.”
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The Limited Scope of Jewish Law in the Second Temple Period: A Sectarian Perspective
Program Unit: Qumran
Yair Furstenberg, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
In contrast to the image of the all-inclusive Torah, covering all aspects of private and public life as reflected in later rabbinic literature, our understanding of the debates concerning the nature and intention of the law within first century Judaism must take into consideration the limited scope of the Torah even in the eyes of its most zealous adherents. A wide-range of sources from this period limit the Judean legal tradition to the ritual sphere, and specific aspects of judicial procedure, and they generally disregard issues of justice and private law, even when these are treated in the Torah. These issues were not subjected to intensive interpretation and legal systematization, and did not entail sectarian strife (despite scholarly arguments to the contrary). A comparison of Qumran law and Jesus traditions illuminate this legal reality from two complementing aspects. Both corpora exhibit a striking similarity with regard to the fields of Torah knowledge. In addition, both are compelled to provide communal and ethical alternatives to the administration of justice.
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“The Son of the Slave Woman Was Born according to the Flesh”: Reading the Flesh in Hortense Spillers and Paul
Program Unit: Paul and Politics
Haley Gabrielle, Emory University
This paper reads Paul’s letter to the Galatians alongside Hortense Spillers’s pivotal essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” to interrogate more deeply the Pauline notion of the flesh. In 1987, Spillers named the “flesh” as a locus of physical, social, and metaphysical violence during North American slavery, which dehumanized and ungendered African-American people. Although Paul’s rhetoric of the flesh occurs in a radically different context, it too appears within the framework of enslavement, sex and gender, and family in Galatians, especially Galatians 4:21-31 through the allegory of Hagar and Sarah. Spillers’s careful attention to these multiple entanglements prompts deeper examination of Paul’s discourse. First, how is the flesh related to physical embodiment, social personhood, and structural harm? Second, how do Paul’s images and logics situate Christ with respect to the flesh? Lastly, by rethinking both the flesh itself and Christ’s relationship to it, how can we reread the allegory of Hagar and Sarah? I propose that the flesh is tied to embodiment to the same extent as its counterpart, the spirit. For both Paul and Spillers, the flesh refers to the experience of a material person who is embedded in a structure which results in violence and harm. The series of metaphorical images in Galatians 3-4 construct Christ as in solidarity with those who are under the law, under a curse, under slavery, and under the flesh, because Christ too is under the law (4:4) and under a curse (3:13), and so too subject to slavery and the flesh. It is in Christ’s shared experience of the flesh that Christ offers liberation to fellow members of the family, including Hagar and Ishmael. Christ too is a son of the slave woman, born according to the flesh, and Christ participates in embodied, social, and structural liberation alongside mother and brother. This alternative constellation of images opposes harmful readings of Pauline discourses of flesh and enslavement, according to which gendered and sexualized bodies are denigrated and legacies of racial slavery are condoned.
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A Scribal Jesus, Mark, and Luke — and an Oral Matthew
Program Unit: The Bible in Ancient (and Modern) Media
Timothy A. Gabrielson, Sterling College
Formulae that introduce scriptural citations appear to be throwaway lines. It would seem that “as it is written” and “for Scripture says” are interchangeable phrases, both useful only as a signal of an upcoming reference. Some early Christian writings support that cursory judgment. Scriptural quotations in the thirteen-letter Pauline corpus, for example, alternate verbs of speaking and verbs of writing with little apparent difference in meaning. The evidence, however, is not uniform. Only about five percent of formulae in Barnabas utilize γράφω, and none in Hebrews do. The reverse is also true, if anecdotal. The Shepherd of Hermas, in its lone appeal to an outside source, invokes “as it is written” (Vis. 2.3.4), and the author conceives of his work as a writing (Vis. 2.2.1; 4.3.6; Sim. 5.3.7; 9.1.1; 9.33.1; 10.1.1). Whether by reflex or deliberate choice, then, it seems some early Christ-followers tended to present Israel’s scriptures as either primarily oral or written.
The Synoptic Gospels are particularly suggestive. The Markan tradition, whether on its own (Mark 9:13), or associated with one (Mark 14:21 par.; 14:27 par.) or both (Mark 11:17 pars.) of the other Synoptics, incline toward “written” references, albeit with stray exceptions (as Mark 7:10 par.). What is distinctive of Jesus in the triple tradition is his emphasis on the present engagement with the scriptures. The most common method, used in debate settings, is, “Have you not read … ?” (Mark 2:25 pars.; 12:10 pars.; 12:26 pars.; but cf. on Luke, below). This is not typical of later Christian exegesis: the ordinary forms, such as “for it is written” or “Moses says,” picture the audience as passive recipients. By contrast, Jesus exhorts his hearers to return to the scrolls. This assumes a debate among rabbis, given the practical restrictions imposed by widespread illiteracy and limited access to the sacred writings. The Q material has an even greater penchant for verbs of writing, as in the temptations (Matt 4:4, 6, 7, 10 and par.), though, again, it is not thoroughgoing (Matt 23:39 par.). The authors of the second and third Gospels also seemed to picture the scriptures as writings first. In the rare instances when their voice intrudes on the narrative, they almost always choose γέγραπται or the like (Mark 1:2; Luke 2:23; 3:4; 4:17; except Luke 2:24). Luke also places a few more “written” references on Jesus’s lips (as Luke 18:31; 22:37; 24:46), indeed, changing one “Have you not read …?” in Mark to “what is written” (Luke 20:17).
Not so for Matthew. His Jesus says six times in the Antitheses, “You have heard that it was said” (Matt 5:21–43). The evangelist himself repeats twelve times some variation on “in order to fulfill that which was spoken (τὸ ῥηθὲν) by the Lord through the prophet, saying (λέγοντος).” Matthew 15:7 also revises Mark 7:6 from the fulfillment of a written prophecy to one of a spoken prophecy. The citation formulae thus indicate we have a scribal Jesus, Mark, and Luke — but an oral Matthew.
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Canonization and the Forming of the Ways in 1–2 Clement: Hints of Core and Peripheral Canonical Works via the Citation Formulae?
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Timothy A. Gabrielson, Sterling College
Accepted paper for the IBR research group on Early Christian Judaism
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The Will and Testament of Jesus Christ: The Intertextuality between Q al-Ma’idah 5:116–120 and John 17
Program Unit: The Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition (IQSA)
Abdulla Galadari, Khalifa University of Science & Technology
The Johannine Farewell Discourse replaces the Synoptic Gospels’ details of the Last Supper. The discourse has two major narratives: (1) John 14–16 describes Jesus’ speech and discussion with his disciples, and (2) John 17 is Jesus’s prayer to the Father, also called the High Priestly Prayer. From a literary perspective, John 17 stands as an independent storyline within the Farewell Discourse. Analogously, Q al-Ma’idah 5:111–115 also presents a discussion between Jesus and his disciples, while Q 5:116–120 portrays a discussion between Jesus and God. Similarly, Q 5:116–120 stands as an independent storyline, especially when taking into account the literary markers that divide the longer passage (Q 5:110–120), in which each section starts with “idh” (when) for God either saying or inspiring something. Several intertextual links between Q 5:116–120 and John 17 suggest that the qur’anic passage is possibly alluding to Jesus’s High Priestly Prayer and reminding its audience of its content, presuming their awareness of it. For example, in Q 5:116–117, God questions Jesus if he asked the people to take him and his mother as two gods instead of God. Jesus glorifies God and responds that he only told them what God commanded him to say. This parallels John 17:3, where Jesus tells the Father that he has made the Father known as the only true God. It also parallels the frequent reminder that Jesus addresses to his disciples throughout the Farewell Discourse, including John 17, that he is only saying what the Father has commanded him to say. In Q 5:117, Jesus says he was a witness to his disciples as long as he was among them, which parallels John 17:6–8. Additionally, the qur’anic passage states that Jesus informs God that when God caused him to die, it was God who remained as a witness and protector to his followers. This also resonates with Jesus beseeching the Father to watch over his followers in John 17:11–12 and 17:15. Furthermore, Q 5:119 suggests that the truthful will be rewarded, which parallels Jesus asking the Father to sanctify his followers in truth in John 17:17–19.
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Al-Māʾidah and the Promise of the Spirit
Program Unit: Qur'an and Biblical Literature
Abdulla Galadari, Khalifa University of Science & Technology
This paper argues that the Qur’anic passages on the “māʾidah” are perhaps an allusion of Jesus’s Promise of the Spirit, as found in the Farewell Discourse of the Gospel of John and its eventual fulfilment in the Book of Acts. Apparently, the Qur’an does not see the Promise of the Spirit and the Eucharist, or the Last Supper, as mutually exclusive, which is also evident in the epiclesis and anaphora of the early churches, such as the epiclesis of Addai and Mari. It is unknown, however, if the Qur’an simply interpolates this situatedness when comparing the Last Supper narrative in the Synoptic Gospels with the Gospel of John, or if it does so based on Tatian’s Diatessaron, which was widely used by the Syriac church, during the time of the Qur’anic composition.
The “māʾidah” passages are divided into three sections that are dependent on both theme and literary style. Thematically, the first is solely Qur’an 5:110, the introductory section. The second section is Qur’an 5:111–115, the main body. The final section is Qur’an 5:116–120, which represents as some sort of the will and testament of Jesus. Literarily, each section starts with “idh” for God either saying or inspiring something.
There are various intertextualities (49 in total) that can be drawn between the Qur’anic passage and the New Testament. For example, the “māʾidah” is to comfort the hearts of Jesus’s disciples (Q. 5:113), similar to the Promise of the Spirit (John 14:1, 14:27, 16:33). It would be a “ʿīd” to the first and the last (Qur’an 5:114), corresponding to the Holy Spirit making the disciples witnesses of Jesus in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8) and is for this generation, their children, and all who are far off (Acts 2:38-39). After the “māʾidah” descends, disbelievers are punished (Qur’an 5:115), corresponding to the Holy Spirit’s role to convict disbelievers and judge (condemn) them (John 16:8-11). Q. 5:115 states that anyone who disbelieves thereafter will be uniquely punished like no one else ever. This assumes that the punishment would befall one person only, because if it befalls against two, then it would not be a unique punishment since two are sharing the same punishment. This corresponds to only Judas being punished for betrayal (Acts 1:15-20). It might also act as an allusion to the unforgivable sin of those who blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, according to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.
The relationship between the Last Supper, the Eucharist, and the Holy Spirit in some early Christian traditions make all a likely candidate for the “māʾidah.” Since the Gospel of John emphasizes spiritual food over material food and replacing the Last Supper with the promise of the Holy Spirit, the Qur’an might associate the “māʾidah” as a spiritual meal that descends from heaven, in which the Holy Spirit is perhaps the carrier of this spiritual meal.
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Is Jesus a Martyr? Narratives of Noble Deaths and the Passion of Jesus in Mark
Program Unit: Mark Passion Narrative
Brian K. Gamel, Baylor University
The earliest Christians who died for their faith looked to the death of Jesus as their model. Yet the early Christian martyrs’ deaths share far more in common with the tales of the pre-Christian Jewish martyrs than the death of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. Through the narrative device of characterization – how an author or narrator portrays a character – this paper compares and contrasts the ways in which the protagonists of five different representative stories about a person (or persons) dying for their faith before a hostile ruler are rendered by their respective authors. The Jesus of Mark’s passion narrative (especially the trial before Pilate and Jesus’ crucifixion and death) is brought into juxtaposition with the (proto) martyrdom of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Daniel 3, the martyrdom of Eleazar and the seven brothers in 2 Maccabees 6-7, the death of Polycarp in The Martyrdom of Polycarp, and the death Perpetua in The Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas. This analysis reveals both the striking similarity between how the protagonists of the latter four works are portrayed and the noticeable contrast to the passion of Jesus in Mark: whereas the four other heroes are consistently shown to rebuff and mock their interlocutors, deny any pain or fear of death, and die triumphantly and victoriously, the Markan Jesus is silent before his enemies, suffers immense ridicule and mockery, and dies with a cry of abandonment on his lips. The latter part of this paper explores theologies of God’s presence in suffering operative in each of these works and the unique contribution of Mark to that discussion.
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Metaphorizing Cosmology in Psalm 42–43
Program Unit: Metaphor in the Bible and Cognate Literature
Andrew Garbarino, Princeton Theological Seminary
In Psalm 42-43, cosmological space and divine activity feature prominently: the wilderness and watery locations of chaos, the divine restraint of primordial waters, the mountain of God’s dwelling, the descent of divine light, and more. From the ancient perspective, these cosmological notions are both literally true of the ordering of the universe and metaphorically fitting to the message and petitionary function of the psalm. Psalm 42-43 therefore examples the complicated dynamics that arise when biblical poetry metaphorizes cosmological or mythical realities. The intricate details of the myths and cosmological concepts in question define the source domain for such metaphors, meaning that the modern interpreter must use all available external evidence to better understand the cultural background. At the same time, poetic metaphors may illuminate the cosmological concepts on which they rely. The way a poem utilizes a set of cosmological concepts may tell us something about their dynamic interplay in the Israelite worldview and imagination. Building on work by Else Holt and using insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory, this paper argues that Psalm 42-43 expresses tensions in Israelite cosmology about the simultaneously life-giving and destructive capacity of the divine provision of water.
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Prophet Elijah's Cup and Chair at the Seder, Passover Morality Play
Program Unit: National Association of Professors of Hebrew
Zev Garber, Los Angeles Valley College
The Four Cups at the Passover table represent the verbs of God’s freedom in the biblical Exodus story (Exod 6: 6-8). Four promises follow one another in rapid succession within Exodus chapter six, verses six and seven: " I will free you...", "I will deliver you...", "I will redeem you...", "and I will take you to be My people." Then, after an intervening verse, a fifth promise appears: "I will bring you into the land...." . The Four Cups are the matrix around which the redemptive memories are spun. Cup One, the Kiddush, festival benediction of blessing and joy; Cup Two, in honor of God, the Redeemer of Jewish history; Cup Three, an abbreviated Kiddush for the benefit of latecomers at the transition between the first and second part of the Seder service; Cup Four, the acknowledgement of the Passover of the Future. The Third Cup follows the Grace after the Meal without narrative accompaniment. Then a special cup, the Cup of Elijah, is poured to overflowing and the door is opened and the “Pour Out Your Wrath” paragraph bellowed to the outside world. After the door is closed, the Fourth Cup is filled, and the “Egyptian Hallel” (Pss 113-118), “The Great Hallel” (Ps 136), and “Benediction of Song” (m. Pesach 10:7, Pesach 118a) are recited. Finally, the Fourth Cup is drunk at the close of the Passover Seder. In my commentary accompanying The Annotated Passover Haggadah, I suggest that the open door greeting of “pour Out our Wrath” is a demand for justice among nations regarding the Jewish faith, fate, and ingathering of exiled. Questions of character abide. Why the Prophet Elijah the Gileadi and Tishbite selected for the role of heralder of messianic redemption? His ubiquitous visit to all sedarim and yet no entrance and sitting at the chair in his honor at the Seder table. Why?
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Exodus-Returning-to-Egypt: Filipino American Liberation Theology in Exodus 4
Program Unit: Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics
Joshua Rumbaoa Garcia, Graduate Theological Union
Since its inception, liberation theology has experienced its fair share of growing pains. The power of the Exodus story caused liberation theology to outgrow its Latin American context and be used as an epistemological foundation for Black liberation theology in the United States to Minjung theology in South Korea among others. Indigenous theologians have rightly problematized the use of the Exodus story as the basis for liberation theologies (See Robert Warrior and Naim Ateek). In response to these critiques, Filipino American theologian Eleazar S. Fernandez constructs a Filipino American liberation theology that relocates the liberative moment from the Israelites leaving Egypt for the Promised Land to Joseph and the House of Jacob relocating from Canaan to Egypt. Fernandez’s proposition is productive for first-generation Filipino Americans identifying their experience as immigrants.
This paper builds off of Fernandez by arguing that the next unfolding of liberation theology for Filipino Americans who have only ever known the American context is better understood in the story of Moses returning to Egypt from Midian. I will demonstrate that God’s call for Moses to שוב, “return,” in Exodus 4 is paramount in the narrative. This importance is precipitated by Moses’ indebtedness to the Hebrew midwives, his mother and sister, and his fellow Hebrews laborers. I will employ Filipino Postcolonial Psychologist E.J.R. David’s analysis of the indigenous Filipino notions of kapwa, the shared inner-self, and utang na loob, debt of gratitude, to contextualize Moses’ indebtedness to those still in Egypt. Moses’ return to his people in Egypt is the liberative moment for Filipino Americans.
This reading is particularly salient in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of Anti-Asian racism which has forced Filipino Americans to reconcile with their dueling allegiances: whether to white America, their former colonizers, or to their black and brown allies under oppression. My reading of Moses’ Exodus-Returning-to-Egypt provides a constructive theological foundation for Filipino American’s innate feelings of indebtedness. Filipino Americans conflicted in their identity affiliation, whether to assimilate or resist, in the US ought to view the moment when Moses leaves his life in Midian to return to his people as their own liberative moment.
I am interested in publishing the paper.
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“Support the Poor”: Charity in the Damascus Document and Matthew’s Gospel as a Case of Mutual Illumination
Program Unit: Qumran
Jeffrey García, Nyack College
Early Judaism attests to a heightened value placed on caring for the poor and needy (see David Flusser: 1968; Gary Anderson: 2013). Generally, scholars have turned to texts like Ben Sira, Tobit, etc. in order to examine this phenomenon. Little attention, however, has been given to the Qumran communal texts, despite there being portions that directly state (4QDa 10 i 7 = CD 14:14; 4QDd 4 ii 3 = CD 6:21), or perhaps imply terminologically (e.g., צדקה in 1QS 1:5; 5:4; 8:2, etc.), the necessity to provide some form of care for them. Additionally, charity is not generally enumerated—perhaps rightly—among the religious characteristics of the yaḥad. With few exceptions (e.g., David Downs: 2016), charity in the Gospels has suffered a similar fate vis-à-vis early Jewish practice and a closer examination is warranted. In that vein, this study will examine the Gospel of Matthew’s account of the “Rich Young Man” (Matt 19:16-22), in which a wealthy person is instructed to give his riches to the poor, in view of important points of contact with the Cave 4 fragments of the Damascus Document.
Even with recent studies (e.g., John Kampen: 2019), New Testament scholars largely maintain the view that much of Matthew, especially accounts that are paralleled in Mark, is a reworking of its Markan source or is heavily influenced by later Christianity. Yet, Matthew's deviation from the other evangelists indicates that his source(s) is trading in early Jewish questions about charity’s value. Moreover, it is clear that supporting the poor and needy—in whatever form—played a role in the Qumran-defining covenant. However, the question remains: to what extent? As such, Matthew’s Gospel and the Damascus Document—perhaps also Serekh haYaḥad (1QS)—offer a rare opportunity for mutual illumination. Therefore, this study has two aims: 1) to examine whether the Matthean account can be utilized to argue that support for the poor and needy in 4QD/CD, and elsewhere, carried more weight within the Qumran community than has previously been noted, and 2) to demonstrate that these elements in 4QD/CD can function as a barometer for whether the “Rich Young Man” account preserves early Jewish thought on charity and, further, functions as an indicator of the streams of Jewish piety present in the early Jesus movement.
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When Darkness Is Blackness (Joel 3:4)
Program Unit: Biblical Lexicography
Lourdes García Ureña, Universidad San Pablo – CEU
Joel’s oracle proclaiming the day of the Lord concludes with the announcement of a series of wonders that will transform the vision of heaven and earth into a grandiose spectacle. Nature is overrun by fire, blood, smoke (Jl 3:3), while the sun and the moon assume a tenebrous and mysterious appearance (Jl 3:4). The event that the prophet announces is not devoid of chromatism, since the language of colour emerges in the prophecy through elements of nature that connote colour such as blood, fire, smoke (Jl 3:3), sun and moon (Jl 3:4). It is logical, then, to ask if חשׁך retains the meaning of ‘state in which there is no light’ (SDBH), in other words, ‘darkness’, ‘obscurity’ as the main dictionaries of the Bible propose (BDB; HALOT), or if, on the contrary, it has a chromatic meaning as its verbal form has in Ex 10:15; Lam 4:8 (SDBH). In order to establish if חשׁך has a chromatic meaning we will apply a specific methodology based on cognitive linguistics. First of all, we will acquire the encyclopaedic knowledge of the native speaker of the time had. For this end, we will conduct a status quaestionis on the meaning of the colour terms proposed by the main dictionaries and a comparative study of how the terms have been translated in the different versions of the Bible. We will then study the characteristics of the book where the colour term appears and analyze in detail the context as well as the entity that describes the color term, the sun. In the light of this semantic analysis, it will become clear that חשׁך expresses color in Joel 3,4: darkness is blackness. This explains why, centuries later, the author of the book of Revelation reinterpreted the pericope and chose a colour adjective, μέλας, to describe the appearance of the sun (Rev 6:12). Finally, we will develop the definition of חשׁך and propose possible glosses.
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I, John: The Homodiegetic Narrator in the Book of Revelation
Program Unit: John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern
Lourdes García Ureña, Universidad San Pablo – CEU
The figure of John has aroused the interest of the scholars who have eagerly sought the identity of the person behind John's pseudonym. Approaching the work through the theory of literature, it is observed that John, in addition to claiming the authorship of the writing, also presents himself as the narrator of the story using the first person singular. The analysis performed shows that this is a particular narrator, since on some occasions he appears as the protagonist of the story (ἐγὼ Ἰωάννης,…, ἐγενόμην ἐν τῇ νήσῳ, 'I, John ... was on an island' (Rev 1: 9) and in others, as a mere visual and aural witness of the visions (Rev 4:1; 5:1, 2, 6; etc.) and of the auditions (Rev 4:1; 6:5, 6; etc.), losing part of its leading role. This ability to split into two selves is possible thanks to the ‘homodiegetic narrator’ (which is characterized precisely by this ability of the narrator to be present in the story he is telling, not only as the protagonist, but also as a secondary character in the role of observer and witness, Genette). It is showed in the narrative through the choice of specific lexemes that reveal the role that the narrator plays at each moment (for example verbal lexeme βλέπω is used when John acts as a character in the story [Rev 1:11; 22:8], while καὶ εἶδον shows John as visual witness [Rev 6:1, 2, 5, 8; 14:1, 14]) and its function in the work as a whole, contributing to give verisimilitude to its story.
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Rethinking Gnostic Myth: An Argument for the Recognition of a Heresiological Category
Program Unit: Bible, Myth, and Myth Theory
Grant W. Gasse, University of Notre Dame
Ever since his Rethinking Gnosticism was published in 1996, Michael A. William’s critique of the modern historiographical term “gnosticism” and the attendant use of “gnosis” and “gnostic” have become a necessary point of departure for all studies of the various forms of religious discourse and practice identified by early Christian heresiologists as gnostic and/or found within the Nag Hammadi corpus. Whether one subscribes to the specifics of William’s assessment or other, adjacent assessments like that of Karen King, the point has been cemented in the field: the term “gnosticism” is at the very least unhelpful, and may even constitute a recapitulation of early Christian heresiology. The purpose of this paper is to “rethink” the category of gnostic “myth,” and to ask whether and to what extent it is susceptible to similar critique. Of course, mythos and mythopoesis are variously assessed in ancient religious discourse, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. Nevertheless, while it is now commonplace in the literature to reject the category “gnosticism,” it remains standard practice to refer to the narratives exhibited within the associated ancient texts as various forms of “myth.” Moreover, while early Christian heresiologists are quick to label (and decry) their rivals as “mythmakers,” little evidence suggests that “myth” and “mythmaking” were ever utilized for the sake of self-designation among these religious practitioners. Accordingly, we should ask if and to what extent mythos itself can be understood as a heresiological category. Toward this end, I consider, as a case study, the heresiological accounts of Valentinus and the Valentinians in Irenaeus of Lyons and Clement of Alexandria, alongside the fragments of Valentinus and the Gospel of Truth. In light of this consideration, I turn to a critical appraisal of the historiographical potential of “myth” as a heuristic category. To the extent that critical distance demands conscious anachronism, the early Christian heresiological deployment of “gnostic myth” necessitates a measured evaluation of its modern historiographical counterpart. Although my title refers to William’s classic “rethinking,” I do not ultimately contend that “myth,” itself a vital and broad literary, philosophical, and historiographical category, must be dismantled. Rather, in conversation with comparative religions scholarship, especially the methodological reflections of Jonathan Z. Smith, I unearth dimensions of its use which have not yet been critically assessed.
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North African New Prophecy and Charismatic Exegesis: Considering the Evidence of Tyconius and Augustine
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Grant W Gasse, University of Notre Dame
The continued presence of Christian prophetic movements in Roman North Africa at the turn of the fifth century is a matter of debate. While all evidence suggests that Cataphrygian Montanists were no longer present in the region, some evidence suggests that Roman African followers of the New Prophecy movement maintained their ecclesial status with more mainline churches. To the extent, then, that evidence may exist for the continued presence of New Prophecy in North Africa, it is unlikely that such evidence will identify New Prophecy as a distinct ecclesial group among ecclesial groups. With this limitation in view, I look to identify evidence for the continued existence of practices historically associated with New Prophecy, in particular, what scholars have termed “charismatic exegesis.” The literary analysis of extant Montanist oracles conducted by Sheila McGinn and Dennis Groh has shown that these materials exhibit discursive, exegetical engagement with the text of scripture, predicated upon the continued inspiration of the Paraclete. This assessment is, moreover, corroborated by Tertullian’s own account of New Prophecy, which places biblical interpretation to the fore. Following this assessment, I ask whether evidence of the continued practice of this kind of exegesis might be found in both Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana and Tyconius’ Liber Regularum. Although these texts are often set in opposition, each possesses a similarly defensive stance toward the articulation of exegetical rules. Thus, Augustine refers to dissenters who might argue that his methodological enterprise is superfluous, since scripture ought to be read under the influence of the Holy Spirit. Likewise, in Tyconius’ case, this stance is displayed in the consistent refrain that the graced interpretation given by the Holy Spirit coheres with, rather than detracts from the articulation of exegetical “rules.” Accordingly, I compare these passages to the extant evidence of earlier Montanist practice in North Africa, ultimately concluding that, while the continued existence of a movement explicitly called “New Prophecy” remains elusive, there is significant evidence to suggest the continued practice of prophetic or charismatic exegesis in North Africa at the turn of the fifth century. In addition, my analysis reframes Augustine’s engagement with Tyconius, arguing that, despite their divergent ecclesial affiliations, both betray a common theological motivation, specifically in their concern about the continued practice of charismatic forms of exegesis among North African Christians.
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Deus misereatur mei: Childbearing, Salvation, and Religious Competition for Women's Devotion in the Acts of Andrew
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Emily Gathergood, University of Nottingham, UK
Recent interest in women, gender and asceticism in the Acts of Andrew centres on the author's subversive theological anthropology—how his Pythagorean-Platonic spirit/matter dualism yields portraits of salvation framed as a return to pre-lapsarian asexual states of being. This paper broadens our understanding of the relationship between childbearing and salvation in the Acts of Andrew, and early Christianity more generally, by attending to the hitherto neglected story of a certain Calliope, transmitted in Gregory of Tour's epitome (Liber de miraculis beati Andreae apostoli 25). First, I argue that this intriguing tale of a pregnant woman's miraculous physiological salvation from life-threatening labour seeks to disincentivise illicit sexual activity by identifying this as the cause of her predicament. Second, I argue that the author casts the apostle Andrew in the role of spiritual midwife, which puts him in opposition to the cult of Diana/Artemis, goddess of childbirth, as the sole mediator of divine mercy. The depiction of Andrew’s midwifery as superior to the idolatrous, demonic alternative bears witness to the underlying socio-historical reality that childbirth was a context of religious competition for women's devotion. It models for readers an exclusively Christocentric response to the health hazards of childbearing in the ancient world. However, there is a tension between the depiction of Andrew as a divinely authorised procurer of physical healing and the wider notion of salvation as liberation from the body. This is mitigated by the death of Calliope's fetus at the imprecatory word of the apostle, which liberates her from a future of motherhood, thereby enabling her to live according to the author’s ideal, masculinised form discipleship, which ultimately culminates in liberation from the body and the world.
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The New Testament and Pachinko
Program Unit: Korean Biblical Colloquium
Beverly Gaventa, Baylor University
This discussion is on the New Testament and Pachinko.
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Deleting Israel from the New Testament: The New Danish Bible Translation and Its Ommission of ”Israel”
Program Unit: Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Anders Gerdmar, Scandinavian School of Theology
In 2020, the Danish Bible Society published its “Now-Bible” (Nu-bibel) where it attempts to translate the texts in a way that better communicates the contents to modern readers. The most significant change was that it translates most of the occurrences of the word “Israēl” in the Greek text with other words, e.g., “the Jews” or “the Jewish people.” This caused an outrage in the Scandinavian countries and the Jewish community, where the translation was heavily criticized. Whereas the committee behind the translation argues that its choices are made only for communicative purposes, and not ideological, this paper arguers that it builds on one political choice, to omit ”Israel” firstly because the modern state Israel may disturb modern Danish readers and secondly because the theological presupposition that the Land of Israel is unimportant in the new covenant. The former presupposition should not influence a Bible translation and the latter lacks support in the New Testament.
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“You Are Gods”: Reconsidering the Reception of Psalm 82 in John 10 in Light of Early Jewish and Christian Readings
Program Unit: Early Jewish Christian Relations
Igal German, Shiloh University
Reading Ps 82 in John 10 light of early Jewish and Christian texts gives us an understanding of the psalm which radically differs from its current scholarly consensus. As has been shown by David Frankel, most contemporary scholars assert that Ps 82 exclusively follows the lines of ancient Near Eastern mythopoeic traditions akin to those found in Ugarit. Remarkably, Ps 82 has often been perceived as a particularly idiosyncratic text in classical Judaism and early Christianity purportedly contrasting the Shema with its emphasis on the oneness of the God of Israel. In this paper, I will argue that the text of Ps 82 in John 10 is constructed as an exegetical tool for internal theological debate which impacted early Jewish Christian relations. In this paper I will compare and contrast the extensive imagery and transcendent experiences of the ancient Jewish composers of the Heavenly Prince Melchizedek (11Q13) and John 10 that informed the interpretive trajectories on Ps 82. I suggest that both Jewish texts recapitulate Ps 82 as a prophetic vision of God judging the rebellious members of the divine council along with the expectation that God will rise to inherit the nations. My study draws on recent literary comparative studies focusing on ancient Jewish interpretive and scribal techniques (Mroczek, 2016) and the textual reception of the psalms in the Gospels and early Christian literature (Boyarin, 2013; Mosser, 2005). I will illustrate how the eschatological orientation of Ps 82 is perceived within the theological boundaries of the Johannine communities and its impact on Jewish Christian relations in late antiquity.
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Incarcerating Jeremiah: Razor-Wire, Famine, and Pandemic
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
Justus Ghormley, Holy Cross College at Notre Dame
The pandemic has brought to public consciousness the troubling degree of injustice that mars contemporary American society. Those who are oppressed and forgotten in the best of times suffer the most in the worst of times. The “sword, famine, and pestilence” of the pandemic—to borrow a gruesome phrase from Jeremiah—fall the heaviest on the “scum” of society—those we scorn and abandon. Perhaps the most vulnerable in our society are our incarcerated sisters and brothers, whom—by virtue of their crimes—we damn to razor-wire cages. It is easy to have compassion on the “innocent” victims of patriarchy and capitalism. Much harder is offering humanity to the one who traumatized you with drawn gun and demonic hate. And so we lock them up.
In my work as a professor and administrator of a college in prison, I spend most of my professional and career-development energy networking with the damned. Reading Jeremiah with them changes the way I view the “sword, famine, and pestilence.” In this paper I will invite you behind bars to see how the gruesome words of Jeremiah have become words of life and beauty. Amid the ravages of Covid-19, two images from Jeremiah in particular—which feature the gruesome words—offer hope: Jeremiah’s investment in gardening (buying a field; Jeremiah 32) and Jeremiah’s incarceration (Jeremiah 38).
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“Why Was It Necessary?” John of Dara’s Defense of the Death of Jesus
Program Unit: Syriac Studies
Kelli Gibson, Abilene Christian University
Among the unedited works of the ninth-century West Syrian bishop John of Dara is a question-and-answer treatise entitled On the Divine Economy. One might expect a work with such a title to focus above all on the promotion and defense of Miaphysite Christology, issuing clever defeaters to dyophysite challenges along the way. However, John responds to questions of a different nature: How can it be fitting for God to become human, suffer, and die? Why was the death of God the Word necessary for human salvation? Did Christ die willingly? These questions take on particular resonance in the context of early Abbasid interreligious debate. This paper will analyze how John of Dara adapts traditional theological arguments about the suffering and death of Christ for a new context of interreligious debate.
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Why does God not repent
Program Unit: SBL International Meeting Presentations
Olga Gienini, Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina
I explore the cognate relation between Egyptian nHm and Hebrew נחם, and probable also with Siryac mxN and the Coptic NoHem. They have the same trilateral root, belong to the same linguistic family, have dual semantic fields, hold common linguistic clusters, have similar meanings, and develop similar religious ideas. I also show that the usual translation of the Hebrew נחם as “to repent” or “to be sorry” when applied to God does not represent the true theology of the passages as in all of them the final result are God’s saving acts. In fact they point to Covenant relations involving not repentance in God. Unfortunately, from the Deluge story onwards erroneous translations are spread throughout the Bibles, not only in the English versions but in other languages as well. If we keep on doing so, we’ll continue betraying the theology of the texts and showing a painful and erroneous image of God’s saving acts.
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Nourishment as Resistance to Isolation: Food and Widowhood in Ruth
Program Unit: Meals in the HB/OT and Its World
Christie Gilfeather, University of Cambridge
The life of the Biblical widow is one which is marked by isolation and gathering. She is isolated from the rest of society by the death of her husband, and ethnographic accounts of widow’s lives reflect the challenges of this reality. Access to food is a significant aspect of the marginalisation of the widow. The gleaning laws of Deuteronomy demonstrate that when the widow is not provided for by other means, she is permitted to gather the scraps of the harvest. This is practice is explored in the book of Ruth, which begins with famine and isolation, but ends with the protagonist entering back into the family unit. Her gathering of the sheaths in the field is the catalyst for her reintegration.
Drawing on insights from ethnographic accounts of the lives of widows around the world, this paper will examine the theme of food in the book of Ruth and contend that it ensures not just her survival, but her full assimilation into the role of wife and mother. This shift is possible because of the relationship between food and sexuality which is a significant theme in ethnographic material. When read in tandem with the Biblical text, it becomes apparent that in the book of Ruth food, widowhood and sexuality are inextricably bound.
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Reading Ruth Allegorically: A New-Old Approach
Program Unit: Metaphor in the Bible and Cognate Literature
Andrew M. Gilhooley, University of Pretoria
Scholars have often noted how the book of Ruth may be read as an allegory based on the narrator’s extensive use of intertexts. As such, Eli-melech, Mahlon, and Chilion represent the Israelite nation who died in exile, Naomi represents the surviving remnant of exile, Ruth represents the foreigners of whom the prophets promised would be ingrafted into the Israelite community in the last days, and Boaz represents Yhwh who promises to redeem the land and re-marry his people (ketubah). Accordingly, Naomi and Ruth’s journey from Moab to Beth-lehem, from emptiness to fullness, from widowhood to married life, from being childless to attaining motherhood, all through the mediation of Boaz, embodies the prophetic hope of restoration. Not much attention, however, has been given to how the narrator’s use of inner-textuality and other textual features also support such a reading. By examining the narrator’s use of these features, this paper will explore how reading Ruth allegorically is grammatically warranted. Arguments made herein may also prove useful for helping to understand the use of metaphor and allegory elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible.
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Voices of Resistance in Psalm Lyrics
Program Unit: Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible
Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher, Catholic Private University of Linz
Poets throughout the centuries used and continue to use biblical Psalms as models or inspiration for their own poetry. While many of these lyrical texts focus on praise and lament, others use this form to express resistance. In this paper, I will use the example of various psalm poems to show how different aspects of resistance against rulers, prevailing social conditions or religious attitudes are thematized by following and using the biblical texts. For example, the poems can identify the adversaries mentioned in the biblical psalms with contemporary enemies. Especially if these enemies are rulers, social or religious institutions, the psalm poems can express the resistance of a group and in this way also strengthen the identity of this special group. Often marginalized groups see themselves mirrored in the distressed and afflicted persons of the psalms and use the biblical texts to represent, lament, or justify their situation. For example, the psalm songs of the Reformation period contributed significantly to strengthening the identity of the new religious movement.
Another form of using psalms to express resistance emerges in the 20th century when the biblical texts are used in contradiction to their original meaning. For example, praise for God's creation can be transformed into an indictment of the destruction of nature, the well-ordered structure of the world into a complaint about human exploitation. Thus the hopeful outlook on an ideal world, as it is outlined in the biblical Psalms, is critically questioned. In this way, the communicative potential of the biblical psalms is taken up and used to express resistance to dominant constructions of the world, society or religion.
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Epistolary Networks: Textual Fluidity in Ancient Letter Collections
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
J. Gregory Given, Harvard University
Why did the texts of some ancient letter collections remain relatively stable in transmission, while others were more fluid? How do we judge the relative extent of textual fluidity given partial evidence and differential attestation between extant collections? Can the fact of fluidity itself teach us something about how ancient and medieval readers interpreted such letter collections? This paper will seek to address these questions, grappling with the methodological difficulties inherent in attempts to use aggregate manuscript evidence (as distinguished from the focused micro-histories of much material philology) as evidence for reception history. I will bring Daniel Selden’s analysis of the Alexander Romance (and related highly fluid textual traditions) as “Text Networks” together with lively current conversations on the genre of the ancient letter collection in order to highlight some peculiar features of epistolary “text networks.” Selden, David Konstan, and Christine Thomas have all shown that—far from being a “fringe” phenomenon in antiquity—the narrative fluidity of the Alexander Romance or the Apocryphal Acts was an extremely common phenomenon in the ancient literary landscape, particularly for narratives without attributed authors. I will argue that some letter collections, just as fluid but hardly as anonymous, participated in this same literary phenomenon. This raises pressing questions for our understanding of ancient authorship, ancient textual transmission, and ancient fiction.
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“Rejoice Etheria, For Your Day of Reckoning Has Come!” Apocalyptic Imagery and Anti-Eschatology in "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power"
Program Unit: Bible and Popular Culture
R. Gillian, University of British Columbia
In the final season of the Netflix reboot “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power,” Adora and her friends face their greatest enemy yet: Horde Prime, Ruler of the Known Universe (henceforth Prime). Having conquered the “Known Universe,” Prime brings his “eternal light” to Etheria to incorporate this previously unknown planet into his empire (S5:E2). The Princesses of Power reject his colonising embrace, launching Etheria into all-out-war.
This reboot takes many of its narrative devices and tropes straight out of the biblical story-telling handbook. As such, apocalyptic imagery features prominently in the Rebellion’s season-long struggle against Prime’s armies. This paper proposes a case study of this season in the framework of apocalyptic literary and visual cues. A “close watching” of these stories reveals an indebtedness to biblical literature, and additionally an undermining of what could be called “traditional apocalypse,” resulting in an anti-eschatological message.
One salient example is Prime’s official title (“Emperor of the Known Universe”) and the resulting implications when his salvific advances are rejected. Alexander the Great, and followed by the Roman Emperors, ruled the oikumene (the known world) with a political claim undergirded by what we would identify as religious themes. Christianity inherited Roman rhetoric, claiming that Jesus, God’s only son, would one day rule and judge this oikumene (cf. Acts 17:31). In “She-Ra,” the immortal Prime descends with his heavenly, white-clad army. His title draws on this religious rhetoric to establish him as a divinely sanctioned, conquering emperor and heavenly judge. His language (“your day of reckoning is at hand!”) is openly apocalyptic. The irony, however, is that Prime is not welcomed as a messianic figure and rejected as an imperial powermonger. In refusing Horde Prime as their “Saviour,” the Princesses refute his empire’s control over their territory and way of life.
Prime’s advances on Etheria are more than world domination. Prime appears to the Etherians as a gargantuan statue of light, with white hair and glowing eyes, proclaiming: “Do not fear, for you have been given the opportunity to share in a world soon to be remade in my image.” To earn this world-to-come, the Etherians must “cast aside” She-Ra, whom Prime designates a “false-hero” (S5:E1). This imagery echoes scenes from Revelation. Prime’s appearance resembles the Son of Man (Rev 14), and he portrays She-Ra as the false-prophet (Rev 19:20; 20:10). The Rebellion undermines this apocalypticism in prevailing against Prime, rather than basking in his eternal light.
“She-Ra”’s recasting of apocalyptic imagery, aligning it with the series’ forces of evil, is a fascinating case study in the representation of Christianity in contemporary American television. Prime is portrayed not as an overly zealous priest, or simply a misguided potentate, but rather an entire malicious system which threatens every life and community with which it comes into contact. The result is an anti-imperial, anti-colonial, anti-eschatology, wrapped in a glittering, feel-good bow.
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Choose Your Own Romance: Teaching Greek Romances in Their Imperial Context
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
R. Gillian Glass, University of British Columbia
How does one teach the entire corpus of ancient fiction in seventy-five minutes? Have the students “write” their own novel. In 2018 and 2019, I gave guest lectures in a course entitled “Introduction to Greek Civilization.” Because this course covers the Greek literary canon, I was asked to introduce the students to something “non-canonical.” I suggested the novels. Setting required readings is, however, difficult in such instances; even Xenophon’s Ephesiaka is too long to assign prior to a guest lecture. My solution was to introduce the students to all five novels simultaneously.
Each student received a piece of paper the size of an index card. On the front, it read “Number the following tropes. You may put the events in whatever order you choose”. Tropes #1 (Boy meets girl: Love at first sight) and #11 (The couple are reunited and live happily ever after) were predetermined; the other tropes characteristic of the novel genre were listed between the two predetermined lines. The students were free to order them as they wished. The back of the page read: “Choose one of the following:”
o There is a court case to decide on the heroine’s rightful husband.
o The hero and heroine become priest and priestess in cults to the Sun and Moon.
o The hero and heroine are shepherd and shepherdess.
o The satirical novel is written from the first-person perspective.
o There is a prophecy predicting the couple’s wanderings and sufferings.
Those acquainted with the Greek romances will immediately recognize the references to Chariton, Heliodorus, Longus, Achilles Tatius, and Xenophon. I then walked the students through pairing their second choice with the appropriate novel. The students were surprised to learn that the order on the first page is not as central to the creation of their “novel” as the single characteristic they choose on the back of their page. They are equally amused to learn that they had “read” all five romances in under five minutes (without learning Greek!).
This exercise serves a greater purpose than entertaining the students, however. Narrative tropes and devices like love at first sight and rival lovers are not new to our students. They recognize these familiar plots from modern romantic-comediess and books. In establishing these tropes with the students, I am able to quickly move into how and why different narrative elements appear in the Greek romances. Drawing on the works of Virginia Burrus, Brigit Egger, and Tim Whitmarsh, among others, I use the novels to introduce questions of gender, (inter-)marriage, sexuality, race, social status, and imperialism. From there, it is easy to pan out and look at how Jewish and Christian fictions played with these same narrative elements to ask equally pressing questions about identity and belonging. Through fiction, we examine how societal norms are shaped or undermined by the stories we tell. Students are eager to discuss how fiction and romance, both ancient and modern, contribute to group identity and social convention.
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Database of Scriptural Citations in Jewish Holocaust Literature
Program Unit: Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies
Gregory Y. Glazov, Seton Hall University
This paper reports on: 1) the completion of the Jewish part of this database based on all (1400) scriptural and rabbinic citations and explicit allusions in Katz, Biderman and Greenberg’s Wrestling with God (OUP, 2009, 704 pp.) anthology of 44 Jewish theological responses during and after the Holocaust, and 2) the transfer of the database from an Excel spreadsheet to using the Django web framework using the Python programming language. The new website provides a more user-friendly interface, allows more complex querying, and simplifies the process by which users can access and contribute to it. The project is sponsored by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine.
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Patterns of Deification in the Acts of the Apostles
Program Unit: Book of Acts
Daniel B. Glover, Baylor University
The Acts of the Apostles presents five different acclamations of divinity through the span of its narrative (8:4–24; 10:24–26; 12:20–23; 14:8–20; 28:1–10). The majority of recent commentators have interpreted these acclamations as a critique of “paganism,” a nebulous category and rarely defined. The contrast drawn from these texts is between a polytheistic and superstitious “paganism” on the one hand and a strictly monotheistic and much more rational “Christianity” on the other. This contrast is typically read out of one of the occurrences of the divine acclamation motif (14:8–20) and then applied to the others. More recent analyses, such as Joshua Jipp on Acts 28 for instance, complicate this picture considerably, however. Those on Malta are scarcely portrayed as senseless yokels, and several of the acclamations (such as 14:8–20) do appear justified when read within its broader ancient Mediterranean context (e.g., Ovid, Metam. 8). This paper contends that a single purpose cannot be read into this pattern of deification. Each occurrence deals with its own historical and theological concerns that lie behind and within the text of Acts. These patterns of deification fall broadly into similar patterns found in ancient Mediterranean literature. This paper argues that, far from using the divine acclamation motif as a criticism of “paganism” or a particular “worldview,” the patterns of deification serve positively to elevate certain figures in the narrative (Peter and Paul) as genuine possessors of divine power and negatively to denigrate other figures (Simon and Herod) as charlatans and self-seekers. The contrast drawn thereby is not between Lukan Christianity versus a vaguely-defined paganism, but a contrast between false and genuine ways of manifesting divine power.
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Plutarch Reads James 1:16–18: Theories of Divine Generation in James and Plutarch
Program Unit: Letters of James, Peter, and Jude
Daniel B. Glover, Baylor University
Scholars have produced three ways of reading Jas 1:16–18. The most popular interpretation is to read the divine begetting of 1:18 as a reference to Christian conversion through “new birth” (Konradt 1998, 2003). But some object that nothing in the epistle to this point has prepared the reader to see this passage as a reference to regeneration (Allison 2013). Others view this passage as a reference to creation rather than redemption, citing Jewish traditions about God’s creation by “the word” and the fact that God is called the “Father of lights” (1:17), perhaps in reference to the creation of celestial bodies. A third option is the birth of Israel, citing parallels in Deut 32:18 (“You were unmindful of the rock that bore you, you forgot the God who gave you birth”) and elsewhere (e.g., Jer 2:3; Philo, Spec. 4.180) that speak of God giving birth to Israel. Each of these arguments has something to commend them, but each has a number of objections.
But perhaps there is a path through the maze. Some scholars (Wolmarans 1994, 2006; Wilson 2002; Johnson 2004) observe the inverse parallelism of the birth imagery 1:12–15 and 1:16–18. One side of the parallelism describes a sexual act leading to death (1:12–15), causing some to regard it as rejecting sex whole cloth (Wilson 2002). The other describes a non-sexual creative act by using the language of paternity (πατρὸς τῶν φώτων) and procreation (ἀπεκύησεν). While the (non)sexual language referring to God’s creation is sometimes used to demonstrate that James does not have a negative perspective towards women (Johnson 1995, 2004 against Wolmarans 1994), scholarship tends to overlook the reason for, and theory underlying, the use of pregnancy and birth imagery in relation to divine generation, especially in view of the potential rejection of physical sex. The ancients, in contrast, did not shy away from such discussions.
In his Life of Numa and Table Talk, Plutarch discusses the theory and significance of divine generation. For Plutarch, to speak of God(s) having sex with a human and producing offspring is mythological. Yet Plutarch affirms that the gods can produce human offspring. When a god’s “power” rather than his (or her) “touch” produces divine offspring when it comes close to humanity. This proximity of power manifests itself in women’s pregnancy and men’s advancement in virtue. In both cases, Plutarch affirms, the encounter results in new and divinely generated beings of creation.
By placing James in conversation with Plutarch, we find many overlapping aspects of the theory underlying, and reason for, the language describing divine generation. The convergence between these two ancient authors on this point suggests that understanding James’s language of divine birth through God’s true word in its ancient theoretical context requires a synthesis of previous interpretations. God’s true word, like Plutarch’s divine power, begets new creations among James’s community, not as rebirth but as a new, divine generation.
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Countering the Exteroceptive Bias: Philology, Sensory Anthropology, and the Book of Proverbs
Program Unit: Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds
Greg Schmidt Goering, University of Virginia
Modern westerners conventionally construe a sense in exteroceptive terms. Consider, for example, that the five Aristotelian senses of vision, audition, touch, taste, and smell all admit data external to the organism. Such a narrow understanding of a sense presumptively excludes other faculties that some cultures construe as senses, such as balance, kinesthesia, or speech. Using a philological approach that is attentive to the concerns of sensory anthropology, this paper investigates sensory vocabulary in the book of Proverbs as a case study. It argues that Proverbs, in contrast to the modern western exteroceptive assumption of what constitutes a sense, evidences an understanding of a sense as a portal that facilitates communication between a person's inside and outside. Using examples from several sensory modalities in Proverbs, the paper illustrates how an exteroceptive bias has led to certain mistranslations or misunderstandings. It suggests that a careful investigation of sensory vocabulary framed by insights from sensory anthropology offers readings that mitigate modern exteroceptive preconceptions.
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The Heptameron: Marguerite de Navarre and Her Doctrine of Scripture
Program Unit: Recovering Female Interpreters of the Bible
Daniella Goldfarb, Marquette University
Using The Heptameron as a source text, this paper will recover the doctrine of Scripture of Marguerite de Navarre, a French reformer and contemporary of John Calvin. In terms of methodology, this paper will rely on a literary analysis of the structure and content of The Heptameron. The three main emphases of this paper are: Marguerite’s three-part doctrine of Scripture, wherein Scripture functions as a medicine with a spiritual and physical healing capacity; Marguerite’s view on the authority of Scripture based on its function in the Christian life; and third, her fourfold method of interpretation. The fourfold method that Marguerite models in The Heptameron incorporates reading Scripture first for its literal meaning, then an allegorical message, followed by a moral reading, and then an anagogical reading. Ultimately this paper hopes to demonstrate that Marguerite was a theologian in her own right, with her own approach to key doctrinal topics such as the nature of Scripture and which is best exemplified by her own chosen literary genre.
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Maintenance and Dependency in Ancient Jewish Society
Program Unit: Religious Competition in Late Antiquity
Pratima Gopalakrishnan, Yale University
In translations of late antique texts, one often encounters the English term “maintenance” as referring to the householder’s management of household members’ basic daily needs. In rabbinic texts, this word “maintenance” translates the Hebrew term mĕzônôt, which may refer to the support a husband provides his wife, a father his son or daughter, a son his father or widowed mother, a slaveholder an enslaved person, or an employer his hired laborers. Conceptually distinct from a wage, and usually quantified in food units rather than in currency, the provision of mĕzônôtis also governed by a variety of rationales.
Due to the halakhic afterlife of the term mĕzônôt, this domestic exchange is often understood using the anachronistic language of legal rights and obligations. Through an analysis of rabbinic texts and other late antique sources, I argue that “maintenance” was a much more malleable concept, which shaped dependencies rather than reflecting them. I show how the rabbis and their contemporaries think through which household members are entitled to maintenance—that is, to have needs at all, and to have those needs met.
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The Festival City: Jerusalem after Herod’s Games in Honor of Augustus
Program Unit: Archaeology of Roman Palestine
Benjamin D. Gordon, University of Pittsburgh
This paper considers ways in which the festival culture of Jerusalem changed as a result of King Herod’s initiatives in the last few decades of the first century BCE. Specifically, it will focus on the impact of the games in honor of Augustus, which were put on quadrennially in Jerusalem beginning in 28 BCE. The inaugural Jerusalem games likely demonstrated to the municipal authorities the benefits of drawing visitors to the city beyond those pilgrims who would typically have come from greater Judea. The games should be viewed as an early indication of sweeping cultural change and, as argued here, a decisive factor in the growth of Jerusalem as a pilgrimage city in the Herodian era. Most significant in this period is the city’s transformation from a regional to a pan-Mediterranean festival destination. Efforts by the Hasmoneans and more importantly by Herod, in his construction of the new and internationally renowned temple precinct in Jerusalem, increased participation by diasporic Jewish communities in Jerusalem festivals, as has been explored in scholarship. However, the games in honor of Augustus contributed their part. They were a crucial moment in the evolution of Jerusalem into a cosmopolitan city of the Roman East, whether in regard to the political messaging of its ruling authorities, the nature of its commercial activity, or the kinds of visitors it hosted.
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Scribal Methods for Correcting Omissions of the Tetragrammaton in Medieval Hebrew Bible Manuscripts
Program Unit: Masoretic Studies
Nehemia Gordon, Bar-Ilan University
Rabbinic strictures required special procedures to deal with omitted instances of the Tetragrammaton to ensure it was treated respectfully. The Sages discussed four solutions: 1. supralinear addition, 2. abrading an inline word and replacing it with the Tetragrammaton, 3. wiping off an inline word and replacing it with the Tetragrammaton, and 4. removing the sheet containing the omission. Medieval rabbis differed about requiring or recommending one or more of these solutions. Medieval scribes may have employed all these methods, but only 1 and 2 have been identified. New solutions introduced in the Middle Ages include abrading an inline word and rewriting it on the line together with the Tetragrammaton in liturgical scrolls, and text-correcting qere and reshaping letters in codices. Another medieval solution was marginal addition both adjacent to, and distant from, the spot of the omission. The latter was common in codices but opposed by decisors in Torah scrolls.
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A True Son of Abraham: How Genesis 18 Re-casts Zacchaeus’ Hospitality as Salvific
Program Unit: Gospel of Luke
Brian Gorman, Ecumenical Institute of Theology
This paper presents Zacchaeus as a significant example of participatory soteriology in Luke’s gospel. The story of Zacchaeus is often understood primarily as a story about the right way for the rich to enter the kingdom of God. While wealth is an undeniable component, Zacchaeus’s salvation is tied to his display of hospitality. This paper argues that the story of the three visitors to Abraham at Mamre in Genesis 18 functions as the primary scriptural lens through which to understand Zacchaeus’s salvific interaction with Jesus in Luke 19:1-10. It offers four conclusions about the soteriological implications embedded in the narrative. First, that Zacchaeus’s salvation is made possible because of the hospitality he shows to Jesus and to the poor through the distribution of his wealth. Second, that Jesus, while invited as a guest by Zacchaeus, functions doubly as a host by extending God’s salvation to Zacchaeus’s household, and that this role reversal is an essential component of the narrative. Third, that Jesus’s recognition of Zacchaeus as a “son of Abraham” is not simply an act of restoration to the community, but a declaration that Zacchaeus has exhibited the hospitality of Abraham and has therefore also been accepted as a member of God’s covenant family. Fourth, Luke intends for this story to be paradigmatic for his readers. This story is a primary example of theoxenic hospitality that suggests Luke’s audience can encounter the same saving welcome of God by extending Abrahamic hospitality to the poor.
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Refuge, Kindness, and the Geography of Open Hearts and Borders in Ruth
Program Unit: Comparative Method in Biblical Studies
Hemchand Gossai, Northern Virginia Community College
This paper seeks to explore particular themes that emerge universally in literature that span both time and geography. In a broadly construed sense, the paper will examine these themes in a comparative manner. Methodological principles such rhetorical criticism and intersectionality will be employed. In this manner we will develop an understanding how aspects of one's social and political identities (e.g. gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, religion, etc.) might combine to create unique modes of interpretation and implications for society. Using the book of Ruth with its principal themes of kindness and refuge among others, this paper explores such universal themes in the context of contemporary social and cultural issues. The paper intersects the words and the social and cultural world of wide-ranging figures such as Marcus Aurelius, together with feminist scholars, historical and contemporary political leaders, while examining these themes intertextually as well. The paper seeks to provide implications for contemporary society on issues such as the centrality of kindness and society’s role in providing refuge to immigrants.
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The Targums Wordmap: The Equivalent Project’s New Research Tool for the Targums of the Torah
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Leeor Gottlieb, Bar-Ilan University
The first phase of the Equivalent Project – a research initiative I founded and direct – has recently culminated in the launch of a brand new digital tool for the study of the Torah Targums. Dubbed “Targums Wordmap”, it resides within Accordance Biblical Software and enables study of the Targums in their digital form in ways that have never been available before.
The purpose of my presentation will be to highlight and demonstrate heretofore impossible searches that are performed by the Targums Wordmap quickly, efficiently, and – most important – thoroughly and with high methodological reliability.
In the presentation, I will show the Targums Wordmap in its Alignment View – which offers a synoptic study version of the entire Hebrew Torah with all of its Aramaic Targums in a manner that displays all equivalent word relations between the various texts.
I will demonstrate how the Targums Wordmap opens up an entirely new dimension of data compilation through its unique cross-textual morphological search capabilities. These allow the user to locate specific features in one Targum while comparing them to the equivalent features of another Targum. These may also be compared and searched against the Hebrew source.
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Pagans, Jews, and the Torah in Late Antique Arabia
Program Unit: The Qur’an: Manuscripts and Textual Criticism (IQSA)
Mohsen Goudarzi, University of Minnesota
The ninety-first verse of Q al-An‘am 6 has proven puzzling to scholars of the Qur’an. This verse opens by criticizing those who claim that “God has sent down nothing to a human being,” a claim that seems to stem from the Prophet’s pagan opponents. However, to rebut this claim, the verse adduces the precedent of the Torah (“the book that Moses brought”) and reminds its addressees that “you make it [the Torah] into documents (qaratis) that you display, while you conceal much.” The rebuttal thus seems addressed to the Jews, who cherished the written Torah in their learning and piety. Some scholars have been content to note these contrasting indications about the verse’s addressees without attempting a resolution (e.g. Rudi Paret, Der Koran: Kommentar und Konkordanz, 147). Others have suggested that the verse originally addressed the Meccan pagans but was supplemented in Yathrib—by the phrase “you make it [the Torah] into documents that you display, while you conceal much”—to reflect displeasure with the town’s Jewish authorities (Richard Bell, A Commentary on the Qur’ān, 1:197). More recently, the late Patricia Crone claimed that this verse addresses only the pagans and shows that far from being scripture-less, they were “in the habit of copying [Mosaic revelations] on papyrus sheets” (The Qurʾānic Pagans and Related Matters, 1:111). In this paper, I argue that the best solution to the puzzling features of Q 6:91 is departure from its dominant reading. Specifically, the skeletal Arabic text that is rendered as “you make it into documents, which you display, while you conceal much” should be read as featuring third-person verbs instead of second-person ones, that is to say, as “they make it into documents, which they display, while they conceal much” (yaj‘alunahu qaratisa yubdunaha wa-yukhfuna kathiran). This reading eliminates the apparent oscillation in the target audience of this verse, which should be seen as addressing the pagans in its entirety. In addition to making a case for this reading, the paper examines the invocation of the Torah in Q 6:91. As alluded to earlier in the surah (v. 7) and elsewhere in the Qur’an (e.g. Q al-Qasas 28:48), the pagans seemed to have disparaged the Qur’an as inferior to the Torah on account of the former’s piecemeal and oral manner of dissemination. The qur’anic text under consideration may be countering this disparagement by noting that, at least in its present form and for practical purposes, the Torah is fragmented (into scrolls?) and of limited availability to outsiders. The paper ends by discussing the material form of the Written and Oral Torah in Late Antiquity, and the significance of orality to the qur’anic self-image.
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The Scribal Networks of Q: A Network Approach to Early Christian Literature
Program Unit: Q
Christina Gousopoulos, University of Toronto
There is an increasing recognition in early Christian scholarship that social network analysis is a fruitful addition to the research toolkits of scholars seeking to better understand the networks of Christians who diffused the Christ cult and its literature around the Roman Empire. In an attempt to theorize some of the earliest (and most remarkably difficult to pinpoint) Christian literary networks, the present contribution employs social network analysis to examine networks of sub-elite village scribes who may pose as a model for those involved in the composition and diffusion of the Sayings Gospel Q. Papyrological archives and documentary texts of such scribal figures will be utilized to tentatively reconstruct the existence of antique scribal networks, illuminating the social environment in which the scribes of Q worked and asking the critical question: how does Q know what it knows?
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Augustine of Hippo’s Preaching on 1 Thess 4:13–14 and 1 Cor 15:32b–34
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Joseph L. Grabau, University of the Incarnate Word
Responses of grief in fourth-century Christian funeral orations provide compelling opportunities for textual research and theological reflection (cf. Pelikan, 1962). In the North African tradition, Cyprian of Carthage anticipated this development in Christian consolation literature, with his De Mortalitate – itself a sermon addressing fear of death at a time of plague in ca. 252. For Augustine of Hippo, perhaps fixed between ideals – his preference for Christian unity in tension with the aristocratic tastes of social elites (Morris, 1992) – Augustine of Hippo did not contribute an elaborate oration of this genre in his oeuvre. Even so, Augustine stands out among late-antique authors for the profundity and extent of his thought on grief, mortality, and original sin – areas which cannot be underestimated in his contribution to theological anthropology. These concerns appear not only in exegetical, polemical, and theological contexts, but are also reflected in his preaching (Rebillard, 1994 and 2003). Augustine also suggests pastoral approaches to care for the dead in his work on the care of the dead, De cura pro mortuis gerenda, which reflects both his leadership and familiarity with burial practices as necessary human and cultural expressions.
Recent scholarship has explored Augustine’s specific homiletic activation of an exercise in “imagined death” among his contemporaries, identifying the “postmortal” as an important corrective for establishing social boundaries of identity and, not incidentally, overcoming fear of death (Muehlberger, 2019; cf. Dodaro, 2006, 1996, and 1989). This paper seeks to establish a tailored pastoral-cognitive interpretation of Augustine’s preaching, by selectively tracing exegetical themes of human mortality, salvation, and original sin. How does the latter, often polemical construct, appear within select sermons of consolation and exhortation? Second, in what way do the Gospel of John and the Pauline corpus interact, as Augustine develops themes of death and resurrection – so crucial to the early Christian preaching about Christ? That is, do certain biblical texts or tropes protect against realism about human nature? Finally, how might a specifically Johannine framework of death and resurrection be detected amidst Augustine’s evident focus upon Pauline texts – 1 Thess 4:13 and 1 Cor 15:32, in particular, here – about human mortality and finitude? Principal sermons of Augustine to be emphasized include serm. 172-173, De mortuis, and serm. 361-362, De resurrectione mortuorum futura, each of which takes a Pauline verse as its point of departure. Additional, shorter contributions of note include serm. 335K and serm. 396, given at the memorial and funeral of a bishop, respectively. Various sermons offered at the anniversary of a martyr’s death permit further material for comparison – as does evidence from Augustine’s Enarrat. Ps. This paper supports conclusions regarding the bishop of Hippo’s pastoral balance of realism and sympathy, synthesis of biblical source traditions, and further development of a North African pastoral theology of death and dying.
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"מזמור לדוד, בברחו מפני אבשלום בנו:" An Evaluation of the Interpretive Relevance of the Historical Superscription in Psalm 3
Program Unit: Book of Psalms
Michael Weinburg Graham, Bar-Ilan University
The connection between the narrative of Samuel and the Psalms is most decisively seen in the thirteen psalms that begin with a short introductory comment from the narrative of Samuel. Traditionally––except for a few voices such as N. H. Tur-Sinai, S. Holm-Nielsen, and Brevard Childs––scholars have given no significant consideration to the interpretive value of the superscriptions. Brevard Childs states that one reason for this is because there was a consensus among scholars for more than a century that the “titles are secondary additions, which can afford no reliable information toward establishing the genuine historical setting of the Psalms." In the last twenty years, as a result of the influence of scholars like Childs, some have begun to view the superscriptions as examples of “inner-biblical exegesis” (e.g. James Kugel, James Mays, Yitzhak Berger). Despite this acknowledgement, scholars have either rejected/minimized the narrative of Samuel or, having given extensive attention to the Samuel narrative underlying these superscriptions, do not consider their interpretive value within the Psalter as a whole. Due to the ongoing discussion among Psalms scholars surrounding the relationship between Psalms 1–2 and the interpretive function of these psalms within the Psalter as a whole, I examine the superscription at the beginning of Psalm 3 in order to identify its purpose and interpretive value. I contend that the Samuel passage to which it refers provides a narrative context which highlights important themes and concepts from Psalms 1–2, supporting the view of scholars (e.g. Robert Cole, Jean-Marie Auwers, Gianni Barber, Joseph Brennan) who contend that Psalms 1–2 serve as an introduction to the book of Psalms, and suggesting an interpretive function for the historical superscriptions. I attempt to demonstrate this in two ways: first, highlighting the linguistic and thematic connections between Psalms 1–3 and Second Samuel 15–19, I seek to demonstrate its interpretive impact upon Psalms 1–3 and the Psalter as a whole. Second, I examine Second Temple texts from Qumran, the Septuagint, and the New Testament, among others, which address in part/whole Psalms 1–3 or corroborate the central themes of these Psalms (e.g. 4Q174, Acts 4:24–27).
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Biblical Hebrew Verb Classes and Alternations
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Kevin Grasso, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The interaction between verbal semantics and argument realization has been a major research area in linguistics for decades. In 1993, Beth Levin published her seminal book “English Verb Classes and Alternations,” where she organized English verbs into syntactic and semantic classes. I model this study on hers and discuss how we might go about organizing verbs in the Biblical Hebrew (BH) lexicon into classes. After this theoretical discussion, I demonstrate what this would look like by classifying argument alternations in the Qal and Hiphil binyanim into syntactic and semantic classes, building on work already begun (Grasso 2021). In order to classify verbs syntactically, I show that there are three primary parameters that must be considered. First, Voice introduces the external argument (Kratzer 1996), and variations in Voice affect the type and number of external arguments available to a verb (Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou, and Schäfer 2015). I show how this interacts with the binyan system, which may spell-out Voice. Second, the binyan system itself can serve one of two functions, either adding additional semantic material to verbs or modifying valency (as a spell-out of Voice), and I show how these interact, drawing on work on the Modern Hebrew binyan system (Arad 2005). The third parameter is the meaning contribution of the root. Adopting a distributed morphology framework (Halle and Marantz 1993), I show that where the root incorporates syntactically has consequences for the type and number of arguments present in the verb, including its capacity to alternate with other binyanim. With these three parameters, many of the argument alternations in BH can be derived. Semantically, I group together verbs based on root meaning and syntactic behavior. As shown by Levin and Rappaport Hovav (2005), syntax is often a reflection of meaning. Given that we do not have access to native speaker intuitions in the study of BH, I show that syntactic behavior can be a reliable indicator of semantic import in the absence of such intuitions. In addition to a verb’s argument realizations, I also investigate the distribution of roots, particularly whether they allow or seem to disallow word formation in categories besides verbs. This can help us to establish the basic classification of root meaning as either referring to an event, state, or entity (Marantz 2001). Rather than decomposing root meanings ad infinitum, I suggest that they should be decomposed only insofar as they affect syntactic behavior. This enables us to see how the meaning of the root interfaces with data we already have, namely syntax, and I propose that this provides a natural grain-size to classify verbal meanings.
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Jinn among Humans and Birds: The Making of Qur’anic Cosmology
Program Unit: The Qur’an: Surah Studies (IQSA)
Valentina A. Grasso, University of Cambridge
The Qur’an is a multi-strand text(s) composed by a series of logia collected during different periods and across various places, but likely all assembled in Arabia. The blended arrangement of the qur’anic macrotext merged strands of traditions whose boundaries were already vague. Muhammad thus gave birth to a vibrant process of adaptation and reshaping of pre-existing pagan and scriptural narratives. These systems, however, were often merged in an imprecise way either consciously in order to blur doctrinal differences, or because the rapid mise en place of the Qur’an did not allow much space for polishing and editing single narratives within the macrotext. The Meccan surah Q al-Naml 27 is a great example of the active merging of strands of traditions anchored to their Arabian milieu with other material featured in the Bible. Through a focus on verses Q al-Naml 27:16-17, this paper sheds light on the taxonomy of the qurʼanic jinn and their relationship with similarly liminal creatures of ancient and late antique times. The portrayal of these beings shows notable similarities with Zoroastrianism and Judeo-Christian angelology, but at the same time recalls ancestral Bedouin cults. Furthermore, the topos of a celestial creature bears many intriguing parallels and equivalences in Antiquity, such as the Roman genii and the Greek daimones found in the Greek-written pseudepigraphal Testament of Solomon. My analysis will first compare and contrast the qurʼanic jinn with supernatural beings found in other milieux, and then move to examine the jinn’s relationship with beings mentioned in the scattered logia of the qurʼanic macrotext. In contrast with the vague features of the jinn which occupy an ambiguous moral position, the scriptural angels and demons were conceived as rigidly dualistic beings. This paper argues that the jinn are re-elaborations of pagan creatures, which grew to represent interfaces between the sacred and secular spheres, and were adapted to serve the strictly hierarchical qurʼanic cosmology. Deeply influenced by Jewish-Christian debates, the Islamic profession of faith is based on the tawḥīd, which argues for the oneness of God. This concept perfected the system of belief of pre-Islamic ‘imperfect monotheists’ who believed in a Supreme God (Allah) but also in the intercession of lesser divine creatures. As such, the identity of these beings had long fermented in the Arabian milieu, but gradually lost ground to external scriptural influences, either expunged from Muhammad’s prophecy or shrewdly reshuffled as in the case of the liminal jinn.
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Marine Lover of Julius Wellhausen: Why Feminist Biblical Studies Needs Irigaray
Program Unit: Reading, Theory, and the Bible
Rhiannon Graybill, Rhodes College
This paper argues that feminist biblical studies is in crisis, and that Luce Irigaray's work offers an invigorating and exciting model for how to do feminist biblical studies differently. While feminist biblical studies has never been so successful (with the journals, panels, handbooks, encyclopedias, edited volumes, etc. to prove it), this success has not always translated into interpretive courage, vigor, or play. Too much of feminist scholarship remains stuck applying borrowed, rigid, or outdated paradigms about gender and sexuality to biblical texts. In addition, feminist discourses about biblical studies, whether or not they originate with scholars working with feminist approaches, often emphasize a liberal feminist equality model that is insufficient, limited, and limiting. Responding to this state of affairs, this paper turns to Luce Irigaray as thinker and writer to imagine an alternative, or alternative future, for feminist biblical studies. Irigaray’s body of work offers a number of dynamic interpretive strategies and tactics, including subversive close readings, destruction “with nuptial tools,” literary style as a mode of critique, taking seriously sex and love, anger, touch, and openness. These strategies and tactics empower feminist biblical criticism in ways that other dominant feminist paradigms do not, while also refusing timidity, asceticism, and respectability as critical postures. In calling for a turn to Irigaray, I will also address the suggestion that her work is anti-queer, anti-trans, or anti-intersectional, arguing for a dynamic and inclusive Irigarayan hermeneutics.
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A Manifesto of Hate: Race, Religion, and Modern Anti-Judaism
Program Unit: Early Jewish Christian Relations
Adam Gregerman, Saint Joseph's University (Philadelphia, PA)
The manifesto by John Earnest, who attacked a synagogue in California in 2019, murdering one and injuring three, is a striking illustration of hatred of Jews. While clearly written by an unstable individual, the manifesto is relatively coherent for its genre. The author brings together two theoretically separate forms of hostility. The first, with roots in early Christian writings, is theological. This is grounded in beliefs about Jewish responsibility for the crucifixion and God’s rejection of their covenant. The other, largely seen as emerging in the modern period, is pseudo-scientific racism, with Jews as enemies of the “race.” These two perceptions rest upon different assumptions and reflect different perspectives. The first is religious, viewing identity in mutable terms (religious beliefs are changeable), while the second is apparently secular and admits no such possibility. In theory, they are in tension.
This distinction has come to seem less firm, however. For example, in early modern Spain the idea of limpieza de sangre foreshadowed negative views of Jews among German Christian theologians in the early twentieth century. Both merged theological hostility with racist claims about the ineradicability of Jewish identity. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the need to rethink facile distinctions between “religion” and “race, which fail to capture (perhaps surprising) areas of overlap between them.
Earnest’s manifesto provides a contemporary illustration of this merger. I will demonstrate his complementary use of both ancient Christian and modern racist accusations against Jews and the ways these approaches overlap. He is knowledgeable about accusations from the first category. In addition to the well-known charge that “the Jews” killed Jesus, he introduces additional accusations. Jews are persecutors of Christians (see Martyrdom of Polycarp 12-17; Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 133; Tertullian, Scorpiae 10). He references the deaths of Stephen (Acts 7) and, much later, of Simon of Trent (a blood libel from 1475). He links Jews with the devil, an accusation in the New Testament (quoting John 8:44) and early Christian writings (see Justin, First Apology 63; Ignatius, Philadelphians 6).
These ancient Christian views are merged with racist views, as he recasts many of these theological themes in secular terms. His (chimerical) notions of Jewish malfeasance include responsibility for starting wars and running the slave trade. He introduces a hierarchical ordering of the “races,” with “whites” at the top and Jews at the bottom. In this schema, Jews are uniquely dangerous. These views co-exist or overlap with Christian accusations, and it is illuminating to see how, despite their differences, they can reinforce each other. In historical terms, one can discern how earlier theological hostility influenced later secular hostility, with “whites” now taking the place of Christians. On the other hand, it is also important to recognize the differences, especially in regard to support for violence. His racist perspective buttresses a zero-sum viewpoint, in which only one race can triumph and hence violence is encouraged. I will therefore analyze these categories, showing how they function in their original context, and then problematize the purported distinctions between them.
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Dining Rooms, Hostels, and Grottos: Rental Spaces for Pilgrims in Pre-70 Jerusalem
Program Unit: Archaeology of Roman Palestine
Matthew Grey, Brigham Young University
An important aspect of pilgrimage in pre-70 Jerusalem was the need for various rental spaces to support large numbers of pilgrims visiting the city on a temporary basis. These spaces could include “upper rooms,” dining halls, or triclinia for participating in specific communal meals (such as the Passover), hostels or inns for nightly accommodations of small groups over a limited period of time (such as the days of a certain festival), or other places of shelter (such as nearby caves) that could meet similar needs on a more modest scale. To explore this aspect of the Jerusalem landscape during the late Second Temple period, this paper will consider three types of potential rental space that could have been used by pilgrims in and around the city: residential structures with dining rooms that could have been rented out on special occasions (including the wealthier courtyard homes of the upper city and the more modest terraced housing attested near the lower city); the hostel represented by the Theodotos inscription (which reflects the existence of a synagogue that housed pilgrims and provided them with basic services, such as rooms, washing facilities, and Torah instruction); and the Gethsemane Grotto on the western slope of the Mount of Olives (a cave outside the city walls that contained an oil press for harvest activities in the fall, but that might have been used by pilgrims for overnight accommodations during the non-harvest seasons). Each of these case studies will be considered in light of the relevant archaeological remains, textual evidence (including accounts in the New Testament gospels of Jesus and his disciples visiting Jerusalem on pilgrimage), and extant documentary sources (including various contracts that survived from Roman Egypt and that can provide valuable insights into the logistics of rental agreements in the broader region). By exploring these different types of rental space in pre-70 Jerusalem, we can have a fuller understanding of the pilgrimage experience in the city and better appreciate the material reality behind the literary accounts describing visits to Jerusalem during the late Second Temple period.
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A New Third Century Fragment of Luke from Oxyrhynchus
Program Unit: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Bruce W Griffin, Keiser University
P-141/P.Oxy 5478, a third century fragment of Luke, was recently published by LH Blumell & BW Griffin in volume LXXXV of the Oxyrhynchus series. This paper offers an introduction to the papyrus and its significance for the ancient text of Luke.
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Immersing Students in Jesus’ Jerusalem: A Digital Field Trip into the Past
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Tyler Griffin, Brigham Young University
Many of our students know about the major events that took place in 1st century Jerusalem as described in the New Testament. They sometimes struggle, however, to visualize those stories and see how they weave together in their historical setting. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a digitally immersive experience with a game engine is worth more than ten thousand words to our digitally native students. This session will demonstrate a free app of 2nd Temple Jerusalem, designed for instructors to use as a supplement for teaching New Testament classes. This session will have two major focal points. First, I will demonstrate the following:
• How the app can provide overviews of the city to give students a better sense of size, scale, orientation, and relation to other major landmarks and features
• A brief virtual tour of Temple Mount from birds-eye view points and a ground level walkthrough experience
• A brief virtual tour of the pools of Bethesda and Siloam, the Mount of Olives, Kidron Valley, Mount Zion, and the northern quarries
The second half of the presentation will be a pedagogical demonstration of how the app could be used to enhance lessons focused on events that transpired during the final week of Christ’s life.
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Bodies in Space and Time
Program Unit: Christian Theology and the Bible
Jennie Grillo, University of Notre Dame
Recent scholarship on divine embodiment has made extensive use of notions of place and space, but the dimension of time has played less of a role in these discussions. Following the ‘temporal turn’ in Jewish studies, this paper will ask how the intersection of time with space might be important in describing divine embodiment in the Bible. I will draw on the work of Caroline Walker Bynum and others in considering the importance of spatio-temporal continuity to individual identity: if identity is in part grounded on the persistence of bodies through time, how are we to understand the temporal discontinuities of divine occupations of place and space?
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Caregivers Examining Caregivers in Mark
Program Unit: Contextual Biblical Interpretation
James Grimshaw, Carroll University
There are eleven passages in the Gospel of Mark where a caregiver brings someone who is ill to Jesus. Characters with illnesses or disabilities have more recently been the focus of many studies but there have been fewer studies on the caregiver characters. This paper will explore the caregivers from the perspective of contemporary caregivers. Caregivers in Mark are either parents, anonymous characters, or the religious community. In four different scenes, parents seek Jesus for their children and many have names, titles, and/or voices (Jairus for his daughter, 5:22-23; Syrophoenician woman for her daughter, 7:26; a father for his son, 9:21; Timaeus and his son Bartimaeus, 10:46). Four passages indicate that anonymous characters (friends, neighbors, family members?) bring the sick to Jesus but have no names, titles, or voices (“four of them” carry the paralyzed man, 2:3; “they” and “people” bring the sick on mats, 6:55-56; “they” bring him a deaf man, 7:32; “they” brought a blind man, 8:22). Those who are ill are also closely connected to the Jewish community in three passages but are simply situated within that context (“in their synagogue”, 1:23; the leper is sent to the priest,1: 44; a man in the synagogue, 3:1). While the parents have some voice, none of the caregivers have much of a role and their main activity is bringing their loved one to Jesus, nothing about what happens before or after that event. Not only are these biblical characters less examined in the biblical studies literature but this social location is often invisible in American society and it is also not typically made explicit in biblical interpretations. Remarkably, caregivers as spouses or partners are not present at all in Mark. This may be the most taken for granted role as a caregiver. The caregivers in Mark will be explored from the experience of caregivers. As I read these passages, I will foreground my experience as both a spouse and parent in my roles as caregiver and I will also interview other caregivers and examine their interpretations of these passages through the Contextual Bible Study approach. I will also draw from Disability Studies and Cultural Studies.
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Intertextual Interplay in Matt 27:43–53: Exploring the Evocation of David’s Song (2 Sam 22:5–20) in Jesus’s Experience on the Cross
Program Unit: Intertextuality in the New Testament
Marc Groenbech-Dam, University of Aberdeen
Matthew’s intertextual framework is often highlighted in his fulfillment quotations, yet hundreds of implicit intertexts are present in the gospel (Senior 1997). One of these implicit intertexts might occur in Matt 27:43-53, creating conceptual parallels between David in 2 Sam 22:5-20 and Jesus in Matt 27:45-53 (Nolland 2005; Gourgues 1994). The Psalms figure prominently in Jesus’s passion, particularly Ps 22. However, Ps 18 is likely also evoked (Kratz 1974; Collins 1994; Carrier 2020). Most scholars overlook the proposed intertext, and those who see a connection either suggest a direct intertextual link between Matt 27:45-53 and 2 Sam 22, or Ps 18. In half of the cases, though, the proposed intertext remains a footnote.
However, if one sees a link to Ps 18 in Matt 27:43-53, one must also acknowledge Ps 18’s literary connection to its parallel in 2 Sam 22 (Cross and Freedman 1953; Berry 1993; Willgren 2016; Weber 2018). Thus, this paper suggests that an allusion to Ps 18 further functions as a window to 2 Sam 22 and vice versa. This kind of layered intertextual interplay is called “double allusion,” “double reference,” or “window reference” following Ruurd Nauta’s “The Concept of ‘Metalepsis’: From Rhetoric to the Theory of Allusion and to Narratology” (de Gruyter: 2013).
Following the criteria of Richard Hays, this paper seeks to investigate the viability of the allusion and double allusion to 2 Sam 22 and how said intertext guides the ideal reader’s understanding of Jesus’s death. One of the criteria for detecting intertexts relates to the history of interpretation. If we expand this criterion to include interpretations of 2 Sam 22, then the targumic tradition of reading 2 Samuel 22 in a prophetic and eschatological mode where the fate of the messiah and his people are intertwined in a mutual vindication makes a fruitful dialogue partner (Van Staalduine-Sulman 2002). Indeed, such a targumic understanding of the evocation of 2 Sam 22 in Matt 27:52-53 meshes well with the clearer eschatological allusions to Ezek 37/Zech 14.
This paper suggests reading Jesus’s cry of dereliction, the darkness, the earthquake, and the raising of the saints, in conjunction with 2 Sam 22 and the targumic stream of interpretation, helps the ideal reader see Jesus’s death on the cross in light of YHWH’s vindication of David and Israel. Thus, the evocation of 2 Sam 22 in Matt 27:43-53 highlights Jesus as the righteous Davidic messiah, the one in whom YHWH is pleased. The death of YHWH’s chosen and beloved Davidic messiah inaugurates a series of eschatological events in Matthew, ultimately rescuing and vindicating Jesus along with His people.
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Emotions in Lamentations
Program Unit: Bible and Emotion
Marianne Grohmann, Universität Wien
The paper aims at a semantic analysis of the vocabulary of emotions assigned to God, humans and the personified city of Jerusalem in the Book of Lamentations, persuing two main research questions: (1) How are emotions described or alluded to in the Book of Lamentations, and (2) How do these references contribute to our understanding of how the ancient Israelites experienced and conceived emotions?
Research on emotions in Lamentations can only trace the expressions of emotions in the texts, thus analyzing the verbal expressions of emotions: in verbs, nouns, personifications, images (images of body, daily life, animals, war, etc.). Access to biblical emotions is possible via semantics, analysing linguistic expressions of emotions. Beside explicit references to emotions, the biblical texts describe reactions of the body like, e.g., tremending, facial expressions, gestures, affect sounds, e.g. crying, sighing, and manifestations accompanying words like speech rate or voice pitch. Metaphors will be investigated as a means of representing, evoking and generating emotions. Conceptual blending theory will be used as a basic methodology for the imagery of Lamentations.
Literary studies have developed certain catalogues to describe emotions in texts, e.g., the distinction between explicit words of emotion – e.g., grief, fear, shame – and implicit or connotated emotions: lexical presentation in context, images/metaphors, which are frequent especially in lyrical texts. These catalogues are useful for investigating the language of Lamentations about emotions. The distinction between explicit emotional words and images, metaphoric language is essential for the interpretation of Lamentations. While psychological research concentrates on the individuum, cultural-anthropological research on emotions has highlighted the ritual aspects linked with emotions. Emotions in Lamentations are not only considered private experiences, but also public expressions linked with gestures, performative acts and rituals. Being part of social and transcendent relationships, they cannot be described only on an individual level. Emotions are no separate conceptual domain in the ancient world, but are linked with the body and physical sensations, movements and actions, cultic actions and ritual gestures. In addition to that, a special focus will lie on the potential of Lamentations to create emotions in readers and listeners.
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Josephus' and Philo's Interpretations of Envy
Program Unit: Josephus
Davina Grojnowski, Independent Scholar
This paper will focus on how biblical narratives can influence subsequent interpretations and rewritings by triggering the emotion of envy in its readers. Even without necessarily verbalising this specific emotion, this paper argues that the biblical script influences Josephus and Philo and their rewritten biblical narratives. By using envy as a lens through which to read Josephus' and Philo's retelling of biblical narratives, we will be able to trace and better understand their individual choices and weightings of tensions left unsolved in the biblical scenes. Specific examples this paper will highlight include Josephus' and Philo's interpretations and perceptions of the triangular relationship between Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar as well as the relationship between their children Isaac and Ishmael. While one author interprets the biblical account as a narrative of sibling rivalry between Isaac and Ishmael, the other minimises allusions to sibling rivalry and instead focuses almost exclusively on the sexual rivalry between the women. A second example of reading Josephus and Philo using envy as a hermeneutic lens is their reaction to and interpretation of Kores' sedition and uprising against Moses. While one author highlights and emphasises the rivalry between kin/siblings, the other goes out of his way to minimise envy between brothers and relatives. Reading Josephus and Philo "enviously", this paper argues that the differences in their retellings and weighting of the same narratives lie in part in their understanding of envy's role in the various interpersonal and complex relationships. The rewritten biblical narratives can be more richly understood if envy is appreciated as an underlying emotion; even if Philo and Josephus do not verbalise the emotion in every instance, the scripts evidence envy's underlying presence. Using a different angle to read the biblical narratives in Josephus and Philo will offer new perspectives of their own values, judgements, and perceptions of their audiences.
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Language Choice in Tannaitic Discussions of Legal Documents
Program Unit: Aramaic Studies
Andrew D. Gross, The Catholic University of America
The Mishnah, for the most part, is a Hebrew text, but on a small number of occasions, it sprinkles in some Aramaic into its text, whether it be just a few words or even full sentences. Many of these instances of Aramaic in the Mishnah concern the formulation of legal documents. When discussing how to formulate a specific clause, the rabbis will often cite that clause in Aramaic. They do not, however, do so exclusively in Aramaic, as they will sometimes give such legal formulations in Hebrew. In this paper, I will consider these instances and the possible factors that may have influenced their language choice. Such factors include the type of legal document being discussed, and whether a given clause is meant for written formulation or for a verbal declaration (verba solemnia) or both. In addition, I will also consider how these discussions accord with the language of extant legal documents from this era. Relevant data from the Tosefta will also be considered.
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"Yes, I know its pain" (Ex 3.7). The empathic god of the exodus and coping with crises
Program Unit: SBL International Meeting Presentations
Alexandra Grund-Wittenberg, Philipps-Universität Marburg
In the context of crises, disciplines in the realm of psychology are increasingly turning to the question which resources help people to cope better with heavy burdens. The concept of resilience, intended as a psychological aid to understanding and coping of crises, is vividly but controversially discussed. Since being included in empathic relationships is often cited as a resource for subsisting in crises, exploring the concept of a compassionate God in the Hebrew Bible could yield an important theological contribution for the question of coping with crises. Thus, after introductory notes on the general meaning of empathy, this paper explores in Ex 2.23-25, 3.7-10 and 6.2-8 how YHWH is presented from the beginning of the relationship with Israel as an empathetic God who perceives suffering very closely. It appears that the texts which stem from nonpriestly and priestly layers are nevertheless connected by the uses of the same verbs (e.g. שָׁמַע, רָאָה and יָדַע, in Ex 2,23f and 3.7 or זָכַר and שָׁמַע in Ex 2,24 and 6,5). They all belong to a word field which is connected not only to perception, but also to understanding and building up relationships. In the texts discussed, suffering and pain are neither overlooked, ignored, nor suppressed. They are perceived and discussed. However, YHWH does not stop at the perception of suffering, but finds a concrete solution and actively implements it, namely the political liberation from an unbearable situation of oppression. The pure reading of such texts in times of crisis should of course not be overestimated, but they can describe historical coping models and supporting concepts of God.
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Food and Social Relations in the HB/OT
Program Unit: Meals in the HB/OT and Its World
Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme, University of Oslo
Hebrew Bible scholarship has had an appetite for food studies for roughly three decades now, and this has led to significant insights regarding the links between food and social relations in biblical literature, and how social relations are negotiated through meals, feasts and fasts in these texts. In this presentation, I start with a brief survey of the state of research on food and the social in the HB/OT, and then I point out what I see as three fruitful trajectories for future investigations. The first is the application of Annie Hauck Lawson's concept of "food voices" to biblical literature, the second is to read through the concept of cuisine (Levi-strauss; Goody) with a focus on etiquette, aesthetics and manners, and the third and final is a focus on Bible reception through 'food events' and eating, such as Easter meals and communal cooking in church settings.
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The Scent Trail of the Gods: Olfaction and the Experience of Divine Presence in Hebrew Bible Ritual Texts
Program Unit: Ritual in the Biblical World
Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme, University of Oslo
The sense of smell played an important role in ancient Mediterranean religious ritual, both in relation to interactions with the gods and in relation to mortuary ritual. The importance of smell is documented in the material culture, where incense altars, braziers and perfume containers of various kinds are frequent finds in cultic contexts. This impression is corroborated by literary texts such as the Hebrew Bible, which seems to formulate its own olfactory cultic theology, and by ancient Greek poetry, where the fragrant character of the sanctuaries of e.g. Aphrodite and Apollo is accentuated.
In this presentation, I examine some of the ways in which ritual actions and objects are able to ‘realize’ transcendent beings such as gods, to make them ‘real’ and accessible to human experience. I focus on descriptions of sanctuary-centered ritual practices in the Books of Exodus and Leviticus and on rituals that include a distinct olfactory aspect, such as sacrifices, incense offerings and application of fragrant oils. The purpose of the presentation is to demonstrate how fragrance and aromas create a divine scent trail that identifies space as the space occupied by the gods and to reflect on how the use and experience of smell are important building blocks in the ritual (and literary) construction of tangible divine presence.
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Forget "Laws" Think "Code of Honor"
Program Unit: Book of Deuteronomy
Philippe Guillaume, Universität Bern - University of Berne
There is a major discrepancy between the audience of the Deuteronomic laws and the framing narratives. Whereas it is clear that Moses addresses the entire Israelite community on the eve of entering the Promised Land, Moses never appears in the Law Code. It is only thanks to the narratives that he is understood as the implied speaker in chapters 12–26. As they stand, these chapters present a discourse addressed to brothers: the term אח appears 13 times in chapters 1–10, 28–33 but 35 times in chapters 13–25. More damning to the still popular notion that Israel is a Volk von Brüdern (Perlitt 1980), Deut 23:8 features Edomite brothers.
The concept of “honor code” avoids the pitfalls inherent to the description of biblical legal collections as “Law Codes”. Understood as a set of expected behaviours within a closed circle of affluent merchants, the intractable issue of impracticability of the Deuteronomic prescriptions as state laws (Hoelscher 1922). Arguing that the laws are utopian is hardly more helpful since a utopia proposing impractical solutions to the predicament of its audience fails the basic requirement of any utopia. The proposed paper provides a survey of the expected behaviors and shows that they are common within guilds and other such associations.
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The House of the Forest of Lebanon: A Temple Suppressed?
Program Unit: Deuteronomistic History
Philippe Guillaume, Universität Bern - University of Berne
The description of the House of YHWH in 1 Kings 6 is followed by the descriptions of several “halls”. The first one—the House of the Forest of Lebanon—is the only one for which architectural details are provided. It is mentioned again in 1 Kings 10, after the visit of the Queen of Sheba, as the repository of two sets of golden “shields”.
On the basis of the size of this house, of the terminology used for the shields and on relevant iconographical sources, this paper argues that the House of the Forest of Lebanon is no mere armory where ceremonial paraphernalia is to be stored. It has all the ingredients to represent a large temple that dwarfs the House of YHWH. The memory of this magnificent temple is suppressed in the biblical text, but it lingers in several texts of the Hellenistic era, starting with the biblical book of Chronicles and in the writings of Josephus.
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The Murals of the Dura Synagogue and Mani’s Book of Pictures
Program Unit: Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism
Zsuzsanna Gulacsi, Northern Arizona University
Although much has been written about the art of the famous synagogue at Dura-Europos, its Mesopotamian rootedness has gone largely unexplored. As a contribution to this invited panel, my study looks south along the local trade routes to Iranian Babylonia and examines evidence available about the religious function of Durian Jewish and Sasanian Manichaean pictorial art as part of a shared regional development of techniques of instruction. It reveals that the distinctly different pictorial arts used by these two communities in mid-third-century Mesopotamia are nevertheless comparable based on their didactic function. They both: (1) displayed a visual library of doctrinal subjects, that is, they captured in pictorial form a large sample of core tenets, which were also recorded in the respective sacred texts of these religions; (2) fulfilled a primarily didactic function, that is, their pictorial genres (narrative scenes, didactic portraits, and diagrams in the Manichaean case) played a dominantly instructional role; and (3) effectively supplemented oral instruction, that is, the paintings were sermonized about and discussed in light of living interpretations. I argue that these correlations result not from direct influence between the two communities, but rather from a shared approach to what images can do for a religion. The Jewish and Manichaean paintings in question emerged simultaneously and in relative closeness to one another. While the Jewish archeological records of the painted synagogue are all but silent, various characteristics of the mid-third-century Manichaean paintings are noted in literary records, including what they portrayed and, most importantly for this study, the pedagogical reasons for how and why they were used. As evidenced by Iranian, Coptic, and Syriac textual sources from between the mid 3rd and the late 4th/early 5th centuries, the founding prophet of Manichaeism, Mani (active from 240 to 274/277 CE), not only wrote down his own teachings, but also created visual representations of them on a solely pictorial scroll—the Book of Pictures—that he and his highest ranking elects used in the course of oral instructions while missionizing across greater West Asia and the East Mediterranean region.
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Catch a Whiff of Paul’s Rivals: Foul Bodies in 2 Cor 11:2–4
Program Unit: Bible and Emotion
Jaimie Gunderson, The University of Texas at Austin
2 Corinthians 10-13 sets us on the front lines of a physiognomic battleground, in the heat of a conflict between Paul and rival apostles over his authority in the Corinthian assembly. Many scholars have pointed out that the accusations leveled against Paul by his opponents (which Paul paraphrases in 2 Cor 10:10) mark Paul’s body as servile, abject––qualities that disqualify him from holding a position of authority. In response to his opponents’ physiognomic critique (as well as his own embrace of his bodily vulnerability) and the growing rift between himself and his assembly, Paul’s emotional rhetoric serves both as a reassertion of his apostolic authority and as a denigration of his opponents’ character. Casting a focused eye toward Paul’s response to his opponents, this paper explores the ways that bodies relate to each other, accrue affective value, and participate in existing affective histories. In particular, I chart the flow of one particular affect––disgust––as it sticks (or threatens to stick) to the bodies of Paul, his rivals, and the members of the Corinthian assembly. Just as Paul’s opponents scrutinized and marked his body for its deficiencies, Paul likewise engages in physiognomic play to mark the bodies of his rivals as a threat to the social order of the assembly. Attending to the affective and sensory-rich imagery that Paul presents in the so-called “paternalistic metaphor” of 2 Cor 11:2-4, I trace the affective histories that undergird Paul’s characterization of his rivals’ bodies. Building on Joseph Marchal’s recent investigation of disgusting figures in Paul’s letters and Mark Bradley’s exploration of foul bodies in ancient Rome, this paper focuses on the multiple ways that bodies disgust and are disgusted. I argue that in 11:2-4 Paul maligns the bodies of his rivals as disgusting––drawing a comparison that classes them with the utterly obscene sexually and corporeally deviant bodies found in Greco-Roman satire, comedy, and political invective. In these media, the foulness of bodies is communicated primarily through the senses of sight, touch, and smell. In a similar fashion, as Paul hurls disgust onto the bodies of his rivals, he invites the Corinthians to use their senses––particularly sight and smell––to diagnose the bodies of his rivals as dangerous and out of place in Corinth. As disgust bounces off and sticks to bodies, Paul retools his appearance––his vulnerable and abject body––as a challenge, one that uses the disgust response of the Corinthians as a springboard for the social transformation of the assembly. Attending to the contours of disgust in 2 Corinthians allows us to discern how the letter means––how audiences constructed meaning from the words on the scroll, whether read or heard. My contention here is that the production of meaning was an intensely bodily process––Paul, like other ancient authors, set store by the experiential quality of his rhetoric.
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The Foundational Structure and The Methodology of Interpretation of the Qur’an as the Qur’an Tells
Program Unit: Qur’anic Studies: Methodology and Hermeneutics (IQSA)
Havva Guney-Ruebenacker, Yale Law School
Perhaps no other verse in the entire Qur’an has caused so much intense debate, past and present, about its possible meaning as the verse Q al-‘Imran 3:7. The key term that has been central in this whole debate is undoubtedly the mighty and mysterious word: mutashabih. As the classical tafsir (Qur’anic interpretation) literature informs us, more than seventy different theories have been developed by classical scholars about its exact meaning, and yet the list continues to grow today, and so does the controversy around it, without any convincing, coherent clarification one way or another. This highly puzzling content of the verse led some contemporary scholars of Qur’an to even suggest that this verse might have been a later post-prophet Muhammad addition to the Qur’an. If there is any single author for the Qur’an, however, as the majority of its followers believe, then under this scenario of a possible single authorship at least, how is it possible to imagine that the author of the Qur’an would leave such a foundational key term, which seems to be so consequential for the comprehension of the structure of the entire Qur’an, to sheer speculation without providing any explanation for, or at least some hints towards its meaning? Could there be any relevant clues inside the Qur’an itself that have been missed so far? This paper argues that a careful study of the other neglected key terms entailed in that very verse Q 3:7 and some other related key terms and their interconnections, such as ta’wil, haqq and ayat bayyinat, as these terms are used and explained throughout the Qur’an, in fact do provide some important clues and evidence towards solving this central qur’anic puzzle. Based on this new evidence, it is possible to introduce a comprehensive map for the foundational structure of the Qur’an and also to develop a set of necessary basic principles for a coherent methodology for the textual interpretation of the Qur’an. As Ibn Kathir and other classical scholars shrewdly argued, the most authentic way for Qur’anic interpretation would be to try to understand and interpret the Qur’an with the Qur’an itself (“tafsir al-Qur’an bi-l Qur’an”). Decoding and mapping some of the Qur’an’s most foundational terms based on their meaning and use inside the Qur’an itself, would be a good place to start implementing their advice.
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Marriage Texts in Judean Desert Papyri: Torah Regulation and Gospel Interpretation
Program Unit: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Daniel M. Gurtner, St Mary's University
Interpreters often address the account of Joseph divorcing Mary before they were actually married (Matt 1:18 – 25) through accounts from the earlier Hebrew Bible regulations or the later rabbinic insights. Sparse attention, however, is given to the papyrological evidence from the Judean Desert, which furnish more suitable points of comparison. The purpose of the present paper is to build on the work of Joseph Fitzmyer (and others) to survey the eleven papyrological documents from Naḥal Ḥever, Naḥal Ṣe᾽elim, and Wadi Murabba῾at in an effort to determine (1) to what degree these legal documents demonstrate compliance with injunctions from the Hebrew Bible and (2) what bearing betrothal, marriage, and divorce practices exhibited by these documents may illuminate the ambiguities the Matthean account leaves for the modern interpreter.
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Paul, the Colonized Colonizer: Reconsidering Counter-Imperial Interpretations of Rom 13:1–7
Program Unit: Paul and Politics
Najeeb T. Haddad, Notre Dame of Maryland University
Recent counter-imperial interpretations have often pitted Paul against the Roman authority, especially in opposition to what has been called the “cult of the emperor.” These political interpreters have sought to understand Paul as a hero of those downtrodden by the political authority. Furthermore, they claim that Paul’s preaching was an empire-resisting gospel which places the Lord Jesus above the lord Caesar. Rom 13:1¬–7, nevertheless, is Paul’s unqualifiedly positive view of the governing authorities. Contextualizing Rom 13:1–7 reveals Paul’s Hellenistic Jewish character, not as one who seeks to subvert but one who seeks to preserve order. It is a way to safeguard the community. This essay will argue that Paul is neither seeking to subvert the emperor nor the governing authorities. Paul is also not suggesting that the community of believers be “subordinate” to the civil authority. Paul, however, maintains in this passage that believers should “fit in” (ὑποτάσσω) with the authorities. To “fit in” is neither complete submission to societal institutions nor a broad rejection of them. To “fit in” is an integration of both assimilation or conformity and distinctiveness or resistance. Paul is not suggesting a complete withdrawal from society or a repudiating of society. He is urging a rapprochement with Roman society as he encourages them to fit in on account (δία) of God’s wrath (ὀργή) and on account of one’s conscience (συνείδησις). Contextualizing Paul in this way reveals how western counter-imperial scholarship understand the mechanics of the formation of Paul’s ideology. For these scholars, Paul is modeled as a counter-imperial heroine offering a universal liberation from oppressive powers. However, their presentation of Paul only reinforces the model that Paul is a colonized colonizer. Rom 13:1–7, therefore, can become a tool for the colonizer. If, however, one does not override the ancient voices, allowing them to speak and to be heard, then in theory such passages can no longer negatively be used.
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The Good Citizen: A Textual and Philological Analysis of Phil 3:17–21
Program Unit: Scripture and Paul
Najeeb Haddad, Notre Dame of Maryland University
Paul’s use of the noun πολίτευμα in Phil 3:20 has seen its fair share of scholarship. This essay will seek to develop portions of Jewett’s “Conflicting Movements in the Early Church as Reflected in Philippi” [NovT 12 (1970):362–90]. It will introduce philological methods of biblical interpretation, a method championed by Jewett in his Anthropological Terms and Romans commentary. Then, analyzing Phil 3:17–4:1, the reader will better appreciate the wider socio-historical, Greco-Roman and Hellenistic Jewish, context of Paul’s use of πολίτευμα and the letter as a whole.
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Bereshit in the Qur'an: Hebrew presence in qur'anic narrations of Genesis
Program Unit: The Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition (IQSA)
Zohar Hadromi-Allouche, Trinity College - Dublin
Qur'anic narrations of episodes related to the Book Genesis often differ in many aspects from their biblical parallels. Contemporary scholarship relates some of these to the indirect transmission of narrations from the Hebrew Bible into Arabic, suggesting that this transmission took place orally, and through the mediation of a third language, e.g., Syriac, between the Hebrew and the Arabic. A close study of qur'anic narrations of episodes from Genesis reveals, however, that these texts often contain remnants of the Hebrew vocabulary of the Masoretic text of these biblical episodes. Furthermore, there are also intertextual wordplays in these qur'anic narrations, that are only meaningful for speakers of Hebrew (and Arabic). The textual evidence, therefore, suggests that at least some of the Qur'an, and some of its audience, were familiar with at least some of Genesis in the Hebrew language.
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Towards Pauline interpretations of life and world: restoration within a social field of action
Program Unit: SBL International Meeting Presentations
Justin Hagerman, Lyon Catholic University
Recent Pauline studies in hermeneutics and ethics invite further critical reflection on the relation between text, world and life. In order to contribute to this area of research, this paper poses the following question: How does Paul’s language of restoration (κατάρτισιν) provide fresh categories for thinking not only about interactions between human beings within their social environments, but also about the effects of these interactions upon the cosmos? To respond to this question, we structure our essay in three parts. First, we focus on two selected texts for our exegetical analysis: 2 Corinthians 13:9 and 1 Thessalonians 3:10. In treating these texts, we attempt to discern the contextual reasons for Paul’s references to ‘restoration’. Second, in dialogue with the field of Pauline exegesis, we attempt to develop a working definition of ‘restoration’ according to these Pauline texts and in the light of his theology more broadly. Developing this working definition will allow us to identify not only the character of Paul’s notion of restoration itself, but also that which effects the restoration about which Paul speaks. Third, we then bring the results of our first two sections into conversation with scholarly approaches to the concept of social fields, giving special attention to the corpus of Pierre Bourdieu, who helps us to clarify the character of social fields, placing special emphasis on the concept of ‘location’ (habitus). It is at this point of meeting in particular that we introduce categories that build upon Bourdieu’s description of social fields of action. In conclusion, this paper seeks to enhance the possibilities for Pauline hermeneutics and ethics, particularly by moving the discussion towards the following perspective: the language of restoration reflects Paul’s concerns with the forms of life that occur within anthropologically- and theologically-defined social fields of action.
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Appeals to the Beginning and Social Identity in the First Epistle of John
Program Unit: Writing Social-Scientific Commentaries of the New Testament
Raimo Hakola, University of Helsinki
At the beginning of the First Epistle of John, the author states that he is declaring to the readers “what was from the beginning.” This claim implies that what the author delivers in the epistle is based upon a solid and unchanged foundation backed up by the testimony of the eyewitnesses. The rest of the epistle suggests, however, that the address of the author may become contested, as there are conflicts and disagreements as regards to what is the right way to believe in Jesus.
In this paper, I first assess the appeal to the beginning in the light of similar claims made in other early Christian and ancient literature. I then proceed to apply social identity approach that clarifies why appeals to the past are so central for various groups in developing their self-understandings. Appeals to the past can be taken as attempts to essentialize a group identity that actually emerges from a mixture of various past and contemporary stimuli and as such remains continually in the making. By referring to the shared and incontestable beginnings, entrepreneurs of ideology can present constructed identities that are subject to historical change and renegotiation as stable and impervious to any counterclaims. I also argue that various loosely formulated symbols (etc. life, darkness) used in the First Epistle of John are convenient tools for anyone who wants to present a particular formulation of contemporary identity as fixed. These symbols do not carry any particular meanings and for this reason can be used to convey the sense of historical continuity even in situations where traditional shared cultural symbols are the subject of intense revision and actualizing reinterpretations
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Murdering Remus and Abel: A Comparative Approach to the Mythical Foundations of City and Civilization
Program Unit: Bible, Myth, and Myth Theory
Crystal L. Hall, United Lutheran Seminary
Myths shape how people understand their origins, how “beginnings” inform their values and ideals. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this paper will compare the founding myth of the city of Rome with the founding myth of the city of Enoch in Genesis 4. Both myths center on two brothers at “the beginning,” one murdering the other, in the founding of the first city. The casualties of these foundings are Remus and Abel respectively. This paper will interrogate the implication of associating “beginnings” with city as a symbol of civilization, and the implications of laying these foundations through domination in the extreme form of murder.
While typically understood as “creation” in biblical studies, in the Greco-Roman world the Greek ktisis was a term associated with the founding of cities. Beginning in the Republic and continuing in the Empire, cities were a key means through which Rome organized itself politically, socially, economically and ideologically. Archeological evidence points to cities not only encompassing urban areas but also organizationally the surrounding towns and villages.
This paper will approach the myth of Romulus and Remus through literary analysis. Greco-Roman recountings of this myth from the first century BCE through the second century CE will include a preliminary comparison of Livy’s From the Founding of the City, Plutarch’s Life of Romulus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities and Cassius Dio’s Roman History.
In parallel, this paper will also take a literary approach to the myth of Cain and Abel in Genesis. While not always categorically treated as “myth,” often in favor of “creation account,” or even in more literalist interpretations as “history,” this paper will treat the story of Cain and Abel as myth to draw comparisons with Romulus and Remus. Genesis 4 will be read with the anti-city bias of the entire primeval history (Genesis 1-11) in view, which connects Cain’s murder with the founding of the first city, and the blood of Abel crying out from the ground. This analysis will briefly consider the “afterlives” of Abel in Second Temple literature and the New Testament, in which he is portrayed as “righteous/just” and a proto-martyr.
This paper will conclude by drawing out preliminary implications for how these founding myths continue to shape narratives surrounding cities in western cultures today, especially with an eye toward the continued narrative that civilization, like the first brothers, necessitates the construction of a strong “Self” over and against a weak, disposable “Other.”
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Placing Words into Jesus’s Mouth: The Exegetical Methodology of Hebrews 2:10–18
Program Unit: Hebrews
Josiah D. Hall, Baylor University
Hebrews 2:12–13 contains two unusual features: 1) Jesus speaks, and when he speaks, he uses the words of Scripture as if he were their original speaker. 2) The Jewish Scriptures attributed to Jesus in these verses come from two very disparate contexts and on the surface appear unrelated. While some commentators recognize a shared theme between the quotations of Ps 21:23LXX in Heb 2:12 and Isa 8:17–18 in Heb 2:13, most make little effort to show how the author would have moved from one to the other. Though some do argue that kinship terms (ἀδελφός and παιδίον) link the passages (e.g. Weiss, Gräßer), that is as far as the argument often goes. This paper provides a plausible exegetical method for the author of Hebrews that takes into account both of these unusual features. Specifically, the paper establishes how a combination of the author’s homiletical aims and rhetorical practices, in this case prosopopoieia especially, guided his exegesis of the Jewish Scriptures and his application of those Scriptures to the mouth of Jesus. In making this argument, this paper addresses Gabriella Gelardini’s challenge that those who argue for a pervasive influence of classical rhetoric on Hebrews’s structure take seriously how Hebrews fulfills the essential homiletic task of “‘explanation and application’ of Scripture.” This paper demonstrates that the author of Hebrews does not distinguish between rhetoric and homiletic tasks, as does Gelardini. Rather the author’s rhetorical practices and theological convictions about Jesus shape how he understands and employs Scripture in a manner both attentive to the original context and pertinent to the needs of his audience.
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Let the Nations Sing Hallelujah: The Influence of the Egyptian Hallel on the Citation of Ps 117OG in Mark’s Account of the Parable of the Tenants
Program Unit: Gospel of Mark
Josiah D. Hall, Baylor University
Coming from one of the most frequently cited psalms in the New Testament, the citation of Ps 117:22–23OG [118:22–23MT] in Mark 12:10–11 concludes and helps interpret a parable which decisively influences the Gospel’s second half. Many interpreters conclude the citation’s impact on the parable comes only from the citation’s self-contained imagery or, at most, the imagery’s function in a psalm praising God for vindicating his servant. In contrast, this study takes a more maximalist approach, arguing that ancient audiences familiar with Jewish festivals would have been less likely to consider the psalm on its own given its place in the Egyptian Hallel and the Hallel’s prominent liturgical function at multiple Jewish festivals. I contend that the psalm’s liturgical context contributes to how early Christian interpreters could have read the psalm and thus understood its use in Mark. The paper shows how allowing the psalms of the Hallel to mutually interpret one another can shift how one understands Ps 117’s perspective on the nations. Specifically, I argue that if the portrait of the nations in the Hallel, especially in Ps 116OG, shapes how one reads Ps 117, then the citation of Ps 117 in Mark serves to reinforce an interpretation of the “others” to whom the vineyard is given as a mixed community of gentiles who have forsaken their idolatry, along with the faithful from Israel, united by their response to Jesus.
To make this argument the paper proceeds in three moves. First, I briefly demonstrate the historical connection between the Hallel psalms, highlighting that they were used as a unit in first century Judaism in connection to both the festival liturgies and worship in the temple. Second, I illustrate how reading Ps 117 in the context of the Hallel can shift the psalm’s emphasis and lead to a new perspective on how the psalm views the nations. Third, I highlight links between the psalm’s broader context and its use in Mark’s narrative in order to confirm the plausibility of using this broader, contextual reading of the citation to interpret specific aspects of the parable, namely the identity of the “others” as a mixed group of the faithful in Israel and the gentiles.
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Mystery of Making Monsters in the Book of Job
Program Unit: Bible and Film
Jin H. Han, New York Theological Seminary
The book of Job makes it amply clear that Yahweh plays a prominent part in the mayhem that happens to Job and his wife in ch. 1, although God has someone else to blame—ha-śātān. This malevolent member of the divine council can and did “incite” God (2:3), which brings the Palestinian amora Rabbi Yoḥanan to tears [b. Ḥagigah 5a]. In the prologue, none finds fault with the heaven, however, except Job’s wife, who in v. 9 exposes the absurdity she rates as evident in the “time out of joint” (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5). The šǝḥîn that erupts from the sole to his crown and strikes his soul (vv. 7b-8) is not the end of his suffering, and the scope and depth of horror in the land of Uz evoke comparison with those of horror films. In the poetic body of the book, the discursive skirmishes muster the images of terror including ṣalmāwet (ṣl-mwt “shadow of death” or ṣlmwt “darkness” [cf. Arabic ẓalamun], 3:5); nocturnal spectres (4:13-21); a spider’s web (8:14), gore of slashed organs (20:24-25), a creature of clay (a golem? 33:6), and many more. More important, the cacophony of the friends’ disjunctive discourses may be compared to for Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2 of “time-image,” in which “time” is not gauged by sequencing temporal movements but gazed with intuition and the multiplicity of memory based on Henri Bergson. While Job’s friends busily labor to construct a wholesome virtual universe in which causality is a theory of everything, he repeatedly invites them to linger a bit over signs that do not neatly integrate, consider a future that could be otherwise than they expect, and share the present time that he lives amid pain, suffering, and the acute sense of fractured meaning, for which God must be responsible somehow. In the present form of the text, the book reaches the climax with the Yahweh Speeches, which bring out the legendary monstrous forces like Yamm (38:8, 16), tǝhôm (recalling Tiamat, v. 16), and Behemoth and Leviathan (40:15-41:26). However, they are all declawed and defanged, deprived of their boundary-transgressing features, and the “Frankenstein” is erewhon. In reception history, the Yahweh Speeches evoke diametrically opposed responses. The majority view finds horror finally reaching sympathy and reconciliation when God speaks out of the whirlwind. In stark contrast, the minority protests that divine speeches sidestep the crux, resurrecting the question that hauntologically echoes 9:24 where Job asks,’im-lō’ ’ēpô’ mî hû? Even as Virginia Woolf strikes a chord when she says, “I read the book of Job last night. I don’t think God comes out well in it,” the true monster of Job remains a mystery, leaving the audience in the third space in which the sublime and the grotesque blend—eerily simulating the way horror films often end.
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The Adulteress (Re)Framed: Reconsidering the Iconography of a Mysterious Gospel Story
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
András Handl, Catholic University Leuven
The story ‘Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery’ (John 7:53-8:11) is often considered as one of the most intriguing Gospel narratives, and not only because of its thrilling transmission history. Recent works demonstrated convincingly that the textual evidence is hardly traceable before the early third century in the West. They argue that despite of its subsequent and successful integration into the Gospel of John, it took at least another three centuries before the story entered the Christian visual canon in the sixth century. Early Byzantine representations—predominantly preserved in the West (Ravenna, Venice)—are, however, ambiguous and their attribution leaves splendid space for interpretation. Therefore, the aim of this contribution is to reconsider the emergence of the iconographical narrative by paying particular attention to some oddities in its development. More concretely, it takes four observations into account: 1) the ambiguity of early Byzantine depictions; 2) the emergence of a new iconographic representation in the Carolingian Gaul: ‘Jesus writing on the ground’; 3) the distinctiveness of the new iconography, which is based on the only unique feature of the story, on the writing Jesus; and 4) the early Byzantine typology’s complete absence of Nachleben. It argues that the lack of distinct iconographic features and the recursion of Jesus’ writing as the single unique moment of the narrative suggest either an effort for disambiguation, or, more likely, mark the very first attempt to visualize the story. The presentation will conclude with some reflection on the interplay between Gospel text, manuscript production, and invention of the new iconography in the Carolingian Gaul.
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Una Hermenéutica de la Liberación: Biblical Interpretation in Light of Enrique Dussel
Program Unit: Latino/a/e and Latin American Biblical Interpretation
Chauncey Diego Francisco Handy, Princeton Theological Seminary
A de-imperial vision for biblical scholarship is increasingly necessary in the world under siege by neoliberalist imperial agendas. Various scholars critique the bias of biblical texts or their reception histories, but this work has not yet gained sufficient traction in the academy. Overall, the field of biblical scholarship remains detached from the lives of those affected by empire and imperial domination. In this paper I propose that this detachment is irresponsible and untenable. Utilizing the work of Edward Said, I shed light on connections between biblical studies and the life and death consequences of imperial projects of representation. Then, through application of the main principles of Enrique Dussel’s Ética de la Liberación, I argue that effects on communities oppressed by empire must become a guiding hermeneutic by which scholars interact with the biblical texts. Lastly, I provide a case study in which I apply this hermeneutic to the interpretation of Israel’s interaction with the Gibeonites in Joshua 9. In the case study, I show that Dussel’s hermeneutic is not antithetical to any methodology other than those that support the use of biblical texts for the purposes of empire.
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The Sound and Smells of Death and Life: A Sensory Analysis of John 11:1–12:8
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Jeannine Hanger, University of Aberdeen
Accepted paper for the IBR research group on Multidisciplinary Approaches and the Gospels
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Tasting the Bread of Life: A Sensory Analysis of John 6
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Jeannine M. Hanger, University of Aberdeen
In recent years, scholarship has begun to take notice of the role that embodiment plays in cognition and communication. This, in turn, has inspired new approaches to ancient texts which take embodiment into account. One such approach focuses on the sensory elements within texts, such as in Dorothy Lee’s 2010 analysis of the five senses in the Fourth Gospel.
This paper builds on Lee’s work (2010, 2016), applying a focused sensory analysis to one of the seven predicated I am sayings in John. Important for their articulation of both Christology and soteriology, these seven sayings in their contexts also contain vibrant, sensory language. Each saying is a metaphorical picture of how Jesus, the revelatory “word made flesh” (1:14) brings “life in his name” (20:31). The sensory elements provide an imaginative entry point into the Johannine world, and they also enliven each saying’s narrative representation of the relationship between Jesus and those who participate with him. Together the sensory aspects of the seven I am sayings bring concrete, tangible, and affective qualities of participation into the notion of this union, contributing to the participatory theology of the Fourth Gospel.
This paper will apply a sensory analysis to one I am saying. In John 6 Jesus states, “I am the bread of life,” and then he invites hearers to eat. To explore the sensory qualities and implications of this sensory invitation, this paper makes heuristic use of insights brought by Sensory Anthropology, an emerging discipline which helps uncover qualities of taste that often go unnoticed in a world that tends to be more sight centric. More specifically, we will explore the role of sensory memory and how the embodied memory of a taste heightens the tangible impact of Jesus’s claim to be the bread of life. Lee’s use of Ricœur’s reproductive/productive imagination will be a helpful framework to apply to Jesus’s sensory invitation in terms of how ancient readers might interact with it. Fundamental to all thought processes, the reproductive imagination involves conceptualizing something that already exists, while the productive imagination “transform[s] existing categories.” When applied here, this suggests that when Jesus states, “I am the bread of life,” this will trigger prior sensory memories attached to the concept of “bread,” such as wisdom, Torah, or literal bread. Then, when Jesus extends the invitation for hearers to eat of him as bread, this prompts the productive imagination to consider the implications of this invitation. What is Jesus implying about who he is and about what he is inviting hearers into? And what happens within the imaginative process when Jesus switches the imagery from bread to flesh? What sensory memories are prompted by reference to flesh-eating and blood-drinking, and how does the productive imagination contend with the invitation to participate with Jesus in this way? The responses within the narrative suggest for ancient readers certain qualities of participation perhaps not considered.
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The Disappearing Deliverer: The Moses Enigma
Program Unit: National Association of Professors of Hebrew
Kenneth Hanson, University of Central Florida
According to the Biblical record, Israel’s great deliverer, Moses, was able to unite twelve semi-nomadic tribes into the worship of a single deity. He managed to lead them in what some call a concerted “revolt” from slavery into freedom. Clearly, there is no single character more central to the narrative of the Exodus than Moses. Yet, when it comes to the “telling” of story, the Haggadah, Moses is strangely absent. He is the disappearing deliverer. This is odd, since there is no biblical figure more revered in Jewish tradition than Moses, whose very name carries with it a high and exalted resonance, enshrined in Jewish thought down to the present. Renowned twentieth century Hasidic Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson described Moses as “the first redeemer and the final redeemer.” Why, then, has Moses disappeared from the “telling” of Passover? It is likely because, for the Jewish sages, the meaning of the Exodus far supersedes the exaltation of any narrative figure, including the great lawgiver himself. In the Haggadah it is not Moses who has won the victory, nor is he presented as a pharaonic potentate. Even when bringing down the ten devastating plagues upon Egypt, Moses is God’s agent, but nothing more, and he acts only as an intermediary. Moses must be subjugated to the greater message of the Exodus, and, in the final analysis, Hashem trumps heroics.
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David’s Eternal Covenant: Death, Closure, and the Shaping of the Former Prophets
Program Unit: Deuteronomistic History
Matthew Harber, Duke University
David’s recent biographers rightly claim that the Hebrew Bible’s political ideology and literary development have obscured the historical David. Since the Former Prophets have been editorially shaped not as biographies but as books, however, to encounter David is to reckon with the literary shaping of the books in which his story is narrated.
This paper’s point of departure is the oft-noticed detail that the David story has been interrupted by the literary boundary between 2 Samuel and 1 Kings. 2 Samuel, departing from a pattern in the Former Prophets (Deut. 34; Josh. 24; Jdg. 16[?]; 1 Sam. 31; 1 Kgs. 25), does not end with a major character’s death and burial. Instead, the account of David’s decline and death has been deferred to 1 Kings 1-2. In its place is 2 Sam. 21-24, a sequentially displaced collection of Davidic traditions. Recent scholarship on 2 Sam. 21-24, following M. Noth and L. Rost, has tended to assume the arbitrariness of the Former Prophets’ present literary divisions. Even recent studies of 2 Sam. 21-24 that have taken seriously Samuel’s present literary shape have not fully accounted for the inter-book pattern of endings from which these chapters deviate.
There is an “enigma factor” (A. Campbell) in 2 Sam. 21-24: are these chapters complimentary of David, critical of him, or both? W. Brueggemann (1988) has labeled these chapters an “appendix of deconstruction” that critiques David’s concentration of royal power in Jerusalem in 2 Sam. 5-8. By contrast, S. Chapman (2016) has argued that 2 Sam. 21-24 retrospectively highlights Saul’s deficiency and David’s suitability for kingship in Israel, despite the latter’s flaws. This paper acknowledges the ambiguity of David’s portrayal but argues that it is not the decisive issue in these chapters.
The various units of the Samuel “appendix,” even those that portray David in an ambiguous light, collectively bestow special honor upon David vis-à-vis the other book endings of the Former Prophets. The account of David’s aversion of the famine through the expiatory execution of Saul’s sons (2 Sam. 21:1-14) concludes with David’s honorable reburial of Saul’s bones in his ancestral territory. Whereas 1 Samuel ends with his death at the hands of the Philistines (ch. 31), 2 Samuel ends with the Philistines’ death at David’s (soldiers’) hands (21:15-22; 23:8-17). Thus, at the conclusion of 2 Samuel, in place of David’s (expected) death and burial is a re-narration of his failed predecessor’s burial. Rather than dying and receiving an honorable burial himself at the conclusion of the book, the figure of David endures and continues to accrue honor.
This paper argues that 2 Sam. 21-24, read in its present location as a conclusion to the book(s) of Samuel, presents David as a perpetually vigorous, death-defying king whose divinely-bestowed vitality extends vicariously to his servants, to the entire nation of Israel, and to his descendants (i.e., the kings of Judah). Samuel’s unique conclusion within the Former Prophets suggested that David’s mysterious vitality was unprecedented in Israel’s national history and decisive for its future.
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Sticky Thoughts That Make Presence from Absence
Program Unit: Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds
Angela Kim Harkins, Boston College STM
The title of this paper calls to mind Sara Ahmed’s theorizing that material objects can function as what Bruno Latour calls “actants”. According to Sara Ahmed, “affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects.” In her theorizing, “sticky objects” carry and transmit emotions that can then move an individual from the ‘outside-in’—a model we expand here to include ideas, memories and other ruminative remembrances that linger and remain in the imagination. This paper examines two martyrdom scenes from the beginning of the fourth century religious narrative known as the Life of Paul the Hermit by Jerome. This narrative gives an account of Paul of Thebes, a hermit who was a disciple of Anthony of Egypt. Not long after a brief introduction, the narrative moves to two vivid descriptions of noteworthy martyrs. The first was bound, smeared with honey and left in the hot sun to die a miserable death while being bitten all over by hungry flies that he was unable to swat away. The second was bound on a feather bed in a fragrant garden, near a bubbling brook teeming with fish and with the sound of leaves rustling in a gentle breeze. He tied to a plush feather-bed of soft fabrics and attacked by a prostitute. In order to diminish his own body’s experience of pleasure, the second martyr bit down hard on his tongue, severing it and spitting it in the prostitute’s face, thereby overcoming his sensual pleasure with agonizing self-inflicted pain. This paper examines how these two martyrdom stories in the Life of Paul the Hermit evoke the experience of touch in a provocative way that allows readers and hearers to easily imagine the interoceptive experiences of tickle, temperature, and sexual arousal, as well as pain, allowing for an enactive reading of the passage. This paper extends Ahmed’s theoretical understanding of emotions as “sticky objects” by including textual depictions of scenes like those that begin the Life of Paul the Hermit. These ‘sticky’ images of life in the desert, the challenges and the temptations found therein can be effective ways an individual can be moved from the ‘outside-in’ – by texts that make the skin crawl or generate a state of sexual arousal. These stories function to generate tactile and perceptible experiences of the body in the desert; even though they are imagined literary scenes, they can be powerful immersive experiences of touch.
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Beyond Iconography: Re-viewing the Wall Paintings from Dura-Europos
Program Unit: Art and Religions of Antiquity
Felicity Harley-McGowan, Yale University
Between 1928 and 1937 a joint team from Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters uncovered the remains of Dura-Europos, an ancient city on the Euphrates in modern day Syria. The richness of the material that its ruins yielded prompted scholars to liken the site to Pompeii; and the existence of painted mural programs throughout the city, from homes to religious buildings (a Mithraeum, Temples, a Synagogue, a Christian building), inspired Michael Rostovtzeff to describe the site as “a veritable museum of decorative wall-painting”. Since the excavation, the distinctive iconographic programs found in different religious contexts have received close attention but have tended to be studied in isolation from each other. Approaches to the Christian building exemplify these limitations: although textual and liturgical evidence has been used to address questions around the content and function of this third century pictorial program, a clearer understanding of its significance for the early history of Christian art has reached an impasse.
This paper suggests reconsideration of the mural programs in scientific and interdisciplinary terms. Although scientific and technical analyses of paintings from Pompeii and other Southern Italian sites (including Herculaneum and Ostia) as well as in the Roman catacombs, have provided new clarity surrounding artistic practice, including design, dissemination of iconographic patterns, and exchange of ideas within these sites, the paintings at Dura have not been subjected to similar examinations. Some scholars, observing that certain paintings in the different religious buildings share similar stylistic, compositional or iconographic features, have raised the possibility that the same artists (or workshops) worked on commissions from different groups. However, this hypothesis has not been interrogated and the nature of artistic collaboration between artists and local patrons has not been explored in any detail. The paper outlines possibilities for future scientific and technical analyses of extant wall paintings from Dura that could contribute to a reformulation of long-held theories about how ancient religions simultaneously developed their own visual language at this pivotal period in history in Syria.
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The Divine Identity and the Resurrection in Galatians 1:1–5: An Exploration of the Intertextual Matrix Underlying Paul’s Redefinition of God’s Identity
Program Unit: Scripture and Paul
Matthew S. Harmon, Grace Theological Seminary
Scholars have long recognized and analyzed the significance of Paul's careful description and elaboration of his identity as an apostle in the opening verses of Galatians. What has been less frequently recognized and studied is the way that Paul speaks of the divine identity, referring to “God the Father, raised him from the dead” (Gal 1:1). In the OT, one of the chief ways God is repeatedly identified is “the one who brought Israel up out of Egypt” (e.g., Ex 20:2; Lev 26:13; Deut 5:6; Ps 81:10, etc.). But several OT prophetic texts anticipate a day when God will no longer primarily be identified this way; instead he will be identified as the one who restored his people from exile through a new exodus (Jer 16:14-15; 23:7-8). This paper will argue that this promised "reidentification" lies behind Paul's description of God as a Father who raised Jesus from the dead. The foundation of this reidentification rests on a series of OT texts that promise return from exile, resurrection, and a new exodus.
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What Are Apocrypha Worth? The Cost of Books in Christian Oxyrhynchus
Program Unit: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Adeline Harrington, University of Texas at Austin
The reader valuation of early Christian texts is a highly contested topic in the field of ancient Christianity. To determine which texts Christians revered most in antiquity, researchers have typically considered which texts appear in ancient canon lists, which texts are most often cited, and which texts are most often copied. Rarely, however, have scholars taken into account the material and economic features of our Christian manuscript evidence when considering these issues. This paper considers the cost of the production of early Christian literature in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, and the dynamic relationship between canonicity and the cost of manuscript production. Using database software in combination with a variety of other methods for assessing the monetary value of manuscripts in Roman and Late Antique Egypt (á la Bentley Layton and Anne Boud’hors), this paper presents a survey of the cost of Christian literary production in Oxyrhynchus from ca. 100-700 CE. In particular, this study compares the cost of apocryphal Christian literary manuscripts with so-called “canonical” Christian texts as well as non-Christian and para-Christian literary productions.
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Cultic Law and Interpretive Technique in Ezra-Nehemiah
Program Unit: Biblical Law
Hannah K. Harrington, Patten University
The writer of Ezra-Nehemiah is working with an authoritative legal tradition that makes use of Pentateuchal sources, both Deuteronomic and priestly (Boda 2007; Japhet 2016). The writer even quotes specific language from the Torah (e.g. Ezra 9:1-2, 10-12; Neh 13:1; cf. Lev 18:24-27; Deut 7:1; 23:2-9) showing awareness of a relatively fixed text, and refers several times to laws that are “according to the Torah” (Ezra 10:2) or “written in the Torah” (Ezra 3:2, offering burnt offerings on the altar; Neh 8:15, collecting branches to make booths; Neh 10:34, collecting wood for the temple; Neh 10:35, regulations for firstfruits and firstlings; cf. Neh 13:1). However, these citations do not always reflect the extant Pentateuch and sometimes the author seems unaware of Pentateuchal statements which would have been relevant to him. Hence, some scholars claim that the Torah did not exist as an authoritative text in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah but represents a retrojection from late Hellenistic times (see Grabbe, 2001; Watts, 2008; Kratz 2016; Fried 2019; Ben Zvi 2019).
This paper supports the contrary position that the writer of Ezra-Nehemiah is working from an authoritative Torah, albeit one which allows for scribal intervention (cf. Albertz 2001; Becking 2001; Nihan 2010; Carr 2011). A close comparison of the citations of cultic law found in Ezra-Nehemiah with Jewish scribal techniques found in early Dead Sea Scrolls reveal a similar attitude to the Torah and its authority. The definition of Torah allowed for expansive interpretation which intertwined sacred traditions, customary practices, and personal viewpoint.
Ezra-Nehemiah falls in line with an early Second Temple exegetical tendency to promote a priestly agenda and a strict brand of cultic law. The writer never decreases the strength of the law, only raises it (e.g. expansion of Sabbath prohibitions and perquisites for the priests, increase of half-shekel head tax; centralized wood and tithe collections). Ezra-Nehemiah also interweaves holiness and ethnicity in an insular manner known from other Second Temple texts. It makes most sense that the Pentateuch, which is much broader in scope, precedes Ezra-Nehemiah.
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Purity, the Scrolls, and Jesus
Program Unit: Qumran
Hannah Harrington, Patten University
Jesus’ position with regard to purity has intrigued scholars for some time (see Thiessen 2020; Kazen 2016; Wassen 2016). His actions seem to both deny and endorse the efficacy of purification from ritual impurity. On the one hand, Jesus honors the Temple and sends a leper to the priest for validation of purification. Only his disciples, but not Jesus, are accused of neglecting to wash hands before eating. On the other hand, although Jesus makes contact with many impure persons, the texts never state that he purifies himself. He even eats with sinners, crossing the boundary between pure Jew and impure Gentile without concern for contagion. As a result, some scholars downplay the importance of ritual purity in Jesus’ time while others see Jesus as a halakhic Jew.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a critical component in the current debates over Jesus and purity. While rabbinic scholars produce explanations of ritual purity, these are often dismissed as a retrojection of rabbinic norms onto first century Judaism. But the Scrolls, dated within Second Temple times, paint a more contemporary picture, which rests in much the same ideological room as the later Rabbis. In substance, the concerns are similar and the differences lie in the details. Indeed, the Scrolls usually reveal an even greater concern over impurity than the Rabbis. Hence it is reasonable to assume that Jesus lived in a climate concerned about purity vs. pollution and to take seriously discussions in the Gospels about purity of food and vessels as well as the contagion of impure persons.
In this paper I apply the data of the Scrolls to passages in the Synoptic Gospels in an attempt to clarify Jesus’ and/or the Pharisees’ position regarding ritual impurity. These include: discussions on the purity of food/eater, healing of persons with severe impurities, e.g. lepers and the woman with an abnormal blood flow, and raising the dead. Reading the Gospels through the lens of the Scrolls brings into relief the fact that purity was a live issue in Jesus’ time. The question was not whether purity was necessary in Judaism but how much purity was required. This ambiguity stems in part from Scripture which gives alternate viewpoints regarding purity of food and eater (cf. Lev 7:20-21; 11:33-34; 17:3-4; Deut 12:15, 22).
Finally, the Scrolls shed light on the reason for Jesus’ baptism. It is curious that although Jesus is presented by the Gospels as pure, he still submits to purification. The Scrolls give evidence that purification goals were not just to shed impurities but to provide a path to holiness, e.g. initiation to a holy order, access to the holy city, and bathing in anticipation of a holy mission. Before beginning his ministry, Jesus too purifies himself in anticipation of a prophetic mission and is rewarded by the descent of the holy spirit.
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Hebrews as a Hermeneutical Lens on the Old Testament
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Dana M. Harris, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
Accepted paper for the IBR research group on the Relationship between the OT and NT.
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God’s Justice-Establishing Act in Christ: Justification in Galatians through the Lens of Contemporary Metaphor Theory
Program Unit: Pauline Theology
Johnathan F. Harris, Wheaton College
It is often recognized that Paul’s justification statements function as judicial metaphors. Less common is a treatment of these Pauline metaphors precisely as metaphors. In this paper, I examine the verb δικαιοῦν in secular and Septuagint Greek to establish its conventional, non-figurative meaning and conclude that the verb means to establish or maintain justice, i.e., a state of affairs in which justice obtains. I briefly suggest that in the prophetic writings of the Septuagint the verb is used to speak figuratively of God’s deliverance and restoration from foreign oppression in terms suggestive of a judge’s act of establishing justice. This figurative use is also evident in Psalm 142 LXX, in which God’s justifying action entails his delivering the psalmist from mortal danger at the hands of his adversary. Finally, I bring all of this to bear on Paul’s argument in Galatians. Noting the way Paul recalls the prophetic metaphor with his allusion to Psalm 142:2 LXX, I argue that Paul’s use of δικαιοσύνη in Galatians suggest that he has revised the prophetic metaphor in light of the Christ-event to speak of Christ’s death and resurrection as the ultimate act of God wherein he establishes a world in which justice obtains. Rather than from any human enemies, God has delivered his people in Christ’s death from the present evil age and established them in Christ’s resurrection in the eschatological age of new creation, in which life — itself an expression of ultimate justice in a context where sin and death loom large — reigns.
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The Aharit Hayamim and the Construction of Historical Time in Qumran Literature
Program Unit: Wisdom and Apocalypticism
Rebecca Harris, Messiah University
The present, for members of the Qumran movement, was a place rife with eschatological activity and otherworldly experience. Key to this belief are the group’s constructions of time. Interpreting the present as “the last days” established the time of the group as the time in which eschatological activity was expected. For this apocalyptically-oriented group, membership provided entrance into a space in which communion with God and divine beings was a present reality and full incorporation into the eternal realm an imminent expectation.
Drawing on contemporary theories of liminality and temporal studies, this paper argues that Qumran constructions of historical time position the group in a liminal space between two ages. Here, historical time refers to the group memories and beliefs that shape its construction of the past and inform its interpretations of present events. It does not necessarily include notions of chronological or “world” time, as such conceptions are the product of more contemporary understandings of time. The review of history in the Damascus Document and the language of “the last days” (אַחֲרִית הַיָּמִים) in the Pesharim are instructive here. In these examples, the present is framed as a liminal time-space, positioned “at the limit” of the present age.
The Jewish socio-religious group reflected in the Qumran literature was not the only ancient group to conceptualize the present as a type of liminal time-space brimming with opportunities for human-divine communion. In the decades immediately following the destruction of Qumran and for centuries after, some apocalyptically-minded religious groups articulated their convictions concerning the present as a type of liminal space, and their own position as leaning into and ushering in the new era. This investigation into Qumran constructions of time reveals certain structural and epistemological frameworks that can help us better understand the nature and aspirations of other apocalyptically-minded religious movements.
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When the Blind Aren’t Blind: Intersections of Impairment and Identity in Biblical Narratives
Program Unit: Social Sciences and the Interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures
Eric Harvey, Brandeis University
Biblical narratives are home to several high-profile figures who would be considered blind by modern standards, yet no biblical text ever refers to a named character as עור “blind.” While some such absences may be merely incidental, at other times euphemistic terminology reflects the negotiations of competing identity factors. This paper examines the portrayal of age-related vision loss as a function of visual impairment, deviant embodiment, disability stigma, and the social significance of aging. Far from self-evident categories with straightforward entailments, these factors are constructed in interaction with one another and the broader social context. Analyzing their interplay clarifies their conceptual boundaries and the complexity of identity representation in biblical Hebrew texts.
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Not Seeing, Unseeing, and Blind: Differentiating Distinct Topoi in Hebrew Metaphors of Blindess and Sight
Program Unit: Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds
Eric J. Harvey, Brandeis University
In Jer. 5:21 and Ps. 115:5b–6a the same phrase appears verbatim: “they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear!” (cf. Ezek. 12:2; Ps. 135:16b–17a). Though the language is identical, in context its meanings are entirely unrelated—one condemns Israel for its rebelliousness and obduracy; the other mocks lifeless statues of foreign gods. The phrase appears again, slightly altered, in Is. 43:8—“the people who are blind, though there are eyes; deaf though they have ears”—with a third set of meanings and entailments. The difference in context between these phrases and the significance of the shift from “not see” to “blind” has not been fully appreciated in biblical scholarship, Nor has its importance for understanding the conceptual landscape of sense and disability in ancient Israel.
This paper will disentangle and differentiate three discrete topoi in biblical literature that have often been conflated: disability, inability, and failure. In the process it identifies the source of anachronistic interpretation strategies and poses a challenge to theories of embodied metaphor.
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Syriac Poetry and Social History
Program Unit: Syriac Studies
Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Brown University
Syriac poetry in its literary forms provides us access to the public presence and participation of women, children, and "uneducated" laity in the civic life of late antique communities, in a variety of social locations. Madrashe and memre that contain refrains indicate the vocal contributions of these groups to collective activities: weekly, daily, and festal liturgies; special civic occasions such as the arrival of visiting dignitaries; occasions of public crisis or resolution of crisis; and civic demonstrations. Such poetic forms also indicate pedagogical methods in local schools, both ecclesiastical and monastic. The sharp changes in madrashe, in particular, from the masterful compositions of Ephrem the Syrian in the fourth century to the simpler hymnographic forms in the fifth and sixth (including the soghyatha, the hymns of Simeon the Potter, and various anonymous hymns, sometimes wrongly ascribed to Ephrem) also contribute to the possibility that we are dealing with common, publicly used texts in local communities, perhaps villages and small towns. As these are demographics not easily visible to us in other kinds of extant literature, the ramifications of such a consideration are important for our understanding of late antique Syriac Christianity.
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The Qur’anic Story — Not Literal History But Literary Art: Muhammad Ahmad Khalafallah’s Forbidden Dissertation
Program Unit: Qur’anic Studies: Methodology and Hermeneutics (IQSA)
Javad Hashmi, Harvard University
In 1947, Cairo University’s Department of Arabic refused to accept the doctoral dissertation of one of its young students, an Islamic modernist by the name of Muhammad Ahmad Khalafallah (d. 1991). His work went on to cause a hailstorm of controversy but it would eventually be published under the title al-Fann al-Qasasi fi l-Qur’an al-Karim (The Literary Art of the Holy Qur’an). In it, Khalafallah made the claim that pious Muslims should understand the qur’anic stories not as literal history but as literary art. For many contemporary secular experts of Qur’anic Studies, this would hardly seem to be a radical proposal, but for Khalafallah’s time—and even amongst many devout Muslims today—this idea could be considered dangerously blasphemous.
Yet, contrary to the claims of his detractors, Khalafallah was driven by a deep sense of piety and devotion to the Islamic scripture, as he anticipated and responded to many of the problems that a strictly historical approach to the Qur’an might run into. Khalafallah’s intent was not to impugn the Qur’an as mere “myth” in the colloquial sense of the word, but rather, to render Islamic scripture immune from attack from “atheists, Jews, Christians, Orientalists, and missionaries.” Of interest is the fact that Khalafallah’s work invokes recent historical and archaeological evidence only but little; instead, the bulk of his work is dedicated to a close intra-qur’ānic reading in order to demonstrate the creative literary freedom that the text employs in order to convey its stories in religiously meaningful and purposeful ways.
Unfortunately, Khalafallāh’s brilliant study remains relatively unknown to the wider non-Arabic and English-speaking world. In this paper, therefore, we introduce the reader to Muhammad Ahmad Khalafallah, situate his contribution, and engage in a close reading of his monumental study. Many of Khalafallah’s insights will be useful to scholars of the Qur’an, including his detailed analysis of various prophetic stories. Overall, it is hoped that Khalafallah’s pioneering work might bridge the gap between Islamic and secular approaches and help to normalize the modern critical study of the Qur’an amongst Muslim readers.
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Healed and Sent Away Empty: Lukan Redaction of Two Synoptic Slave Texts
Program Unit: SBL International Meeting Presentations
Jonathan J. Hatter, Loyola University of Chicago
Current research on slavery in the synoptic gospels has shown that these texts tend to portray slavery and enslaved characters in ways that are typical of the wider first-century Mediterranean world. Of particular note, these texts consistently place enslaved characters in situations where their bodies are vulnerable to physical violence. The Gospel of Luke, following its synoptic sources, often characterizes the enslaved as susceptible to violence, but it also provides two notable variations from the parallel stories of enslaved abuse that are found in Mark and Matthew. First, in the Parable of the Tenants (Luke 20) the enslaved emissaries who are killed by the tenants in the Markan and Matthean version are instead beaten and sent away (empty handed yet still very much alive). Second, at the arrest of Jesus in the garden (Luke 22) when a disciple assaults the slave of the high priest, it is only the Lukan Jesus who heals him. This paper focuses on these two passages and, more specifically, on the redactional changes introduced by the author of Luke which seem to lessen (though not eliminate) the violence experienced by their enslaved characters. Adopting a reading strategy from feminist biblical scholarship, I read Luke’s text as a source for enslaved history which “is to be used with the most vigilant suspicion,” (D’Angelo). Such a reading will demonstrate, on the one hand, that the author has made deliberate choices which ameliorate the portrayed fate of their enslaved characters and, on the other hand, that the gospel as a whole still accepts a conventional understanding of the enslaved body as vulnerable to violence. The paper will conclude by offering some possible explanations for this tension which take into account Luke’s broader characterization of slavery and enslaved characters.
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Jesus, a Racist? Teaching Transtextuality around Foreign Women (Matt 15:21–28 and Mark 7:24–30) and Artists
Program Unit: Racism, Pedagogy, and Biblical Studies
Jione Havea, Independent Scholar
Drawing on the controversial moves by artists from Asia and Pasifika (especially Reg Mombasa and Emmanuel Garibay) on sacred biblical scenes, this presentation will explain and encourage transtextual reading. I presented transtextuality in my 2003 Elusions of control as a methodological step after intertextuality, and Gale Yee’s invitation for intersectionality in her 2019 SBL presidential address prompts me to revisit transtextuality as a reading option. In this presentation, i will revisit transtextuality through a reading of artworks on Matt 15:21-28 (Canaanite woman and her daughter) and Mark 7:24-30 (Syrophoenician woman and her daughter) across with Matt 8:5-13 and Luke 7:1-10 (Roman centurion and his servant/boy) and other healing stories. i will present transtextuality as an approach that (1) frees biblical stories from the control of canonicity, (2) that frees readers from the control of historical and literary criticisms (3) so that they may call out racist authorities (like Jesus). The racist and sexist attitudes of Jesus will be called out in this presentation, and transtextuality will be proposed for readers who do not shy away from controversies.
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A Method in the Study of Literary Motifs: How Folkloric Studies Can Inform Comparative Methodologies
Program Unit: Comparative Method in Biblical Studies
Alison K. Hawanchak, Asbury Theological Seminary
The study of literary motifs is inherently a comparative endeavor as one examines various narratives and identifies the common features that appear in those stories. However, the features that one chooses to accentuate have the potential to create a distorted view of the motif. Therefore, a rigorous methodology is required to generate a faithful and reliable description of literary motifs.
This paper promotes the use of a comparative method that is rooted in both folkloric and literary studies to refine the description of literary motifs or type-scene. Based upon the structuralist study of folk literature, this comparative method is used to identity the component parts of a tale and compare those parts on two levels. The component part of interest in this method is the event, which is composed of an action performed by an actor. The first level of comparison is the general elements, in which the events will be described in terms of their generic features. These general elements are used to establish a means of comparison between the different tales. The second level of analysis is the specific elements of the tale. In this level the constituent unit of the event will be described in terms of its specific features and will provide a means for distinguishing the features that are unique to each story. This dual layered approach allows for a discussion of the unified message of the motif while still considering the unique features of each individual tale. This method of assessing the component parts of the tale will be coupled with a literary approach to the text that explores the poetics of the narrative. The attention to the poetics of the text helps guard against the fragmentation of the text that can arise from a purely structuralist based approach. A literary approach also helps to ascertain the events in the scene and provides a means for interpreting the significance of the events within the motif.
This method will be illustrated in a case study of the “Potiphar’s Wife Motif.” Based upon its usage in the folk literature of the world, the “Potiphar’s Wife Motif” is broadly defined as scene in which a woman, often identified as a stepmother figure, makes vain overtures to a man then accuses him of attempting to force her. Localized approaches to this motif identify its presence in the ANE tales of the Epic of Gilgamesh, The Tale of Aqhat, and The Tale of Two Brothers. However, the generalized description does not align well with each of these narratives. By applying the proposed comparative methodology, a case will be made to refine the description of the motif as the “Hero and His Temptress Motif.” This methodology will also demonstrate how the previously overlooked occurrence of the motif in Judg 16 can be identified and incorporated as an exemplar of the motif. Thus, this methodology seeks to clarify which events are indispensable to the content and structure of the motif by illuminating the key features that unite the tales together.
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Samson and Delilah among the Heroes of the Ancient Near East: A Comparative Folkloric Approach to Judg 16
Program Unit: Joshua-Judges
Alison K. Hawanchak, Asbury Theological Seminary
Amongst the numerous approaches to the book of Judges, a literary-folkloric approach views Judges as a strand of tales related to epic literature that are representative of a type of Israelite lore or folk tradition. Folkloric approaches to the book of Judges often concentrate on Samson’s hair and great strength, while giving less attention to his shenanigans with Delilah. Moreover, the lack of attention given to Delilah is indicative of a larger lacuna of research concerning the interaction between the male warrior and the warrior goddess as a motif found in the heroic literature of the ANE. This literary motif depicts the encounter of a hero and a temptress, in which a woman approaches the hero in an attempt to entice him to submit to her will. The hero must then choose to either stand his ground or bow to the desires of the temptress. In this paper I present a literary analysis of the scene in Judg 16:4–22 from a comparative perspective to assess how Samson and Delilah relate to other heroic literature of the ANE with this motif: The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Tale of Aqhat, and The Tale of Two Brothers. These ANE tales establish the essential features of the motif, which will then be taken into consideration while reading Judg 16.
My analysis of the Samson and Delilah scene concludes that Judg 16 contains all the key elements of the hero and his temptress motif. However, the scene ends with an ironic inversion of the motif which allows the author of the tale to employ the motif to draw attention to Samson’s naziritic status, to make an assessment of Samson’s character as a judge, and to make a theological statement.
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One “Whom YHWH Knew Face-to-Face”: Moses as Superior to Pharaoh
Program Unit: Egyptology and Ancient Israel
Ralph K. Hawkins, Averett University
Recent studies related to the book of Exodus have shown that its author(s) intended to portray Moses as superior to Pharaoh. This paper will survey the arguments that have been made so far, and then explore a trope that has been overlooked, that of speaking to a deity “face to face,” which is also used for the same purpose. The study will begin with an examination of the use of the expression in The Battle of Qadesh, in which Ramesses hears the word of Amun, receives the counsel of Amun’s mouth and, finally, speaks to Amun “face to face.” It will then consider the use of the expression in the Pentateuch, where it is repeated three times. Moses is said to have spoken with Yahweh “face to face”: (1) in the book of Exodus, where it describes Moses’ habitual encounters with YHWH as having been “face to face” (Exod 33:11); (2) in the case of Aaron and Miriam’s jealousy over Moses’ status, in which YHWH insists that Moses’ authority was superior to that of other prophets, because he spoke to him “face to face” (Num 12:8), and; (3) at the conclusion of Deuteronomy, where the author states that there has never been another prophet like Moses in Israel, “whom YHWH knew face to face” (Deut 34:10). After comparing the use of this phrase in both The Battle of Qadesh and the Pentateuch, it will be suggested that the author(s) of the Pentateuch intended to use it to demonstrate the superiority of Moses over Pharaoh.
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Early Israel’s Ammonite Wars and Recent Excavations at Biblical Naʿarah (Josh 16:7)
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible, History, and Archaeology
Ralph K. Hawkins, Averett University
The biblical historical books report that the Israelites were in conflict with the Ammonites from the time of the judges through at least the time of King Jehoiakim. After the battle accounts of 2 Sam 10-12 and the assertion of Ammonite vassalage to Judah in the tenth century (2 Sam 12:26-31), however, there are few details about their relationship. Recent excavations at Khirbet ʿAuja el-Foqa, in the southern Jordan Valley, may open a window to some of this history. This paper will introduce the excavations at ʿAuja el-Foqa and summarize the first three seasons of excavation, which have made it clear that this was an Israelite fortified town built in a strategic location in the Jericho Valley. It will then consider the geo-political aspect of the site, which was located on the west side of the Jordan River, due west of the Ammonite capital of Rabbah and south of a series of what were probably Israelite towers that had been built in the Desert of Manasseh. It will be suggested that ʿAuja el-Foqa was built as a central administrative site in the Jericho region, and that it was also part of an Israelite defensive network designed to defend Israel’s eastern border. The paper will conclude by proposing that the site be identified with biblical Naʿarah, located on the border of Ephraim and Manasseh (Josh 16:7).
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Making Uzziah Good: The Function of Remembrance of Uzziah by the Prophet Isaiah in 2 Chronicles 26:22
Program Unit: Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah
Kaz Hayashi, Baylor University
Since the turn of the 21st century, scholars have drawn attention to the distinctive and prominent role prophets play in the book of Chronicles (Beentjes 2001; Jonker 2011; Knoppers 2010; Warhurst 2011). Numerous factors bolster the importance placed upon the prophetic office in the book, including the multiple additional references to otherwise unknown prophets compared to the parallel accounts in the Deuteronomistic History (DtrH), the virtual lack of criticism against prophets, and the unique role prophetic books play as historical sources (Schniedewind 1997). In this paper, I analyze the rhetorical function of these prophetic sources in the book of Chronicles and conclude that the Chronicler used these prophetic citations to affirm the positive evaluation of a king’s reign. The divergences in the prophetic citation formula for king Uzziah (2 Chr 26:22), however, suggest that this peculiar citation belongs to a later redactor who sought to depict Uzziah in a positive light.
The history of scholarship reflects a transition from the earlier debates on the existence of the sources in Chronicles, to the evaluation of how these sources rhetorically function in the Chronicler’s retelling of Judah’s history. Out of the thirteen sources mentioned by name, the text assigns eight to prophets. The history of scholarship on the prophetic sources has primarily centered on the existence or non-existence of these sources—while some assert that the Chronicler refers to independent compositions, others claim that the Chronicler either modified or created these books based on the source formulae embedded in the Chronicler’s Vorlage of Samuel-Kings. Scholars adhering to the latter position identify the function of prophetic sources as bolstering the narrative with a sense of authority and authenticity. Few scholars note the interesting pattern that prophetic sources only appear with kings whom the Chronicler either partially or wholly views favorably (Glatt-Gilad 2001; Klein 2006; Knoppers 2004; Williamson 1982).
Building upon recent scholarship, I concur that Chronicler’s prophetic sources indeed communicate the Chronicler’s positive evaluation towards a particular monarch. The reign of Uzziah, however, appears as an anomaly due to the Chronicler’s Sondergut that concludes the king’s reign in a negative light with his improper sacrifice and his banishment from the temple. Moreover, Uzziah’s prophetic citation diverges from the consistent formulae employed by the Chronicler for all the other kings (for example, the lack of הנה and the use of the active verb כתב instead of the passive form כתוב). I, therefore, contend that Uzziah’s prophetic formula that attributes Isaiah with recording the reign of the king, belongs to a later redactional hand that desired to redeem Uzziah as a positive king, rather than a negative king who did evil in the sight of the Lord.
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"I Will Dwell in the House of the Lord Forever": Remnants of Royal Funerary Liturgy in the Psalms
Program Unit: Social Sciences and the Interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures
Christopher B. Hays, Fuller Theological Seminary (Pasadena)
n/a
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Wondrous Voices on Mount Hor: The Death of Aaron in Early Syriac Literature
Program Unit: Syriac Studies
Kristian Heal, Brigham Young University
The death of Aaron (Num 20:23-29) is a rare subject in the surviving homiletic corpus, treated extensively in Syriac literature only in the mimro ‘On Aaron the Priest’ attributed to Jacob of Serugh and published by Bedjan (HS I. 68-84). Even though early Syriac authors were primarily interested in other aspects of Aaron’s life and character, this unique mimro was popular in medieval and early modern Syriac manuscript anthologies. It was collected with the works of Jacob of Sarug, collected with other mimre on priests, or among funerary texts. In a large homilary from the 13th century, the mimro is collected together with funeral homilies for bishops, priests, deacons, monks and children. The popularity of the mimro is perhaps best illustrated by its development in transmission, resulting in four distinct recensions among the twelve surviving Syriac manuscripts. The title of the mimro in Bedjan’s edition, which is taken from Vatican Syriac 117, is slightly misleading. Rather than retelling the whole life of Aaron, the donnée of the mimro is the period leading up to and including the death and burial of Aaron. The contents are better reflected by the scribe of a 13th century manuscript who gave both the title and a brief summary of the work: “Next, we’ll write a mimro about the burial of Aaron, son of Amram … The subject of the mimro: How sad was the hour of the death of Aaron the priest, the high [priest] of the Old Testament, when Moses his brother strips him of the holy garments.” I take this summary as the jumping off point for this paper. I first consider the dramatization of the moment of the death of Aaron, including the removal of the priestly robes, and then explore the theme of sadness and mourning, looking at the responses of Moses, Aaron, Eleazar, the Lord and the angels to the death of Aaron.
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On the Creation of Early Christian Doctrine: A Third-Century Episcopal Response to the Perniciousness of Gambling
Program Unit: Lived Religiousness in Antiquity
Rob Heaton, University of Denver
One of the earliest unique outputs of the Latin Christian Church is the sermon entitled De Aleatoribus ("On Dice-players") that, though it has been transmitted within the works of Cyprian, is considered anonymous. Harnack attributed the homily to Victor of Rome (c. 189-199 CE), whereas later analyses have placed it more firmly into the third century. More significant than the identity of its author, however, is the novelty of its subject matter: with no Christian scriptures unequivocally available to dictate gambling-related behavior, and positive examples of cleromancy found even among the disciples' selection of Judas's replacement, a case for the condemnation of gambling had to be constructed from a wide tapestry of scriptures that included both the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas in its Latin Vulgata translation.
With the benefit of Chiara Nucci’s 2006 Latin-Italian editio princeps of De Aleatoribus, this paper briefly examines the pitfalls of recent scholarship on the sermon before providing historical context for the common recreational activities in and around third-century Italy. It then progresses to a socio-rhetorical analysis of the sermon's argument against gambling where, among other tactics, the homilist uses the Shepherd of Hermas in a desperate appeal to top-down order, starting with the rehabilitation of other bishops or church leaders who have fallen under the sway of the game. The sermon then frames gambling itself as a "religious experience" antithetical to Christian discipline, such that participation at the gaming-table, overseen as it is by the devil, invalidated any parallel claim to Christian living. The situation presupposed by such argumentation contrasts a small elite of literate Christians pleading against a majority whose lived religion had never before prohibited the enjoyment of cultural games of chance, which possibly formed a pillar of their social lives. Finally, my paper reflects on the sermon as a window into the granular detail of third-century Christianity not as it can commonly be idealized in the works of celebrated theologians or retrospectively conceptualized as “orthodox,” but as it was experienced in the negotiation between professed (or newly invented) ideals and a culture not yet transformed by the hopes of Christian preaching.
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The Religious Identity of the Christ Group in the Revelation to John between Israel and Church
Program Unit: Jewish Christianity / Christian Judaism
Christoph Heil, Karl-Franzens Universität Graz
The Revelation to John represents the creative work of a Jewish Christ believer whose religious and cultural identity cannot be reconstructed easily. A similar problem comes up regarding the Christ group he describes. Is it “Jewish”, “Jewish Christian” or “Christian”? Such broad taxonomies are rightly criticized, and so this paper tries to formulate a new description of Revelation’s Christ assembly by answering the following questions,
(a) How are the terms “ekklesia” and “laos” used? Although “ekklesia” occours twenty times in Revelation, it is mainly restricted to the seven assemblies mentioned in chapters 1 to 3 and plays no major conceptual role. “Laos” occurs nine times in Revelation, mostly in connection with “tribe”, “language” and “nation” to describe universal humanity from which those come who stand before the throne and before the Lamb (7:9). In two references (18:4 and 21:3), “laos” clearly alludes to Israel. The Covenant Formula is used in 21:3, although with the plural “laoi”. God’s people come from many peoples.
(b) Is the phrase “synagogue of Satan” (2:9; 3:9) a polemic against Jews as a group of others, is it an inner-Jewish polemic or – not very probable – is it a polemic against Gentile sympathizers to Judaism?
(c) Which is the meaning of the “twelve” symbolism in Revelation? Especially relevant here is to ask for the identity of the 144,000 who are saved (7:1-8; 14:1-5).
(d) Is the story in Rev 12 referring to Israel with some additional elements from a Christ believing perspective or is it the story of the followers of the Lamb told in Jewish apocalyptic fashion? Who is the woman (12:1)? Who is the male child (12:5)? What is the meaning of the flight into the wilderness (12:6) which alludes to the Exodus?
The paper will conclude that the formative motivation to write Revelation was the author’s belief in Jesus as the Lamb and as the Messiah. This belief was expressed in genuine Jewish concepts, language and images. For example, “Israel” (2:14; 7,4; 21:12) and “Jew” (2:9; 3:9) are used as positive terms. Indeed, the author tries to protect the designation “Jew” and claims that the Christ assemblies represent the real “Jews”. In socioreligious terms, Revelation “presents itself as advocating a true form of Jewish identity … Rather that agitating for the founding of a separate, explicitly non-Jewish community, the author stays within Jewish discourse and tradition” (Rowland 2020). Further, the universalistic integration of Gentiles into the new people(s) of God is formulated in traditional Jewish wording. Diaspora Judaism in Asia Minor provides a very probable setting and basis for this creative social identity formation.
Maybe the way how the Revelation to John includes traditional Jewish and Jewish Christ-believing features in its concept of the “peoples of God” can be an inspiring paradigm for a Christian ecclesiology today.
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Sunday Observance in Late Antiquity
Program Unit: Lived Religiousness in Antiquity
Uta Heil, Universität Wien
Living together in a community is not only shaped by the common urban space, e.g., but also by the several temporal activities influenced by the time of the day, the day of the month or the month of the year. It is obvious that a common identity of a special group, a social milieu or a specific religion can be created very effectively through temporal practices like a common festival calendar, just as the process of "othering" occurs in reverse through a different temporal rhythm. Therefore, religious experiences and religious identity is also highly influenced by temporal categories.
Since the second century AD, the day of the week or weekly rhythm gained in importance either in the context of Jewish communities or as a popular astrological system. However, Christian writers were very reluctant to give an honour to a special day such as the Sabbath, or even lucky or unlucky days. Nevertheless, Sunday gained in importance and the law on Sunday rest of Emperor Constantine in 321 marked an important turning point in the "career" of this special day in Christian thought.
The lecture will discuss the extent to which temporal categories play a role in defining what is "Christian" and "non-Christian". Particular attention will be paid to "Sunday" as a special day of the week.
The paper is based on a research project, "The Apocryphal Sunday", funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, which deals with the cultural history of Sunday.
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Romans 3 and the Logic of Paul's Atonement Language
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Erin Heim, University of Oxford
Accepted paper for the IBR research group on Pauline Theology.
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Reflections on Scripture and the University: A Philosopher's Perspective
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Paul Kjoss Helseth, University of Northwestern
Helseth will reflect on the relationship between Scripture and the university from the perspective of a professor of philosophy.
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Money and Symbols in Judea and Early Christianity
Program Unit: Numismatic Evidence and Biblical Interpretation
David Hendin, American Numismatic Society
This paper surveys ancient Judean coins from the Second Temple Period with a focus on the origin and possible intended meanings of symbols. Key related numismatic elements to be discussed include the half shekel Temple tribute and the role of the money changers within the temple system.
David Hendin is vice president and adjunct curator of the American Numismatic Society and author of Guide to Biblical Coins soon to be published in its 6th revised edition and 17 other books.
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Stretching the Scope of Salvation in Matthew: The Soteriological Significance of Varying Status Levels in the Kingdom
Program Unit: Matthew
Bruce Henning, Emmaus Bible College
Matthew’s gospel often harshly distinguishes those who are “in” and “out,” between the “saved” and the “lost.” Moreover, the Matthean Jesus frequently comes across as strict and unyielding in his demands for kingdom entrance (e.g. Matt 10:37-39), suggesting the limits of salvation are extremely narrow (i.e. Matt 7:13-14). This paper proposes that this stark binary is nuanced by two features. First, Matthew depicts status variations among the saved – those within the kingdom range from “the greatest” to “the least.” To establish this, the first section of the paper focuses on Matt 5:19 by both situating it within Second Temple, Rabbinic, and relevant Matthean texts (19:28 and 20:23) and by analyzing the syntax of ἐλάχιστος κληθήσεται ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τῶν οὐρανῶν and οὗτος μέγας κληθήσεται ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τῶν οὐρανῶν. This section interacts with concepts of different categories of judgment and variations of “reward” language, as in Nathan Eubank’s Wages of Cross-Bearing and Debt of Sin (de Gruyter: 2013) and Anders Runesson’s, Divine Wrath and Salvation in Matthew (Fortress: 2016). The second observation which lessens Matthew’s seemingly harsh binary concerns Matthew’s depiction of the twelve with their moments of weakness, and yet being in the above category “great(est).” This section interacts with scholarship on Matthean discipleship, such as Jeannine Brown, The Disciples in Narrative Perspective (Brill: 2002); Joel Willitts, “The Twelve Disciples in Matthew” in Jesus, Matthew’s Gospel and Early Christianity, ed. Daniel Gurtner, Joel Willitts and Richard Burridge, (T&T Clark: 2011, 166-179), and examines the disciples’ literary character, especially Matthew’s redactions to portray the disciples as ὀλιγόπιστοι. The combination of these two observations stretches the limits of salvation, though not beyond being “narrow,” but beyond the initial impression given by the harsher statements.
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“Here Is a Story I Can Vouch for Myself:” Separating History from Fiction in Ancient Epistles as a Pedagogical Exercise
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
James C. Hernriques, Trinity University
Those of us who have taught undergraduate courses within the field of religious studies are likely familiar with the preliminary hurdle of disabusing students of certain ingrained assumptions regarding the stark dichotomy of “true” and “false,” especially in reference to sacred narratives or myths. We are challenged with demonstrating the semantic nuances of those relevant constructs that are generally accepted as synonymous with “true” or “false,” the most obvious concept being “myth,” but also “history,” “fiction,” and “non-fiction.” Students often approach primary source material as either “true” or “false,” “fiction” or “non-fiction” in regards to historicity. Indeed, this approach is not limited to the study of sacred narratives, but spans all disciplines tasked with interpreting history in some form. Primary sources are without a doubt the best way to engage students and demonstrate the messiness of “truth” when reconstructing history, but we are still faced with the task of choosing the best types of sources that will put this messiness into stark relief at a level intelligible to non-experts. This paper proposes that the genre of the ancient epistle is a prime candidate for overcoming this problem. Epistles, both “fictional” and “non-,” or “historic” and “novelistic,” all carry multiple levels of narrative capable of simultaneously conveying both truths and falsehoods within the same document. With minimal introduction to literary theory and concepts like the implied author and implied audience, students can easily understand how a pseudonymous letter or epistolary novel can nevertheless describe an accurate narrative of historic events. This paper recounts and discusses an in-class exercise from a course on the history of biblical interpretation in which students read four ancient epistles—Pliny the Younger’s letter to Tacitus on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Pliny the Younger’s letter to Licinius Sura, “To Aeschylus” from the epistolary novel The Letters of Themistocles, and “Chronos’s Letter to the Rich” from Lucian’s Saturnalian Letters. Students were tasked with rating the veracity of each letter in regard to multiple aspects (author, narrator, contents, etc.). This paper will further describe the methods of presentation and student voting in this pedagogical exercise, as well as discuss the results of its execution and further benefits of its application in courses dealing with sacred narratives.
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Lifting Up the Subaltern in the Book of Ruth
Program Unit: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible
Gina Hens-Piazza, Jesuit School of Theology of SCU
Whether in ancient texts or in our own world, the achievements and advancement of one individual are often the product of or even at the expense of an unacknowledged community at work whose backstory goes untold. This study considers such anonymous and liberative change-makers in the book of Ruth who embody what bell hooks identifies as the “keepers of hope.”
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American Elijah: Kaepernick's Warning and Its Prophetic Fulfillment
Program Unit: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible
John W. Herbst, Virginia Peninsula Baptist Association
In 1 Kings 17 the prophet Elijah first appears in the Hebrew Bible, without preamble. He is the Deuteronomistic Historian’s new Moses, enjoying a special relationship with Yahweh as Yahweh’s prophet. Unlike Moses, Elijah has little pedigree, yet he immediately becomes a central figure. His declaration of drought should be taken as a warning: unless Ahab makes serious reforms, there will be serious trouble in Israel. Ahab’s failure to react appropriately leads three years of famine and the famous confrontation on Mount Carmel.
In 2016 Colin Kaepernick made a similar dramatic entrance into the national consciousness of the United States, determining to kneel as everyone else stood for the pre-game rendering of the national anthem. Like Elijah, Kaepernick had little pedigree or preparation: he had not been known as one who speaks truth to power and had not undergone formal preparation before his transformation into prophetic figure. But his actions are memorable because his audience failed to push police reform, leading to the death of George Floyd and months of disturbing protests and disquiet.
This paper begins by briefly summarizing the place of Elijah within the Hebrew Bible’s portrayal of prophetic warning, particularly in the Deuteronomistic History and in Jeremiah. As explored by scholars such as Nelson, McKenzie, and Brueggemann, these works argue for the assurance of disaster when a prophet’s warnings go unheeded, even when the prophet himself comes into the story without much background. While Moses comes from royalty and has a powerful birth story, the Deuteronomistic Historian wants his readers to know that a grand background is not necessary: Yahweh can appoint anyone to be a spokesperson.
I will then discuss Kaepernick’s place in the history of African American prophets whose words and actions should be taken as warnings. Just as Kaepernick’s refusal to stand at attention functioned as a warning, warnings have been a part of African American prophetic preaching for the past 200 years, including sermons and addresses given by Absalom Jones, Florence Spearing Randolph, and Jeremiah Wright. Kaepernick’s rise and the connection of his protest to the 2020 demonstrations suggest that will yet see dramatic entrances of prophetic voices that remind us of Elijah.
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How to Become a City of Refuge: Numbers 35 and Deuteronomy 19 in Light of 2 Samuel 20–21
Program Unit: Book of Samuel: Narrative, Theology, and Interpretation
John W. Herbst, Virginia Peninsula Baptist Association
Second Samuel 20:15–22 and 21:1–14 share remarkably similar storylines and key vocabulary. Each begins with a dire threat to the community (Abel, Israel). A leader summons (“qara”) a party with the power to nullify the threat. The leader identifies her/his people as the “nachalat (“inheritance of”) Yahweh” in pleading for salvation. The summoned party responds by insisting that destruction of the threatened populace is not the goal; instead, the community harbors someone who does not merit protection. The leader duly surrenders the guilty parties, after which the threat is lifted.
Scholars traditionally assign these passages to different authors, with good reason: 2 Sam 20 is closely tied to the larger Succession Narrative begun in 2 Sam 9, featuring a Yahweh who stays in the shadows, while in 2 Sam 21 Yahweh’s action is more evident. Yet both stories draw attention to an overriding issue through Samuel: Israel’s problems come about not due to outside influence, but to a deficit of inner purity. Too often the people are at risk because they are unwilling to expel individuals who have not behaved well. And forty years ago, Forshey pointed out that the peculiar use of the term nachalat Yahweh, referencing people rather than a geography, further unites these passages.
This paper will show that these accounts impact the understanding of “cities of refuge” laws of Numbers 35:9–34, Deut 19:1–13, and Josh 20:1–9. The 2 Sam passages stress that when refuge is provided the protected individuals must stand trial (following the model of Num 35, as explained by Cocco) lest the entire community find itself in grave danger. 2 Sam 21 highlights the danger of permitting murder to go unpunished, then 2 Sam 20 applies the same idea to a city in a way that recalls Deut 19: Abel Beth Maacah, located at or beyond Israel’s northern border, effectively becomes a candidate for a new city of refuge as stipulated in Deut 19:8¬–9. By doing the right thing in executing a guilty fugitive, Abel Beth Maacah establishes its residents as part of the nachalat Yahweh and becomes a legitimate city of refuge in an expanding Israel.
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Racism at Home: Investigating the History of Racism Locally
Program Unit: Racism, Pedagogy, and Biblical Studies
Seth Heringer, Toccoa Falls College
In some college contexts, the student body is deeply aware of racism and actively works to be part of the anti-racism movement. In other college contexts, however, the student body is not as interested in racism. That disengagement can come about because of student demographics, because the college “bubble” hinders engagement beyond campus, or because the college itself has not emphasized racism and thoughtful responses to it. This presentation will show the combination of a reading from Deuteronomy 15:12-15, a reading from Ta-Nehisi Coates on the effects of slavery, and an assignment to investigate racism locally can overcome student disengagement.
Coates’s article begins with Deuteronomy 15:12-15, and so that is where this learning unit begins. Students will discern that this passage is speaking about a system of Hebrew slavery due to financial debt. Moreover, they will see that slavery is something that has a definitive end in freedom with formerly enslaved people leaving with financial goods as a remembrance of Israel’s own enslavement in Egypt.
With this textual background, students will then read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” that appeared in June, 2014 issue of The Atlantic. This essay walks readers through the physical and financial consequences of slavery on black folk in America. Coates’s tracing of a direct line from slavery and racism to wealth inequality brings what can seem like a problem from long ago into contemporary relevance.
Despite the strengths of this article, students still might believe that the problems of racism reside elsewhere. To overcome this challenge, I added an assignment where students explore the local history of racism. For example, in my context at Toccoa Falls College in northeast Georgia, I had students explore either the local history of racism where they were raised or in the counties surrounding Toccoa. One student made a startling discovery at the Stephens County Library: a Toccoa Record article from June 17, 1915 entitled “Escaped Negro Convict Lynched.” As students read this account of local lynching, the strength of the local racism that existed was palpable, making the Coates article even more believable than before.
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Vestiges of Ancient Near Eastern Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible and Late Second Temple Period Jewish Literature
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Dominick S. Hernández, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
There are vestiges of the ancient Near Eastern wisdom tradition not only in biblical wisdom literature, but also in Jewish writings of the late Second Temple period. This continuum of this tradition across ages is identifiable by tracking the topic of divine retribution, which was both evident in Ancient Near Eastern wisdom writings (e.g., Ludlul, The Babylonian Theodicy) and prevalent in the biblical wisdom tradition. The Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate that divine retribution continued to be at the forefront of Jewish thought through the late Second Temple period. This is not, in and of itself, surprising, but what is notable is that the sectarian writings of the Qumran community were particularly concerned about retribution upon the wicked who were in positions of power (e.g., Psalms Pesher [4QpPsa] on Psalm 37). The community used imagery similar to that of ancient Near Eastern and biblical wisdom literature in order to broach the topic of just retribution upon the wicked—for example, the dichotomy between light and darkness (e.g., The War Scroll [1QM]), and lion imagery (e.g., Commentary on Nahum [4Q169]).
The New Testament authors also use similar imagery to that which is found in ancient Near Eastern and biblical wisdom literature. For example, imagery related to swallowing the possessions of the vulnerable as an act of wickedness appears in the Instructions of Amenemope 14.5-8, Job 20:12-14, and Mark 12:40 (cf. Lk 20:47). However, some of these vestiges of ancient Near Eastern wisdom writings took on a new theological purpose for Jewish authors of the late Second Temple period. For example, some of this imagery was used to portray the New Testament teaching that the wicked might prosper and not necessarily be punished for their misdeeds during their lifetime, but they would eventually suffer retribution in the eschaton, or in the life to come.
In this paper, I will present imagery that appears in ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature, trace it through the biblical wisdom tradition, and explore its usage in Jewish literature of the late Second Temple period. This paper will conclude with suggestions concerning the ways in which following imagery related to just retribution facilitates a heightened awareness of how retribution dogma progressed in the late Second Temple period.
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Biblical Theology and Genesis 9:20–27
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Dominick S. Hernández, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Accepted paper for the IBR research group on Difficult Texts in the OT.
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What Happens in Samaria, Stays in Samaria
Program Unit: Historical Geography of the Biblical World
Oliver Hersey, Jerusalem University College
The geography, history, languages and cultural backgrounds of the biblical world are important features that bring texts into sharper relief. The writers of the Bible were intimately familiar with the geographic details of their national history, and they assumed readers were too. Commentaries on biblical narratives typically focus on the languages, historical and cultural background, but rarely is the geography considered. In this presentation we demonstrate how a clearer understanding of a seemingly abrupt shift from marriage to worship in John 4:16-20 might be achieved by considering the geography, history, language and cultural backgrounds of the passage.
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Isaac and Iphigenia: Child Sacrifice in Israelite, Greek, and Phoenician Literature
Program Unit: Bible, Myth, and Myth Theory
Raleigh C. Heth, University of Notre Dame
As a methodological point, it should always be recognized that the vicissitudes of history have forced biblical scholars to work with a body of literature that is fairly limited in size. We are fortunate to have Mesopotamian and various North West Semitic texts to help us fill out the worldview of the biblical authors. Nevertheless, gaps remain in our understanding. There is, though, another source of information that provides insight into the world of the ancient Mediterranean. The expansive corpus of the Hellenic world, though less frequently utilized by biblical scholars than Mesopotamian literature, can also shed light on the intellectual trends of ancient Judah when used responsibly.
Without suggesting homologous points of connection, this paper compares and contrasts the ways in which myths centered on child sacrifice taking place at foundational moments were received in both biblical and ancient Greek literature. For biblical literature, this involves an investigation of references to child sacrifice in the various legal corpora of the Pentateuch as well as in the editorial history of Genesis 22. For ancient Greek literature, this involves tracing the various versions of the Iphigenia myth through time and across multiple classical authors. In this discussion, close attention will be paid to the representation of Iphigenia’s sacrifice in the works of Homer and Hesiod, as well as in the tragedies of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. Finally, a brief review of Philo of Byblos’ Phoenician History allows us to highlight a different response to these types of stories—one in which the practice appears to be received more positively than in previous examples. We conclude that these stories highlight a distinctive aspect of Eastern Mediterranean culture that is not shared with Mesopotamia.
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The Blaspheming Son in the Context of the Holiness Legislation
Program Unit: Pentateuch
Andrew Heyd, University of Pretoria
The placement of the Blaspheming Son pericope in Lev 24 has perplexed commentators from Ibn Ezra to today. Recent work explains its placement as a parallel to Lev 10 or as a rebellion that contrasts with a picture of Israel arrayed in worship in Lev 23-24:9. This paper will argue that the Blaspheming Son can be most naturally be read in context of the Divine Name Formula [I am Yhwh (your God)] that forms the structural backbone of the Holiness Legislation. A social science lens of honor will illuminate the connection between the Divine Name Formula and Blaspheming Son pericope, explain several features within the pericope, strengthen parallels with Lev 10, and provide insight into a layer of coherence within the Holiness Legislation that addresses Yhwh’s honor in post-exilic Yehud.
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The Meaning of Israel’s History in Psalm 106 and Isaiah 63:7–64:11: An Intertextual Exploration of YHWH’s Salvation of Israel in the Past and Future
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Todd Hibbard, University of Detroit Mercy
Accepted paper for the IBR research group on Isaiah and Intertextuality
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What We Owe to Each Other: A Critique of Biblical Studies by Way of the Museum of the Bible
Program Unit: Ethics and Biblical Interpretation
Jill Hicks-Keeton, University of Oklahoma
In this paper I use the Museum of the Bible (MOTB) as a case study to offer an ethical critique of our guild's fantasy that "the Bible" exists, our propensity to weigh in on "history" but not consider the moral implications of our historiographies, and the White heteropatriarchy that has thereby made itself so pervasive as to be nearly invisible. With reflections on how to reckon with our field's origins and continued entanglements with colonialist legacies.
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Immigrant: Not Sojourner, Foreigner, or Alien; Bible Translation and Contemporary Migration Conversations
Program Unit: Ethics and Biblical Interpretation
Theodore Hiebert, McCormick Theological Seminary
The purpose of this paper is to explore how Bible translation has shaped contemporary images and conversations about migration and migrants in the public square. In particular, we will examine the way in which the primary term for migrant in the Hebrew Bible, gēr, has been rendered with translations that arise from suspicion and fear of the migrant and continue to perpetuate suspicion and fear of the migrant in contemporary social and political discourse. These translations are not grounded in an accurate understanding of the social and political context of the gēr in the biblical period.
The first claim I want to make is that gēr should be translated “migrant” or “immigrant” to most nearly capture in contemporary English the authentic place of the gēr in antiquity. This is what we have chosen to do in the Common English Bible, the first Bible translation in English to make this choice. Where it is used in the book of Genesis and elsewhere, gēr fits precisely the current definition of a migrant, one who makes a “change of residence across administrative borders.” In the biblical period, this meant relocating to take up residence in a new country. It meant leaving the status that one’s own land and kinship structures provided and moving to a new land without these protections.
The consequent claim I wish to make is that none of the common translations of gēr—sojourner, foreigner, alien, resident alien—are satisfactory representations of the place of the gēr in the ancient context of the Hebrew Bible. Rather, they are partial translations that promote typical stereotypes of the migrant experience, in antiquity and today. “Sojourner” portrays the migrant as merely temporary in their new place of residence. “Foreigner” stigmatizes the migrant as perpetually other, even when the migrant takes up permanent residence in a new country. And “alien” or “resident alien” demotes the migrant to a non-human or sub-human status.
In this paper, I wish to explore both the roots of these translations in a suspicion and fear of migrants and the way these translations have promoted views of migrants as aberrant, threatening, and less than human in religious and political conversations and in the media today. And I want to propose that the proper use of language of migration in Bible translation and interpretation can normalize the phenomenon of migration and create new and more constructive discourses about migration today.
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"Am I My Brother's Keeper?" The Architecture of Sibling Rivalry in the Book of Genesis
Program Unit: Genesis
Theodore Hiebert, McCormick Theological Seminary
The purpose of this paper is to show how the stories of sibling rivalry in the book of Genesis are not isolated individual narratives but are part of a comprehensive design. That design positions the first rivalry story of Cain and Abel as the negative archetype for responding to rivalry, and it distinguishes the stories that follow as positive archetypes for resolving conflict. Thus the iconic question from the Cain and Abel story establishes the comprehensive theme for four key rivalry stories in the book of Genesis: Cain and Abel (Gen 4), Isaac and Ishmael (Gen 16-21), Jacob and Esau (Gen 25-36), and Joseph and his brothers (Gen 37-50). The negative answer of the pre-flood story contrasts intentionally with the positive answers of the three post-flood stories. In the age of failure before the flood, conflict is resolved through deadly force and kinship structures are destroyed. In the new age after the flood, conflict is resolved by choosing family bonds over individual grievances in order to preserve family structures and the communities based on them.
These four stories share a common structure and a set of common aims. Each story follows a common three-part structure: 1) a conflict between siblings arises, develops, and threatens family relationships; 2) the immediate response to this conflict is deadly intent—one rival intends to kill the other and to destroy family bonds; and 3) the rivalry story seeks a path toward survival, toward a future that preserves the lives of the rivals and the family structures of which they are a part. This common pattern reflects a set of common aims: to show how fragile communities are, how essential social cohesiveness is within kinship societies and among kinship societies, and how critically important it is to resolve conflict without violence in order to preserve the social fabric.
Preserving social cohesiveness is essential, first of all, at the most basic household level, which provides the core kinship unit upon which segmentary societies like ancient Israel are organized. It is also essential on the larger level of peoples and kingdoms that incorporate different tribal identities, a context prefigured in the story of Joseph and his brothers, who represent Israel’s own tribal subunits. And it is essential for the relationships between peoples and kingdoms, such as the relationships between Israel/Judah and its neighbors the Ishmaelites and the Edomites, represented by the Isaac and Ishmael and Jacob and Esau rivalries.
These four stories of sibling rivalry in Genesis are lodged in the literary strand of Genesis traditionally attributed to the Yahwist, so we must attribute the shared structure of these rivalry stories and their overall design and aim to J. The Elohist has traditions only about the Isaac/Ishmael rivalry and about the rivalry between Joseph and his brothers. The Priestly writer has no traditions about sibling rivalry at all. To conclude, we will explore the differences among these traditions and the reasons for them.
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“Parting of the Prayers”: How Heb 11 and Didache 10 Inform the Development of the Apostolic Constitutions 7.32–33 and the Amidah (Shemoneh Esrei)
Program Unit: Jewish Christianity / Christian Judaism
Andrew W. Higginbotham, Ivy Tech Community College - Lawrenceburg Riverfront
This paper will examine structural linkages and affinities between the Hebrews list of exemplary figures and rabbinic prayers (Mishnah Ta’anit, Amidah) with Didache 10 and Apostolic Constitutions 7.32-33. Some of these passages have been compared fruitfully before, but this study will trace connections in defense of the thesis that liturgical practices and themes drifted freely within the Jewish-Christian milieu of the first centuries of the Common Era. A structuralist approach, focusing mainly on repeated biblical figures and themes, will seek to elucidate several elements of the “Parting of the Prayers”. First, while Did. 10 has affinities with the Model Prayer (Matt 6/Luke 11) and its repetition in Did. 7, the thanksgiving prayers of Did. 10 show closer similarity to Heb 11 and the seven benedictions of m.Taan 1:4. These in turn have resonances with Apos. Con. 7.32-33. The “pull” that the “list of faith” seems to have made in these liturgical communities is significant and needs discussion. Second, the thematic units of these documents then map to the Amidah (Shemoneh Esrei) prayers. The order and form of prayers thus appears to persist in both Jewish and Christian practice for centuries. Finally, the alignment of the thematic units across these documents then hints at an answer concerning how the “Eighteen Prayers” expanded, particularly with regard to the Birkat HaMinim and the separation (by exclusion) of Jew and Christian in this period.
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Archaeology and Text at Qumran: Archive and Oeuvre in 11 Caves
Program Unit: Book History and Biblical Literatures
Andrew W Higginbotham, Ivy Tech Community College - Lawrenceburg Riverfront
This paper responds to the dual valence of “archaeology of text” as both the physical unburying of material remains of textual materials and as the Foucauldian unpacking of the episteme underlying a collection of related textual witnesses.The field of this paper is the finds at Qumran and the lens of this paper is “caves as canons or collections.” This paper builds off of prior work to classify the materials found in the 11 caves near the Qumran site in relation to each other as variously-overlapping corpora of texts. The argument of that work was that the caves are linked but independent, based on linguistic and compositional differences between the collections. As “archaeology” is to be used here as a valent term, susceptible to mixing and mingling of both of its senses, the idea of Qumran as “archive” will also be made labile. Each cave is both a set of texts found there and a set of literary and linguistic relations embodied in the texts. Questions of Qumran as genizah, as archive, as oeuvre, as witness(es) will be explored. The prior work of Carol Newsom (The Self as Symbolic Space) and the recent contributions of Molly Zahn and her respondents (Metatron 1:1, “Ancient Hebrew Literature Beyond ‘The Bible’: Part One”) will serve as conversation partners in this work. This paper hopes to open a renewed discussion of how textual finds, in conversation with their physical and rhetorical contexts, develop our understanding of the conversations that they preserve and embodied.
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Jonah in the Belly of the Wicker Man: Biblical Prophets and Folk Horror
Program Unit: Bible and Film
Ryan S. Higgins, Jewish Theological Seminary of America
Robin Wood has theorized that “the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses.” Horror films dramatize the reemergence of the repressed, “the happy ending (when it exists), typically signifying the restoration of repression.” Wood’s is just one of many theories of the horror genre, but it has remarkable explanatory power for folk horror films, whose protagonists often represent an oppressive and orthodox modernity suddenly challenged by its pagan antecedents. Although folk horror was not popularly recognized as a sub-genre until 2010, the celebrated “unholy trinity” is half a century old, consisting of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). Older still is folk horror’s central conflict, and it is no surprise to find it in texts that comprise the scriptures of every good witchfinder: the Hebrew Bible. The biblical prophets in particular, like some folk horror heroes, are proponents of a “legitimate” religion that seeks to annihilate the persistent, heterodox practices of the Other.
Refining the sub-genre, Adam Scovell has recently proposed a chain of elements that constitute a folk horror film: landscape, isolation, skewed belief systems and morality, and happening/summoning. This paper locates the links of Scovell’s folk horror chain in the Hebrew Bible’s Former and Latter Prophets. Particular attention is given to the book of Jonah. With its urban setting, self-isolating hero, pious pagans, and divine anticlimax, Jonah subverts the conventions of folk horror. But the narrative is still a nightmare for Jonah and the readers he represents: like the doomed Sergeant Howie keeping his appointment with the Wicker Man, Jonah burns at dawn and discovers that God is not strictly on his side.
A dialogue between prophetic texts and folk horror films reveals the biblical writers’ rhetorical use of terror, pits triumphalist biblical religion against the hauntology of paganism, and provides a new lens for psychoanalytic interpretation of the prophets. In turn, reading biblical texts as folk horror both expands and affirms the genre’s conventions, shows how the object of horror’s repression might be a dominant cultural institution, and suggests how horror films might depict and problematize a cinematically absent God.
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The Dark Side of the Mirror: Divine Mirroring in the New Testament and Beyond
Program Unit: Biblical Exegesis from Eastern Orthodox Perspectives
Rainer Hirsch-Luipold, Universität Bern - Université de Berne
This paper reevaluates the (theological and anthropological) meaning of the mirror passages in Paul’s Corinthian correspondence (1Cor 13,12; 2Cor 3,18) in the light of contemporary religio-philosophical reflections about mirrors: the images they produce, their ontological status and their hermeneutical value. We will discuss bright, tarnished and distorted mirrors, convex and concave ones, but also the Pythia as God’s voice, the moon reflecting the light of the sun, or extraordinary human beings exemplifying divine virtues. Where in all this can we best place Paul’s enigmatic thoughts about divine mirroring?
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Blessed Assurance against Contested Manumission in John 8:35–36
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Jason Hitchcock, Marquette University
Jesus’s statements in the climactic exchanges of John 8:31–59 have puzzled both his literary interlocutors and contemporary readers. The longstanding consensus is that vv. 34–38 lack an organizing principle other than the keywords “slave” and “son” (Brown, 1966). V. 35 has been singled out as an independent Parable of Slave and Son, awkwardly inserted by a secondary editor (Dodd, 1963; Brown, 1966). On this theory, the ill-fitting v. 35 is comparable to Synoptic traditions which draw a simple contrast between slavery and sonship (Mark 12:1–11 // Matt 21:33–46 // Luke 20:9–19; Matt 17:25–26; cf. also Heb 3:5–6), and most commentators identify the “son” of the parable as Christ himself. Yet this identification renders the logical connection between vv. 35 and 36 opaque: why should the son’s permanent residence entail that, “If the son sets you free, you will really (ontōs) be free”? Moreover, several considerations attenuate the partition theory: (1) No extant manuscript of John 8 is missing v. 35; (2) the permanent position of a son is a poignant illustration in a dispute which invokes the sperma Abraam (8:33, 37); (3) the textual variants of vv. 34–36—e.g., the removal of tēs hamartias and avoidance of sin as personified master—are more easily explained by the presence of v. 35 and its neutral/positive construal of a household; (4) v. 36 begins with the coordinating conjunction oun, whose purpose disappears in the absence of v. 35, as v. 36 makes little sense as an inference from v. 34.
I propose that vv. 35–36 constitute a parabolē (Aristotle, Rhet. 2.20), a rhetorical example from common human experience, with the word “son” (huios) functioning as double entendre. The son is both Jesus himself, one able to set others free (cf. vv. 31–32) and also heir to the household of God, a permanent authority who guarantees a slave’s manumission. Taking vv. 35–36 together as a parabolē requires no textual emendation and preserves the logic of the Johannine Jesus’s argument. Moreover, I demonstrate the cultural currency of the parabolē by adducing P. Petr. 12.3, a will in which the testator frees a slave woman and her son and prohibits their re-enslavement in the future by the testator’s surviving relatives. This text illustrates the social dynamic in which the status and security of a freedman is derived from his or her relation to the household’s heir, an individual who would eventually be in a position to treat the slave harshly or even challenge a prior manumission. Thus, if manumitted by the heir himself, the slave is truly free.
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God’s Righteousness versus Jewish Civil Fairness: Paul’s Transformation of the Concept and Practice of Civil Justice for Christian Community in Rome
Program Unit: Pauline Theology
Sin Pan Ho, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Hong Kong
In Romans 2, Paul echoes the concept of civil justice as fairness in the Torah to illustrate the judgement of God over law-breakers. On the other hand, his understanding of justice is transformed by the Christ event.
In this paper, I argue that the righteousness language in Romans 10:1-4 both echo and critique the concept of fairness in the civil realm inherited from the Jewish Torah tradition. Paul identifies unmerited grace with God’s righteousness and criticizes Jewish civil fairness and vindication as “their own righteousness”. Paul’s understanding of the Christ event transforms the self-understanding of Christ community in civil society from an oppressed community to a grace-giving community. Romans 13:1-10 is an application of grace-based justice over fairness-based civil justice. Instead of casting out the hope of vindication due to Claudius’ expulsion of the Jews in Rome in AD49 and deem themselves as a victimized group, Paul applies the grace-giving duty as God’s righteousness in the civil realm. Paul urges the Roman church to be a dutiful group. He reckons to pay taxes as an act of grace-giving act “loving the neighbours as themselves”, for the governing authorities are neighbours of the church in the capital city Rome. As a result, the letter to the Romans depicts an imperial-friendly Paul from the perspective of first readers.
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Ethnic Boundaries: Inclusion and Exclusion in 1 and 2 Maccabees
Program Unit: Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature
Jana Hock, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
Ethnic boundaries are a defining factor of social life. Who belongs to a group and who does not? The answer to this question provides information about which person receives which treatment and which amount of support, and has which possibilities. Ethnic groups determine by their self-definition who belongs to them and who does not; in doing so, they define a social boundary that does not necessarily have to coincide with the geographic boundary. Therefore, geographical and social boundaries are not inevitably identical.
In telling the story about the expansion of the Hasmoneans’ power up to their assumption of the office of high priest, the First Book of Maccabees refers to the Judean group mostly as ‘Israel’. Besides, the Second Book of Maccabees primarily focuses on the prehistory and the early years of the Maccabean resistance movement under the Maccabean brother Judas, whilst it denotes the Judeans as ‘Ioudaioi’. In both books, there are mechanisms of inclusion in and exclusion and from the Judean group, whether the group is called ‘Israel’ or ‘Ioudaioi’.
In order to show how inclusion in and exclusion from the Maccabean group work in 1 and 2 Maccabees, two examples for each book will be given (1 Macc 5:9–36, 55–62; 2 Macc 12:3–7, 14:18–25).
This contribution aims to give deeper insight into these processes of inclusion and exclusion in the First and Second Books of Maccabees, in order to elaborate how inclusion in and exclusion from the Judean group works. Of particular interest are the questions of who belongs to the Judean group, which member promote and sign responsible for inclusion and exclusion, and how, therefore, the Judean group self-identifies.
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Jesus’s Obfuscatory Speech and the Motif of Misunderstanding in the Fourth Gospel
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Lee Douglas Hoffer, University of Chicago Divinity School
From the earliest reception of the Fourth Gospel, interpreters have recognized the distinctive character of the Johannine Jesus’s discursive style, a tapestry woven of double-entendres, figurative expressions, and parables lucid only to the initiated (Meeks, 1972). The enigmatic features of Jesus’s discourses provoke not only the Gospel’s readers but also the audiences within the narrative, who frequently express their bewilderment at his language and misunderstand his claims. While numerous scholars have acknowledged this motif of misunderstanding, most have not noted its relation to the protagonist’s peculiar parlance, focusing instead on the role of misunderstandings in prompting Jesus’s elaboration of his point or the putative effects of the motif on the reader (Culpepper, 1983, 152–165). I contend that, rather than functioning primarily to provide discursive segues, the motif of misunderstanding functions together with Jesus’s perplexing parole as part of the Gospel’s explanation for Jewish unbelief in Jesus’s Messianic status. On this reading, the Johannine Jesus employs equivocal terms, cryptic phrases, and complex metaphors in order to confound his audiences, and the instances of misunderstanding represent the intended result of his obfuscatory speech. Using the Markan Jesus as a foil, whose explicit obfuscatory aims shape his own discursive patterns (Mark 4:10–12), I explore three points of overlap between Jesus’s portrayals in these two Gospels, points which indicate that the Johannine Jesus also seeks his audience’s confusion rather than comprehension. First, I compare the use of Isa 6:9–10 in Mark 4:12 and John 12:37–40, noting how both shape their citation of this text to portray Jesus as the Isaianic herald who hardens the people with his message. Second, I argue that the Markan assertion of Jesus’s exclusive use of parables in teaching outsiders (Mark 4:33–34) parallels the Johannine characterization of Jesus’s puzzling speech as en paroimiais (“with figurative language;” John 16:25). Indeed, Jesus is chastised for his failure to speak “clearly” (en parrēsia), to make his meaning transparent (John 10:24; 16:29), and in the Farewell Discourse, he contrasts his own prior mode of expression en paroimiais with his future communication en parrēsia with his disciples. Finally, I treat two short, representative passages that illustrate this dynamic of obfuscatory discourse, audience misunderstanding, and the reticence of Jesus to clarify his intent. In John 2:18–22, Jesus predicts for hoi Ioudaioi the destruction and reconstruction of “this temple,” and they naturally take the deictic houtos to refer to the edifice in whose shadow they stand (John 2:14–17). Yet Jesus does not correct their misapprehension, and his terse communication and the context of the scene renders their accurate discernment of his intent impossible. Similarly, when Nicodemus misunderstands Jesus’s reference to being “born from above” as a physical birth (“born again”), Jesus merely chastises him for his failure to understand rather than clarifying his referents. I conclude that these aspects of Jesus’s speech in the Fourth Gospel’s contribute to his portrayal as the Isaianic agent of Israel’s hardening and paints the Jewish people’s unbelief as the product of providence.
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The Transatlantic Afterlife of 2 Esdras/4Ezra
Program Unit: Pseudepigrapha
Karina Martin Hogan, Fordham University
Fourth Ezra (2 Esdras 3-14) is the only Jewish apocalypse included in the Christian Apocrypha, unless you count Greek Daniel as an apocryphal book. Its inclusion is sometimes attributed to the framing of 4 Ezra by two shorter Christian prophetic/apocalyptic works at the beginning (5 Ezra) and end (6 Ezra). The textual and reception history of 4 Ezra suggests otherwise. While the Christian appropriation of key elements of 4 Ezra in 5 Ezra played a role in the “Christianization” of 4 Ezra, its inclusion in Christian Bibles in the West, whether among the Apocrypha or in an appendix to the Vulgate after the Council of Trent, was primarily due to the expansive Old Testament canon in the Gutenberg Bible. In many Orthodox churches, 4 Ezra was also included in the Old Testament without the Christian additions (5 and 6 Ezra). It was transmitted in Syriac, Ethiopic, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic and Arabic Christian Bibles. Moreover, with the exception of a few verses of 5 Ezra that were incorporated into Christian liturgy, the Jewish apocalypse was far more influential on Christian history, nowhere more than in the Iberian Peninsula. After tracing the textual history that led to the inclusion of 4 Esdras in the Gutenberg Bible, this paper will focus on the influence of 4 Ezra on the Spanish colonization of Latin America, beginning with Christopher Columbus.
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Beauty, Thrown to the Beasts: Thecla’s Lawless Asexuality
Program Unit: Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative
Jimmy Hoke, Luther College
“And when Thecla said this, Tryphaena mourned, considering that such beauty was to be thrown to the beasts” (Thecla 29). Thecla’s refusal to have sex presents a problem throughout the Acts of Thecla: she is repeatedly threatened with death—and mourned—for her rejection of marriage to/sex with men, a byproduct of her profession to remain chaste. Although scholars usually frame Thecla’s refusal of sex as rooted in devotion to Christian celibacy, this paper assumes Thecla finds in Christianity a space where she can grow fully into her asexuality. Starting from this assumption, I analyze the asexual politics that Thecla’s actions—and others’ reactions to them—reveal. Thecla’s asexuality exposes political anxieties around the failure of Roman “compulsory sexuality” (applying the term coined/theorized by Emens 2014 and Gupta 2015). Tryphaena’s worries of throwing away beauty emphasize how compulsory sexuality renders asexuality wasteful. It is a failure to be (re)productive.
Emotions and affect drive these reactions to Thecla’s asexuality. Anxieties around Thecla’s asexuality provoke fear and death threats. Theocleia remarks how her daughter is “gripped by a new desire and a fearful passion” (Thecla 9). Later, she howls, “Burn the lawless one!” (Thecla 20). Sentencing Thecla to death is an (unsuccessful) attempt to exterminate this “new” (kainos) and fearsome threat to Roman compulsory sexuality. These affective anxieties fray at the fantasy of the good life under Roman rule. The affective attachments to Rome’s compulsively sexual “good life” echo Lauren Berlant’s rendering of (cruel) optimism—echoes that are also prominent in Ela Pryzbylo’s summoning of “asexuality without optimism.” Unoptimistic asexuality abstains from queer happiness and “pride-full” identities that characterize LGBTIA2Q+ politics oriented toward inclusion.
After unveiling the affective anxieties that Thecla’s asexuality reveals within Rome’s compulsory sexuality, I interpret the fictional narrative of Thecla’s near-martyrdom alongside Przybylo’s asexual reading of contemporary “lesbian bed death” tropes. In so doing, I align with feminist/queer work on Thecla (including that of Burrus, Kotrosits, and Matthews) and add ace politics, orientations, and resonances into the historical conversation. The “death drive” of unoptimistically asexual lesbian bed death, I argue, recalls the death threats toward which Thecla’s asexuality drives her. By letting Thecla embrace a “lawless asexuality” that refuses to back down in the face of tears and death threats, I accentuate the wasteful refusal of productivity that Thecla’s “asexual Christianity” signals. The narrative’s presentation of women-driven asexual Christianity stands in distinction to the compulsively sexual (hypermasculine) politics of second-century canonical Christianity (especially as found in 1 Timothy). Ultimately, I conclude, the Acts of Thecla musters a lawless asexuality without optimism attempts to shred both the promises of sex and asexual/Christian attachments to fantasies of the good life that are predicated on productivity, wealth, happiness, and successful martyrdom.
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Reconstructing Thessalonian Millenarianism at Wounded Knee
Program Unit: Scripture and Paul
T. Christopher Hoklotubbe, Cornell College
In The Thessalonian Correspondence: Pauline Rhetoric and Millenarian Piety, Robert Jewett argues that reading the Thessalonian correspondence in juxtaposition with a “millenarian model” provides a plausible framework for reconstructing the socio-rhetorical situation of the Thessalonian ekklesia, especially for explaining some Thessalonians’ abandoning of their work, ecstatic experiences, and sexual freedom. I suggest that by adding another millenarian analogue to his model, namely the Ghost Dance movement inspired by the Paiute prophet, Wovoka (which may have even been inspired in part by 1 Thessalonians), helps us to further attune our historical imagination to how anti-colonial/imperial and ethnic concerns may have animated the eschatological vision of the Thessalonians and Paul. In this essay, I offer a social-rhetorical reading of the text that privileges indigenous experiences in its attempt to reconstruct the colonial/imperial situation of Paul and his Thessalonian audience.
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Nock and Weber: Possibilities and Limits of Typological Analysis
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
Carl Holladay, Emory University
This paper proposes to re-examine Nock's Conversion using Weber's typological analysis. it will explore to what degree, if any, Weber's construal of "world," asceticism, and mysticism can inform Nock's construal of conversion as a constant type of religious experience.
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Characters, Characterization, and Authorial Purpose in Acts
Program Unit: Book of Acts
Carl Holladay, Emory University
This paper explores some of the ways in which characters and events are portrayed in Acts, and specifically how such characterizations reflect authorial purpose. Should the narrative of Acts be read as though character portrayal is part of the author’s literary purpose? And, if so, can this be linked to authorial intent? Does the “intentional fallacy” also apply to literary characterization? These questions will be explored by looking at some specific texts, not only the portrayal of certain people such as Peter and Paul, but also certain events such as the perceived “Roman portrayal” of Philippi (ch. 16) and the “Greek portrayal” of Athens (ch. 17).
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At the Intersection of the Contextual Approach and Form Criticism
Program Unit: Comparative Method in Biblical Studies
Drew S. Holland, Martin Methodist College
This essay examines the relationship between form criticism and William Hallo's contextual approach. Hallo suggested that literary studies might produce a fruitful means of comparison and contrast across ancient literary texts. So this essay examines the most recent insights of form criticism to study how this discipline might inform contextual studies. It looks to the primary form critical concepts of form, genre, and Sitz im Leben to determine how these features of form criticism (especially as today's form critics view them) provide a helpful method for investigating the relationship between biblical literature and texts from the ancient Near East.
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The Enuma Elish, the Memphite Theology, and Genesis 1: A Contextual Trialogue
Program Unit: Egyptology and Ancient Israel
Drew S Holland, Martin Methodist College
This paper attempts to set a broader contextual framework for the ancient Near Eastern influences upon Genesis 1 by examining its literary form in comparison with and contrast to both the Enuma Elish and the Memphite Theology. This approach takes up a suggestion from Brent Strawn to expand the cognitive environment of a focus text beyond a single conversation partner. In addition, this paper will also briefly consider the creation traditions of both Mesopotamia and Egypt, of which the Enuma Elish and the Memphite Theology are prominent representatives.
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Looking the Part: Body Type and Criminality in Two Early Christian Narratives
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Kelly Holob, University of Chicago
Robbers are not an uncommon feature in both stories about biblical figures (apocrypha) and stories about later holy people (hagiography). For example, there are stories about the robber crucified next to Jesus and narratives about brigands who try to rob and are sometimes converted by the Desert Fathers. However, besides acknowledging their sinful nature, scholars rarely examine robbers themselves, though they may increase our understanding of conventions that govern narratives featuring these figures. In this paper I compare the portrayal of robbers in John and the Robber, a relatively understudied apocryphal text despite its composition by Clement of Alexandria and presence in Eusebius’s Church History, and Sozomen’s account of Moses the Robber in his Church History, about a holy man who converts from banditry to monasticism. I argue that in these texts, the robber and his body take center stage.
My analysis of these narratives demonstrates that both characters’ particular body type predisposes them to crime. The problem these narratives pose is how to overcome this predisposition, and their bodily nature, through Christian practice. How could paying attention to bodily features in both genres help us further our understanding of how characters work in both apocrypha and hagiographies? What narrative problems are produced by their bodies, and how do they overcome them? The presence of such tropes across these texts and time periods suggests that apocryphal texts and hagiographies both participate in a common discourse of criminality.
In John and the Robber, the apostle John places a certain youth in the care of a bishop, but the bishop eventually grows lax, allowing the youth little by little to become a bandit chief, from which station John later saves him. Though previous scholarship argues that the youth’s turn to robbery was due to greed, the narrative makes clear that John first became concerned about him because of the youth’s “fit” (ἱκανόν) and “handsome” (ἀστεῖον) body and “hot” (θερμόν) soul, which predisposed him toward a life that exploits his physical qualities. John diagnosed that problem when he first saw him and helped him finally overcome his propensity at the end of the narrative, with fasts among other methods. The youth’s bodily qualities, furthermore, fit in with what an ancient reader would expect of a violent criminal, especially a bandit chief, as is evidenced from Apuleius’s Metamorphoses.
Moses also fits this stereotype. However, Sozomen, rather than portraying the former robber as simply overcoming it, instead cleverly shows him using his robber-body in monastic tasks. Like a robber, he sneaks around houses at night, though it is to fill up the water pitchers of his fellow monks. Like Clement’s robber, Moses is very strong in body, so much so that painstaking askesis could barely make a dent in his strength. He even displays his amazing strength against robbers, capturing and delivering them to his follow monks. This observation allows us moreover to nuance the scholarly claim that in other accounts of Moses his black skin contributes to his natural inclination toward sin and crime.
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Desire without Mercy: Sexual Renunciation in the Acts of Thomas and His Wonderworking Skin
Program Unit: Christian Apocrypha
Jonathan D. Holste, University of Virginia
The Acts of Thomas and His Wonderworking Skin (Acts Thom. Skin) follows the Apostle’s missionary activities in India. The core of the narrative centers on Thomas’s founding of two churches—the first in the household of Arsenoë, the second in the former temple of Kentera. In both episodes, sexual renunciation features prominently. In the first, Arsenoë’s newfound Christian faith leads her to reject her husband’s sexual advances. This begins a sequence of events that include Thomas’s flaying, Arsenoë’s suicide, and the Apostle’s use of his flayed skin to restore her miraculously to life. This use of Thomas’s skin to raise the dead also plays a key role in the second episode, and so too does sexual renunciation. Thomas’s work in Kentera begins with the Apostle bringing six brothers (and several others) back to life. The governor had killed them all because the oldest had backed out of his engagement to the governor’s daughter. All of the events of this episode are set in motion by the oldest brother’s vision in which Jesus exhorts him to avoid marriage and remain chaste. In both episodes sexual renunciation serves to advance the plot of Acts Thom. Skin, and this paper examines this narrative function. The significance of sexual renunciation, however, extends beyond a few central characters and key moments in the narrative. Rather, in this paper I argue that sexual renunciation is part and parcel of Christian conversion in Acts Thom. Skin.
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Resolving the Ambiguities of the Oaths in Ps 44:21 and Job 31:5
Program Unit: Biblical Law
Shalom E. Holtz, Yeshiva University
Recent scholarship on ancient Near Eastern trial procedure and its significance for biblical interpretation identifies oaths in Ps 44:21 and Job 31:5. In both verses, the speakers invoke a well-attested legal procedure to support a claim of innocence. Two interpretive questions remain unresolved: do these verses, in fact, contain oaths, and, if so, what are the oaths' textual parameters? The first question stems from the similarity between oaths and conditional sentences, in general, in Biblical Hebrew. Otherwise unmarked conditional sentences might not be oaths, at all; they might simply be conditional sentences. In this reading, each of the two verses contains the protasis of a conditional sentence, and the apodoses, expressing particularly judicial consequences, occur in the following verses (Ps 44:22; Job 31:6). This presentation, however, will read the verses' surrounding contexts alongside comparative evidence from Mesopotamian trial records to confirm the interpretation of both verses as oaths. Doing so raises the second interpretive question, which stems from the possibility that oaths can consist of fully articulated conditional sentences, with protases and apodoses (such as Ps 137:5–6), but can just as well appear as truncated sentences, containing only explicit protases with only implicit apodoses (such as in 2 Kgs 9:26). This creates ambiguity in the reading of Ps 44:21–22 and Job 31:5–6. Are both pairs of verses fully articulated oaths, with the protases, expressing the sworn claim, in the first verses (Ps 44:21; Job 31:5) and the consequences for claiming falsely expressed in the second verses (Ps 44:22; Job 31:6)? Some recent readers of these texts have adopted this possibility, and understand the notices that "God shall surely investigate" (Ps 44:22) and "God shall weigh me on the scales of righteousness" (Job 31:6) as the consequences invoked by the speakers should their claims turn out to be false. This presentation will argue for the alternative reading, in which the first verses contain truncated oaths, while the second verses actually contain declarations that stand independent of the preceding oaths. The judicial actions mentioned in Ps 44:22 and Job 31:6 ("investigation" and "weighing on the scales of righteousness") are different from the more punitive consequences in other fully articulated oaths. Moreover, in Ps 44:21–22, at least, the presence of the word hălō militates against reading these verses as an oath with fully articulated consequences. Although the word hălō can occur at the beginning of an apodosis (Obad 1:5), the example of Neh 13:25–26 suggests that, in oaths, it marks a separate declaration. Thus, on contextual and grammatical grounds, the truncated oaths in Ps 44:21 and Job 31:6 are followed by separate challenges to God, as judge.
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Scribal Midrash in Rabbinic Literature: The Ten Sons of Haman (Esth 9:7–9)
Program Unit: Midrash
Jonathan Homrighausen, Duke University
The Bavli (Meg. 16b), the Yerushalmi (Meg. 3:8), and Massekhet Soferim (13:2-4) all record a scribal practice for writing the names of the sons of Haman (Esth 9:7-9) in a special two-column layout in the liturgical Esther scroll. This halakhic tradition is still followed today, yet it remains understudied in scholarly literature. This scribal midrash concerning the ten sons of Haman suggests deliberate parallels between Exodus and Esther, between Pesach and Purim, through the lens of midrashic intertextuality (Boyarin 1994). This cluster of intertexts was not only written, but also seen, chanted, and heard in the multisensory performance of the megillah at Purim.
The language with which the rabbis describe the scribal layout is telling; they contrast the ‘half-brick on half-brick and brick on brick’ layout of the names of the sons of Haman with the ‘brick on half-brick and half-brick on brick’ layout of the Shirat haYam (Exod 15). The latter is more structurally sound than the former, a fact known in antiquity (e.g., Vitruvius, De Architectura 2.4.3). Just as Exodus 15 proclaims God’s lasting kingship in place of Pharaoh (e.g. Exod 15:18), so the rabbis read Esther as proclaiming God’s kingship amidst diaspora in foreign lands. This Purim-Pesach connection draws on the Book of Esther’s note that Haman issued his decree the day before Pesach (3:12), as well as the Haman-Amalek typology already in the megillah. This parallel, subtly traceable in the Greek Additions, becomes a staple of rabbinic interpretation of the Book of Esther in both Targums, both Talmuds, and Esther Rabbah.
However, this cluster of intertextual allusions is not only written, but performed at Purim. Both the Bavli (Meg. 16b) and Massekhet Soferim (13:2-4) also mention a tradition in which these sons’ names must be recited in a single breath during the reading of the megillah. Thus, the scribe’s written performance of this midrash in the word-image interplay of the scroll parallels the cantor’s oral performance of the ten sons of Haman in Purim. While most late antique sources on Purim performance suggest that this was a mockery of Haman’s sons—gallows humor, quite literally—one late antique piyyut, “Zeresh’s Lament,” suggests the presence of an opposite tradition in which Haman’s sons were also the victims of their father’s evil.
In sum, the performance of the names of the ten sons of Haman in late antiquity suggests the myriad ways in which sacred texts as material objects did cultural and ritual work, and how writing was an act invested with significance beyond mere textual transmission. It also suggests, following Laura Lieber’s recent work on text, ritual, and performance in Jewish late antiquity, that hearing, seeing, reading, and singing must all be considered in tandem as embodied performance.
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The Term “Diaspora” in Jas 1:1 in the Light of Hellenistic Philosophical Discourses on Exile
Program Unit: Letters of James, Peter, and Jude
Sung Soo Hong, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
The term “diaspora” in Jas 1:1 has been interpreted in relation to, in the words of Darian Lockett, “the covenantal context of sin-punishment-return.” Richard Bauckham holds that “whereas in James the word [“diaspora”] is used to identify the addressees but then plays scarcely any further part in the argument of the letter, in 1 Peter the Diaspora belongs to a potent theological metaphorical complex which is developed through the letter as a way of interpreting Christian existence in a pagan society.” How likely is it that the author of James mentions the Diaspora at the outset only to ignore it for the rest of the writing? Or, is it that the Diaspora is in fact “a potent theological metaphorical complex” in James and yet we have missed it as we have paid attention to the sin-punishment-restoration cycle embedded in the Jewish Diaspora letters and other Jewish texts? The author of James does not say that the audience is in the “Diasporic” situation due to the collective sins of Israel such as systematic injustices and idolatry. Rather, their situation is described as one in which “various trials/temptations” befall (peripiptō, 1:2) the audience. At the same time, it is “your own desire” (1:14) that leads “you” to the temptations/trials, and even to “death” (1:15). Is there any way to relate the “Diasporic” situation of the audience within James to the author’s initial exhortation to (moral) perfection (1:4)? This paper argues that Hellenistic philosophical discourses on exile help us understand both the “Diasporic” situation of the audience and the author’s exhortation to perfection in James. In Hellenistic moral philosophies, “adverse” circumstances, especially exile, are considered opportunities for moral progress toward perfection (cf. Fitzgerald’s study of the peristasis catalogues). The first part of this paper will review briefly the contributions and limitations of the studies that have compared James with the Jewish Diaspora letters. The second part will examine Hellenistic philosophical discourses on exile (φυγή, fuga, exilium), examining Diogenes, Teles the Cynic teacher, Musonius Rufus, Seneca, and Favorinus. The third part will discuss a Jewish example, namely, Philo’s take on the “exilic” situation (especially in “That Every Good Man Is Free”). The fourth and last part will discuss the “Diasporic” situation and the idea of moral progress within James in the light of foregoing discussions.
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The Elites in Third-Century Judea: A Social Mapping
Program Unit: Economics in the Biblical World
Sylvie Honigman, Tel Aviv University
The period ranging from Alexander the Great’s conquest through the Diadochi’s wars to the Ptolemaic domination on the Southern Levant was eventful in military and political terms. We may surmise that both the turmoil and the imposition of the Ptolemaic order further entailed far-ranging changes in the social structures of the elites in Judea alongside continuities. In this paper I will examine the relationship between empire and elites and its dynamic impact on the balance between various categories of elites: high priest, temple personnel, personnel in the royal administration, and the so-called strongmen documented in the Zenon papyri. I will advance two basic claims, namely, that changes were neither stable nor linear, and that we need to distinguish between structural changes in the state apparatus—which were real—with a change in the identity of the elite families. To this end, I will use recent studies on the relationship between empire and native elites in the ancient Mediterranean and comparative material from Ptolemaic Egypt and Tel Kedesh in Phoenicia.
Regarding the high priest, I will examine evidence and comparative material suggesting that he first emerged as the local leader in the era of the Diadochi wars, which resulted in a political void, but his powers were curtailed to a significant extant with the establishment of the Ptolemaic order. Second, I will question the view that the setting up of the Ptolemaic administration together with the increased monetization of the economy entailed the emergence of new, secular elites who were socially distinct from the priestly elites linked to the temple. Likewise, as I will show through the case-study of the Tobiad family, the opposition between priestly families and strongmen may have been overemphasized. The claim that the boundaries between these various elite groups were far less rigid than it has often been argued has potential bearings on our understanding of the social location of texts in this period and the subsequent era.
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Exegeting the Prophets in the Donatist Communion
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Jesse Hoover, Baylor University
For this year’s CNAC session on “Prophets and Prophecy in North African Christianity,” I would like to present a new addition to the field of known Donatist theologians: the anonymous author of a capitula series over the books of the Major Prophets. In previous CNAC sessions, I have discussed the significance of surviving Donatist capitula sets: as terse outlines of the biblical text which function analogously to section divisions in modern writings, they allow us a brief window into a Donatist exegetical world that exists beyond the highlights of the polemical struggles encapsulated in the writings of Optatus, Tyconius, or Augustine. In this session, I will defend and extend the argument that four of these capitula sets—those covering the biblical books of Isaiah, Jeremiah/Baruch, Ezekiel, and Daniel—are the work of a single Donatist author writing in the late fourth/early fifth century.
With this basic point established, I will then use these four capitula series to examine what we can tell about the author’s biblical text, theological interests, and exegetical strategies when it comes to the Major Prophets. To offer a relevant example, for instance, on the basis of Ezech. caps. 95, 97, and 98 we learn that the author believes that the Jews will be restored to their homeland during the last days –an important theological (and indeed social) argument that we would not encounter if we studied only those Donatist writings directly relating to the schism. I will further compare the exegetical assumptions made by this author in his analysis of the Major Prophets with contemporary 4th-5th century commentaries outside of the Donatist communion as a way to showcase which elements were common to wider late antique Christianity and which were unique to him. My ultimate point in this presentation is to establish the anonymous author of the capitula series as a Donatist voice in his own right, one that can help us contextualize the beliefs and assumptions of the North African sect.
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Is the Holiness Code Law?
Program Unit: Biblical Law
Matthias Hopf, Universität Zürich
It is common to speak of Lev 17–26 as the “Holiness Code”, or as the “Heiligkeitsgesetz” in German. In spite of this labelling since August Klostermann, it is far from clear that the Holiness Code (HC) actually represents “law”. Just as with regard to the Deuteronomic Code (DC), this issue is highly debated and poses several important questions. Among those are: Does this designation need HC to be ius (i. e. historically applied provisions), or does it suffice to say that it constitutes leges (utilizing Yale scholar Leopold Pospíšil’s differentiation)? Yet, even if only the latter, does that textual corpus as a whole represent a collection of leges at all? In fact, many regulations are often called “apodictic”, the identification of which as “legal” has been cast doubt upon by Erhard Gerstenberger, and others. Actually, several of those passages seem to be outright ethical and not strictly legal. This paper will offer answers to these and further questions regarding the nature of HC, i. e. whether, and, more importantly, in what ways the designation “law” might apply. For this, the paper will differentiate between an emic, and an etic level of appraisal. In other words, it will both aim at carving out the “self-perception” of these texts, as well as at establishing an assessment based on an inter-culturally valid toolset. Accordingly, the paper will resort to a multi-pronged approach, mainly drawing on methodological, and hermeneutical insights taken from the anthropology of law (Leopold Pospíšil, Wolfgang Fikentscher, Fernanda Pirie), but also revisiting semantic, and form critical arguments. As a result, a nuanced, and differentiated picture of HC as some sort of “artificial law” will emerge, i. e. an intentionally shaped textual body incorporating legal, cultic, ethical, and further elements, but all that in the guise of “law”.
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Down with the Past! (?) Some Recent Advances on Biblical Hebrew wayyiqṭol
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Aaron D. Hornkohl, University of Cambridge
Several recent proposals regarding the Biblical Hebrew (BH) wayyiqṭol contest established consensus views: (a) Robar (2013; 2015, 78–112) argues against a core past perfective meaning for wayyiqṭol; (b) Khan (2021) challenges the notion that the development of wayyiqṭol is adequately explained via reference to the Proto-Semitic past perfective yaqtul and the encroachment of BH qaṭal into the past perfective sphere; (c) Kantor (2020) and Khan (2021) contend that wayyiqṭol’s characteristic gemination is secondary, a relatively late orthoepic means of disambiguating it from weyiqṭol. While the combined force of the above studies (and several others) arguably heralds a paradigm shift, they also raise a host of questions, not least, how the Iron Age classical Hebrew verbal system functioned with an undifferentiated w-yiqṭol. The present paper reports on an initial survey and exploration of some of the ramifications of the emergent view.
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Spelling-Pronunciation Dissonance in the Masoretic Tradition and Beyond: 2ms ךָ- and תָ- Re-revisited (Again)
Program Unit: National Association of Professors of Hebrew
Aaron D. Hornkohl, University of Cambridge
It has long been known that dissonance between the Masoretic consonantal tradition and the Tiberian reading tradition exceeds explicit cases of ketiv-qere and acknowledged instances of qere perpetuum. The written and reading traditions are related, but independent, affording access to more than a single tradition. Divergences between the two are generally (rightly) attributed to secondary development in the reading tradition, sometimes assumed to date as late as the medieval period. Often ignored are affinities between the Tiberian vocalisation tradition and other Second Temple traditions—to say nothing of earlier evidence of phenomena eventually standardized in the pronunciation tradition. The present study illustrates the complex diachronic relationship between various traditions of ancient Hebrew consonantal and vocalic evidence by revisiting one of the most oft-studied cases of apparent Masoretic consonantal-vocalic mismatch: 2ms ךָ- and תָ-. Innovative aspects of the study include maximal incorporation of evidence from various traditions and chronolects, more granular examination of evidence from the Judean Desert and Iron Age epigraphy, and integration of the 2ms issue within the broader framework of dissonance in the combined Tiberian written-reading tradition.
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Progress towards the ECM of the Pauline Epistles
Program Unit: Novum Testamentum Graecum: Editio Critica Maior
Hugh Houghton, ITSEE, University of Birmingham
The initial apparatus of the Greek manuscripts selected for the ECM of Galatians has now been prepared, and those selected for Ephesians have now been transcribed in full. Work is in progress on the transcription of Romans, Philippians and the Corinthian correspondence. This paper will introduce the resources currently available online and report on the progress of these editions.
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Memes, Music, and…Matthew?! Cultivating a Media-Rich Asynchronous Forum Environment
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Melanie A. Howard, Fresno Pacific University
Many professors who have used asynchronous forum assignments to foster engagement with course material have likely encountered student posts that not only fail to engage substantively with course material but are then followed by a steady stream of superficial sentiments of assent. This presentation will argue that tweaks to forum prompts can nourish more substantial engagement with course material and foster more enjoyment of the forum experience for students and instructors alike. The presentation will offer three examples of soliciting student inclusion of mixed media in forum posts. First, the presentation will explore the use of forum prompts that encourage student creation of media in the form of illustrated memes that demonstrate acquisition of course content. This method of meme creation allows students to provide evidence of their learning in creative and alternative formats. Second, the presentation will suggest how inviting students to connect course content to songs allows for both an opportunity to engage with the reception history of biblical texts and to connect existing student interests to course material. Finally, the presentation will highlight how inviting students to engage with news media can illustrate the contemporary significance of thematic elements of the biblical text while simultaneously developing students’ information literacy skills. The presentation will conclude by gesturing toward ways in which these asynchronous forum assignments might also be translated into synchronous class activities in order to bridge student work inside and outside of the classroom.
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Does a Proselyte Have a Foreskin? Revisiting Circumcision in Philo and Paul
Program Unit: Pauline Epistles
Jeffrey Hubbard, Yale Divinity School
This paper examines Paul’s discussion of circumcision in Romans 2:25-29 in conjunction with Philo’s discussions of circumcision, especially in QE 2.2. Romans 2:25-29 has in recent years become an important battleground in the debate over whether Paul directs chapter 2 at a Jewish or Gentile interlocutor. While the traditional consensus asserts that Paul’s interlocutor is a Jew who is overly reliant on his own circumcision, recent interpreters (Stowers 1994, Thorsteinsson 2003, Thiessen 2016) have argued strongly for the interlocutor’s Gentile identity. Another approach to these verses has sought to find illuminating comparanda to Paul’s thought in Philo, who can discuss circumcision in language tantalizingly similar to Paul’s (see Borgen 1983, Borgen 1987, Barclay 1998). Such discussions are usually conduced with reference to De migratione Abrahami 89-93.
In this paper I hope to bridge the gap between these two approaches to Romans 2:25-29. I believe that the arguments of Stowers, Thosteinsson, and Thiessen can be bolstered by further consideration of an important piece of Philonic evidence: QE 2.2, where Philo addresses the directive to not oppress the προσήλυτος (Ex 22:21). The προσήλυτος, Philo asserts, is the one who has circumcised not his foreskin but his vices. Borgen, in one of the only lengthy treatments of this passage with respect to Romans 2, cites it as background for what he takes to be Paul’s point: that circumcision of the heart is the true criterion for Jewishness. But this is not precisely Philo’s point, for his other uses of προσήλυτος draw sharp distinctions between that category and that of the αὐτόχθων, the native born (e.g., Spec. 1.52). I suggest that this passage from Philo does more to support the Gentile interlocutor reading of Romans 2 than the Jewish: both Philo and Paul offer evidence for first century Jews attempting to explain why the Gentile adherents of their religion need not become genitally circumcised. This exploration helps to ground the excellent work of Thiessen more firmly in the intellectual world of first-century Judaism.
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Does Justin Argue with Jews? Reconsidering the Relevance of Philo
Program Unit: Early Jewish Christian Relations
Jeffrey Hubbard, Yale Divinity School
In recent decades, Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew has experienced a resurgence of popularity as a potential witness to the complex and shifting relationships between Jews and Christ-followers in the second century CE. The trend in this research is to cast doubt on whether the Dialogue offers an accurate representation of Jewish-Christian dialogue in the second century. It is often suggested that Justin’s knowledge of Judaism comes from second-hand, polemical sources, or that Justin merely uses Trypho’s “Judaism” as a stand-in for what are actually (in Justin’s view) heterodox Christian doctrines and interpretations. In other words, the current consensus denies that Justin in the Dialogue disputes with genuinely Jewish arguments. Such research, however, is often conducted without much dialogue with studies that have queried the sources of Justin’s own theology. One of the key questions that has occupied the latter group is the possibility of Justin’s use of and dependence on Philo of Alexandria. The purpose of this paper is to explore Philo not as Justin’s source, but as (partially) representative of Justin’s Jewish interlocutors.
The paper takes up a rarely-noted conundrum in Justin scholarship: the near disappearance of the Logos from Justin’s theophany arguments in the Dialogue. Despite Justin’s extensive use of the Logos in the Apologies, the Dialogue finds him far more often referring to the “other god” to describe the preexistent Christ. After surveying the problem of the Dialogue’s missing Logos, the paper considers several important instances from the Philonic corpus where the Alexandrian exegete discusses the Logos in connection with biblical theophanic accounts. Comparison with the relevant exegetical material in Justin reveals points of contact but also sharp divergences. Though many have noted the similar shape to Justin’s and Philo’s exegesis of theophanies, Justin’s “other god” diverges from Philo’s Logos in striking ways, especially as it pertains to the experience of the visio dei. How can we reconcile the strong evidence for shared traditions between Philo and Justin while appreciating the distinctions? It is my thesis that the relative absence of the Logos in the Dialogue with Trypho is best explained as a rhetorical positioning on the part of the Justin, one that distances his positions from those of Hellenized Judaism. In other words, we would do well to reconsider the possibility that Justin’s exegesis in the Dialogue is employed in part as an intentional response to Jewish exegetical traditions, and thus offers a more helpful window into developing Jewish/Christian relations than many have recently acknowledged.
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Prevailing against God? Divine-Human Boundary Negotiation in Genesis 32:23–33
Program Unit: Christian Theology and the Bible
Caitlin Hubler, Emory University
What is the difference between a human and a god? Questions of divine ontology are so basic to theology and biblical studies that they often go overlooked, but neglecting culturally specific understandings of divinity often leads to the retrojection of anachronistic categories onto the biblical text. Whereas much of Christian theology has tended to view either human or divine status as an essential and unchangeable fact of one’s being, literary sources throughout the Ancient Near East show evidence of a much more fluid understanding of the divine-human spectrum, suggesting the need for a reexamination of the question with regard to the Hebrew Bible. In light of recent insights around the constitution of the divine in the ancient Near East, this paper provides a fresh analysis of Jacob’s encounter at the Jabbok in Genesis 32:23-33. Through this lens, Jacob’s encounter can be seen not only as the story of a heroic ancestor who prevails against God, but as a philosophically sophisticated negotiation of the boundary between human and divine.
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The Spirit of Truth: Revisiting the Prophetic Work of Tertullian’s Paraclete
Program Unit: Contextualizing North African Christianity
Kyle R. Hughes, Whitefield Academy
(this is a resubmission of a paper accepted and then withdrawn last year)
This paper examines the interplay between biblical exegesis and Tertullian’s understanding of the New Prophecy through a careful analysis of the role of the Paraclete in both Johannine and North African contexts. In particular, this paper begins with an important corrective to most published translations of Against Praxeas 2.2, demonstrating that Tertullian identifies the Paraclete as the one who will prove the truth of the regula fidei. This point leads into a discussion of how Tertullian conceives of the twofold work of the Paraclete in inspiring Scripture and providing direct revelation through the “Montanist” prophets, showing how these two interrelated aspects of the Spirit’s work both testified to the reality of the divine economy. Finally, this paper examines continuities and discontinuities between Tertullian’s understanding of prophecy and that of his predecessors Justin and Irenaeus, challenging conventional views by demonstrating how Tertullian’s understanding of the Paraclete is a natural extension of earlier views. As a result, we will have a new lens for contextualizing Tertullian and North African prophecy within a broader trajectory of biblical exegesis.
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Orientalizing Frank Moore Cross: Academic Prestige and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Program Unit: Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship
Charles Hughes Huff, St. Bernard's School of Theology and Ministry
The authority of the “Bible scholar” is a construct granted by a public. In the case of the Dead Sea scrolls, a scholar’s special access to the secrets of the scrolls is a key to such authority, but so is the comforting connection to the civilized, Western, religious home of the reader. The popular construction of the Bible scholar helps create the conditions for Evangelical discourse about the Bible to thrive. Scholars not directly involved in places like the Museum of the Bible deploy paradigms that strengthen Evangelical narratives about the Bible’s social capital. In this paper, I will examine one example of the use of the authority of a Bible scholar in the creation of the prestige of the Dead Sea scrolls. In 1955, Alex Small wrote an eight-part series on the Dead Sea scrolls in the Chicago Daily Tribune. This series is the first thorough discussion of the Dead Sea scrolls in Chicago newspapers. For this series, Small interviewed Frank Moore Cross, who was then Assistant Professor of Old Testament at McCormick Theological Seminary. Cross is not only interviewed for the articles; in his introduction to the series, Small claims that the articles are based on Cross’s own series of articles on the scrolls published in The Christian Century, a Christian publication associated with mainstream Protestantism. This example brings together a Bible scholar directly working on the Dead Sea scrolls and representation in popular media. In Small’s series, Cross’s authority is lent to an orientalizing, Christian-focused interpretation of the scrolls. The language in this series of articles presents a specific binary structure. On the one side are monotheism, Judaism, Christianity, and an international group of scholars. On the other are ancient Middle Eastern and Indian polytheism and Arabs. This casual orientalizing is significant not only for American views of the Middle East in the 1950s, but as a key to the framing of the Dead Sea scrolls in American culture more broadly. Small also writes along two major trajectories: the virtuosity of scholars involved with the Dead Sea scrolls and, more importantly, the relationship of the scrolls to the Old and New Testaments—the key to framing the importance of the scrolls. In a final article, released on Christmas Day, 1955, he mentions the non-biblical scrolls for the first time: he treats the presence of “baptism and communion” among the “Essenes.” In this series, then, Small uses the authority of the “Bible scholar” construct to paint the importance of the Dead Sea scrolls not in terms of the history of a specific ancient Middle Eastern community, but in terms of modern Protestant Christianity.
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Painting the Resemblance over the Image: Reflections with Basil of Caesarea and Diadochus of Photike
Program Unit: Biblical Exegesis from Eastern Orthodox Perspectives
Georgiana Huian, Universität Bern - Université de Berne
In the first homily on the Creation of the Human Being (or Hexaemeron X), attributed to Basil of Caesarea (ca 330- 379), the main topic is the creation of the human according to the image of God (τὸ κατ’ εἰκόνα), whereas the possibility to achieve the likeness to God (ὁμοίωσις θεῷ) is considered a capacity (δύναμις) to be actualized. This homily compares human striving to be like the prototype with the realization of a portrait, which should be admired for the ability of the painter, not only as a static resemblance. Having the image of God through his creation, human beings have to work their craftsmanship – through free will – in order to realize the resemblance. What is the relationship between the given image (eikon) and the accomplished image (portrait) and how does the painter-metaphor function in Basil’s discourse? Starting from this question, tackled by Anca Vasiliu (L’image dans le discours des trois Cappadociens, 2010), I investigate the painter-metaphor in another Greek Father, Diadochus of Photike (ca 400- 486), who is concerned, in One Hundred Chapters on Spiritual Perfection, with the human constitution as eikon of God. I address the concepts used by Diadochus to illustrate the being and becoming of the eikon: the seal (σφραγίς), the imprint or mark (χαρακτήρ), the trait or characteristic feature (γράμμα). I equally address how Diadochus echoes the Pauline approach to the image of God in its strong Christological articulation and search for Pauline roots of Diadochus’s vocabulary (e.g. Heb 1:3 the Son as image of God is named χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως αὐτοῦ). I consider the description of the relation image – prototype in terms of “glory” and “illumination” or “resplendence” in Basil (On the Holy Spirit, XVIII, 45, 149C) and Diadochus (ch. 8, 17, 36), starting from Heb 1:3 (ἀπαύγασμα τῆς δόξης). Thereafter, I investigate the shift, in the patristic discourse, from the Pauline Christological understanding of the “image” to a trinitarian (Basil) and anthropological one (Diadochus). I also highlight Diadochus’s platonic language of participation and mimesis, which is meant to clarify the relation between the human and his Archetype. Against this Pauline and Platonic background, I focus on the comparison between the grace of God and a painter, which paints the luminous traits of the likeness over the purified image of God in the human, realizing a perfect portrait, in response to human ascetic efforts (Diadochus, ch. 89). Finally, I assess the conceptual potentialities of the imagery of the painter, painting and portrait, considering its uses in Basil and Diadochus, as well as its relationship to the Pauline concepts of εἰκὼν τοῦ Θεοῦ (Col. 1, 15) and μορφὴ Θεοῦ (Phil. 2, 6). My conclusion concerns the connections and differences between a formal, a substantial and a vivid-performative understanding of the eikon in the patristic discourse, as compared to the Pauline connotations (and terminological renderings) of the “image of God”.
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Deified Instruments and Divine Music
Program Unit: Cultic Personnel in the Biblical World
Michael Hundley, Central Washington University
Throughout the ANE, musical instruments feature in cultic service. From the third millennium BCE to the first, two instruments are even deified, the lyre in Mesopotamia and Ugarit and the drum in Mesopotamia. This presentation considers what makes these instruments worthy of divinization and what that divinization says about the cultic role of music. Often said to be deified by association or contagion, their deification instead seems driven by pragmatism. For example, deifying the balaĝ-instrument, the lilissu-drum, during the Balaĝ-prayers and associating it with the divine counselor (gu4.balag) and the divine heartbeat add to the efficacy of the ritual. When the music plays, the counselor intercedes on behalf of humanity, appeasing the potentially angry deity and ensuring continued presence and prosperity. By extension, other non-deified instruments seem to increase ritual efficacy. Turning to the biblical texts, I consider if instruments in the Psalms too may be more than musical ornamentation and why the Priestly texts, those most concerned with the cult, eschew instruments altogether.
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The Reritualization and Ceremonialization of Marriage in the Gospel of Philip
Program Unit: Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism
Jennifer Hunter, University of Washington
When did the ritualization and Christianization of marriage occur? The answer to that question depends on how we define and apply the terms ritualization and Christianization to the study of early Christian marriage. David Hunter has concluded that the “The absence of explicit witnesses to Christian blessings or ceremonies before the fourth century suggests that the actual ritualizing of Christian marriages occurred very gradually and that marriages customs remained largely ‘un-Christianized’ for a long time.” [Marriage and Sexuality in Early Christianity, 33 (2018)]. In this evaluation of the question at hand, Hunter has equated ritualization with the presence of marriage ceremonies, which has lead him in turn to date the earliest efforts to Christianize marriage to the fourth century, which is when we have the first explicit reference to a wedding blessing by a bishop in the writings of Ambrosiaster. However, the term ritualization has deep roots in anthropology, in which the term is distinguished from ceremonialization. The study of marriage in late antiquity can benefit by applying this distinction to our research. Ritualization is not equivalent to ceremonialization, nor should we assume that the ceremonialization of marriage is equivalent to the bishopizing of marriage. By recognizing these processes as different from one another, with their own unique timelines of development, I argue that the bishop’s blessing is not the place where we should begin our inquiry into the question of when the ritualization and Christianization of marriage began to occur. When we carefully distinguish between the ritualization, ceremonialization, and bishopizing of Christian marriage, we can better understand the ways in which Christians, prior to the third century and drawing from both Jewish and Greco-Roman tradition, began to (re)ritualize and Christianize their marriages, not the through the involvement of a bishop, but through the material actions of the couple during their married, sexual, and procreative shared life, as evident in both the writings of Clement, as well as the non-canonical Gospel of Philip. The latter has not been widely treated as a text that is relevant to the study of early Christian marriage, but I suggest that not only does it show evidence of the early Christianization of marriage, the text also suggests that the Christian community associated with it, uniquely ceremonialized their marriages in a process that did not center around a bishop’s blessing, but whose purpose was to facilitate the reritualization of the Christian couple’s sexual and procreative lives.
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Drowning Jonah in a Thousand Genres
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Brandon M. Hurlbert, Durham University
Accepted paper for the IBR research group on Biblical Violence.
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The Place of Egypt in Jeremiah and Ezekiel
Program Unit: Book of Ezekiel
Allison Hurst, Harvard University
Much work has been done in recent years to counter the tendency to consider Jeremiah as a Deuteronomistic text and Ezekiel as a Priestly one. In the past few decades, scholars have begun to recognize that both Jeremiah and Ezekiel reflect both Deuteronomistic and Priestly ideologies and traditions, and that the sharply drawn line between them is more blurred than previously thought. Yet there is one topic about which these divisions still hold: Egypt. In this paper, I will argue that Jeremiah builds on the traditions of the Deuteronomistic school to cast Egypt in a negative light—one that positions it as the land to which the Judahites must not return (Deut 17:16). This corresponds not only to the depiction of Egypt in the Deuteronomistic History (DtrH) as a place which frequently houses enemies of the monarchy (1 Kgs 11:14–22; 11:40) and upon which the monarchy should not rely but also to an emphasis on Egypt as the “house of bondage” for the Israelites, a phrase that occurs in Deuteronomy more than anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible (Deut 5:6, 6:12, 7:8, 8:14, 13:10, and 24:17). Ezekiel, on the other hand, likens Egypt to Israel in his oracles concerning the fall of Egypt, so that Egypt suffers the same exilic fate as the Israelites (Ezekiel 29–32). In so doing, Ezekiel builds upon the Priestly tradition, which deemphasizes the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt and, instead, highlights a similarity between the Israelites and Egyptians through the traditions about Ishmael in Genesis 17 and 25 and the story of the blasphemer of mixed Egyptian-Israelite ancestry in Leviticus 24. While Egypt remains a key enemy of Judah’s, the emphasis in Ezekiel is on a close relationship between Judah and Egypt but not on the idea of enslavement there. I will argue that the approaches of Jeremiah and Ezekiel to Egypt are not radical innovations but natural continuations of attitudes toward Egypt that are found in Pentateuchal traditions and that have been expanded in light of the specific situation of each exilic community. In the case of Jeremiah, the approach reflects an effort to make Egypt less appealing as a place of refuge to those fleeing Jerusalem leading up to and following its destruction by the Babylonians in 587 BCE. In the case of Ezekiel, the audience was already exiled in Babylon, meaning that Egypt posed no imminent threat as a place of refuge. It is in this context that the mythic dimension of the relationship with Egypt would have been effective. This paper illustrates the stark differences in approaches to Egypt that characterize Jeremiah and Ezekiel and locates those differences within the context of exile.
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Adam and the Names
Program Unit: The Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition (IQSA)
Saqib Hussain, Oxford University
In the Adam creation story as related in Q al-Baqarah 2, God “taught Adam the names, all of them” (v. 31). An intertextual reading of this passage has illuminated it in multiple ways (Reynolds 2010; Pohlmann 2012; Tesei 2016; Zellentin 2017; Sinai 2017). On the surface, the naming incident is a straightforward allusion to the Genesis story in which Adam names the animals that God presents to him (Gen 2:19–20). It has therefore not been particularly problematized in any previous study of the qur’anic story. But a closer look at the text reveals a complicated picture. First, the masculine plural pronouns that refer to the “names” that Adam was taught (vv. 31, 33) are usually reserved in qur’anic Arabic for humans rather than animals. Second, through God teaching Adam the names, the angels’ concern that man will “sow corruption and spill blood” in the land (v. 30) is somehow adequately addressed; it is not clear how this is achieved, however, if the qur’anic naming episode is simply alluding to the Genesis account. Due to these issues, some early Muslim exegetes suggested that the story is actually about Adam being introduced to his righteous offspring, who are counterevidence to the angels’ claims that man will not be righteous. This reading has some basis in several midrashic and talmudic passages, in which Adam is shown his righteous descendants. It also helps clarify God’s enigmatic declaration to the angels: “I know what you reveal and what you conceal.” This can now be read as a polemical corrective to the rabbinic story that God hid some of the actions of man from the angels so as not to give the latter yet further reasons to object to His creation. In the Qur’an, God shows the angels humanity “all of them” (v. 31), and declares that it is in fact the angels who had failed to mention (i.e., “concealed”) that there would also be righteous people among mankind. Based on these and other considerations, I will argue that this rarely cited tafsir reading is in fact the correct interpretation of the passage. Additionally, by examining how the Qur’an merges rabbinic accounts of the angels’ objection to the creation of Adam with the biblical vocabulary of Adam and the naming of the animals, I will show just how freely the Qur’an draws upon antecedent traditions. This allows me to highlight the pitfalls of intertextuality. The Adam story demonstrates that the creative integration in the Qur’an of such diverse biblical and para-biblical motifs means that even seemingly clear allusions to biblical passages are liable to be misunderstood. This shows how intertextual readings that do not pay sufficient attention to a close reading of the Qur’an on its own terms can obscure rather than illuminate the text.
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“Re-Semiticization” as a Translational Phenomenon in Ethiopic-1 Samuel: An Initial Sounding
Program Unit: Ethiopic Bible and Literature
Jeremy M. Hutton, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This paper reflects on the translation style of the Ethiopic translator of 1 Samuel through investigation of select chapters. Working from the consensus opinion that the Ethiopic version was translated from a Greek Vorlage, I investigate the text-linguistic relationship between the presumed precursor (usually construed as OG) and Eth-1Sam (as found in Dillmann’s edition). I focus on “de- and re-Semiticization” as a translational phenomenon in which typically Semitic syntactic patterns were lost in the translation of the text from Hebrew into Greek and then re-implemented (often obligatorily) in the movement from Greek to Ethiopic. Often, the “re-Semiticization” phase of this process produced morphosyntactic patterns that diverged from the underlying Hebrew original. For example, the Hebrew construct chain (N.CONST + N.ABS) was morphologically revised using the Greek genitive (N + N.GEN). In turn, the Greek construction frequently underwent morphosyntactic transformation when it was realized in Ethiopic as the waldu la-negus construction (N-PRO + PREP-N). Similarly, the Hebrew N + DEMONST.ADJ (e.g., ha-‘iysh ha-hu’) was frequently rendered in Greek with a simple ART + N construction (ho anthropos; 1 Sam 1:3), which was then rendered in Ethiopic with the demonstrative (we’etu be’si). In some cases this could be explained as dependence on an Intermediary translation, but other cases imply that the addition of the demonstrative adjective was due to the translator’s re-Semiticization (e.g., ye’eti be’sit in 1 Sam 1:18). I use the typology of translational transformations proposed by Chesterman (2000) to track these obligatory or culturally-preferred grammatical changes, differentiating them from semantic and pragmatic changes. This method allows greater precision in identifying authentic instances of re-Semiticization more likely to be due to the translator’s method, enabling the researcher to differentiate them from merely apparent instances of the phenomenon that seem to rely on intermediary translations. The goal of this study is to offer methodological controls for the task of determining the Greek manuscript family from which Eth-1Sam was originally translated.
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Tracing the Origins of the Biblical Abraham Tradition
Program Unit: Pentateuch
Juerg Hutzli, Université de Lausanne
The proposed paper aims to trace the origins of the biblical Abraham tradition.
After the challenge of the classical documentary hypothesis in the last decades, the antiquity of the Abraham traditions cannot simply be presupposed anymore. Since the 1990s, scholars have developed new views of certain alleged ancient Non-Priestly texts dealing with Abraham (Gen 15; 20; 21:8–21; 22; 24), they tend to date them from a later, post-monarchical period. Contradicting the documentary hypothesis, they also argue that some of the Non-P units depend on the Priestly strand of the Abraham narrative. Moreover, current scholarship agrees that none of the references to Abraham found outside of Genesis can be dated before the exile.
Nevertheless, for many scholars the relative antiquity of Abraham tradition seems indicated by the story of Gen 18 in which they see the hieros logos of the Terebinth sanctuary in Mamre and by the text Ezek 33:24 which suggests that during the exile the population remaining in the land referred to Abraham as their patron. From these texts, some critics conclude furthermore that Abraham originally was an autochthonous figure. Only later on, Priestly and post-Priestly authors would have transformed the latter into an immigrant coming from Mesopotamia.
The proposed paper will scrutinize these arguments. It will examine further references to Abraham in the Hebrew Bible outside of the Pentateuch, in particular in Second Isaiah. Some of these texts reflect the Priestly tradition of Abraham’s origin in Mesopotamia. Both the antiquity of the biblical Abraham tradition and the protagonist’s autochthonousness will be put to the test.
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Who Is the Model Minority? An Asian-American Reading of Ebed-Melech in Jeremiah
Program Unit: Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics
Jerry Hwang, Singapore Bible College
The label of “model minority” with reference to Asian-Americans has rightly come under scrutiny in recent decades. The work of historians such as Madeline Hsu and Ellen Wu has demonstrated the particular role that Asian-Americans played in constructing a new cultural narrative which repositioned them as desirable immigrants. In Christian communities, the construct of “model minority” has often been seen mirrored in the biblical book of Ruth. As ancient Israel’s most famous daughter-in-law, Ruth continues to play an outsized role in shaping Asian-American Christian identity as compliant, loyal, and family-oriented, despite being foreign.
Recent global developments have mounted a challenge to this account of the “model minority.” On this note, it should also be recognized that Ruth has also been (mis)used within Asian-American Christian circles as a “biblical” mandate for forced cultural assimilation, oppressive family relationships, and muting dissent if various kinds. Ruth’s mixed history of interpretation necessitates a different kind of “model minority" for faith communities, one that Jeremiah’s portrayal of Ebed-Melech the Cushite can supply. His intervention on behalf of a prophet about to be killed (Jeremiah 38) marks him as a “model minority” who speaks truth to power despite his marginal position in King Zedekiah’s court. However, J. Daniel Hays has shown that Ebed-melech is frequently overlooked because of the unfounded assumption that, as a black Cushite, he must have been a slave or otherwise minor figure. For this reason, an Asian-American reading of Ebed-Melech serves the double purpose of (1) gaining a biblical model for how a “model minority” can faithfully protest the injustices of the establishment, and (2) exposing the tendency of both Western and Asian cultures (from both of which Asian-Americans draw their hybrid identity) to overlook the lifesaving contribution of a black Cushite in redemptive history. The tendency of ethnic Asian Christians to reproduce the racist biases of Western interpreters about Africa’s place in the Bible has broader implications for reconciliation in the fraught relations between African-Africans and Asian-Americans. These two groups have both suffered at the hands of others as well as often being pitted against each other.
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Reframing New Testament Masculinities
Program Unit: LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics
Susan E. Hylen, Emory University
Many New Testament scholars argue that masculinity was constructed in opposition to femininity: to be a “true man” was not to be a woman. In addition, scholars assert that masculinity consisted of impenetrability (both sexually and in war) and control over self and others. In this paper, I analyze the popular morality expressed by Valerius Maximus and propose two modifications to this interpretation. First, there were a number of important virtues men and women shared. Valerius praised men and women for pudicitia (modesty or sexual morality), a virtue that we have often labelled “feminine.” Acknowledging this overlap in gendered virtues may alter the degree of polarity we see in the construction of ancient gender. Second, I argue that control of others through force and self-control represented two different versions of masculinity in this period, not one. While control over others and self-control were both prominent markers of masculinity, self-control rose to prominence in the New Testament period. Control of others through the use of force did not disappear as a type of masculinity, but authors emphasized the importance of self-control—including the decision to refrain from violence and extend clementia to one’s enemies. The paper closes with a discussion of the implications for New Testament studies.
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Water That Is Just Right, Too Much, and Too Little: Miriam, Urban Poor Women’s Response to COVID-19, and the UNSDG
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
Ma. Maricel Ibita, Ateneo de Manila University
The significance of the indivisibility of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG) for biblical ecological hermeneutics and sustainable living has a lot of potential but scholars have not yet fully explored these possibilities (Nilsen, 2021). I suggest that heeding Nilsen’s challenge of partnering the biblical texts using various methods of doing ecological hermeneutics with the UNSDG is beneficial for both domains. On the one hand, the dialogue will highlight the various UNSDG reflected in the biblical texts especially on the interaction between the divine, non-human and human creation and raise the necessity of doing ecological biblical interpretation. On the other hand, an ecological reading of biblical texts will also provide religious grounding for the UNSDG to invite people of faith in concretizing the UNSDG by 2030. In this presentation, I will use the principles of ecological hermeneutics as outlined in the Earth Bible Project as I focus on the character of Miriam in the Old Testament in relation with various bodies of water in Exod 2:1-10; 15:20-21; and Num 20:1-2. I will first briefly present some observations using a hermeneutic of suspicion about the character of Miriam in these texts, from the viewpoint of feminist biblical scholars. Next, I will identify and highlight Miriam’s relations with the divine, her siblings and the peoples, and the non-human creation. Finally, I will retrieve some alternative images of Miriam and her relationship with water and integrate them with contemporary women’s struggles concerning water during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the biblical Miriam can accompany them in realizing the 2030 UNSDG #6 Clean Water and Sanitation; #11 Sustainable Cities & Communities; #15 Life on Land; #16 Peace, Justice & Strong Institutions; and #17 Partnerships for the Goal.
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Amazing G-race: Towards a Contextual, Inclusive, Integrated, and Transformational Assessment Method
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Ma. Maricel Ibita, Ateneo de Manila University
Assessment evaluates the competences that we aim for our students to gain at the end of a course or a module, be it in a face to face, pure online, and/or hybrid learning. The Amazing G-race is a two-hour creative group test that potentiates various learning intelligences of students, foster classroom and group dynamics, evaluate retention of objective facts, and integrate course content with contemporary life and praxis as a transformative reappropriation of learning about biblical texts. It is a synchronous/asynchronous game that involves online/offline art appreciation, short investigation of a historical person of Asian descent in a global setting, and a theological geography of the university campus/room. The factors I considered in the development of this assessment are (1) intersectional contexts of the students (as men, women, LGBTQ+ students of a particular university and their identities as citizen of a specific country, region and as part of the global community); (2) inclusivity (the test items should consider student’s internet access, mobility, gender, diversity, and religious affiliation/non-affiliation); (3) integration (the items that a student need to answer has to be attentive to the physical and mental states of students); and (4) transformation (the quiz should still be a learning experience for the students and not just a parroting of what they objectively know). This test usually covers the four gospels while the last item of the quiz, “loser-winner”, offers the whole class a bonus point when each group shares with the class a 30-word “negative experience” in doing the Amazing G-race quiz and the other groups respond with a 30-word “positive points of the negative experience” each. This portion summarizes the test and emphasizes that to get the class bonus point, they need to be aware of their own individual-group processes, listen and learn from their peers, and cooperate together to exemplify that inclusive growth makes sure that no one is left behind, especially in this COVID-19 or post-COVID-19 era.
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Enriched Pastoral-Theological Spiral for Pandemic Biblical Education and Beyond
Program Unit: Teaching Biblical Studies in an Undergraduate Liberal Arts Context
Ma. Marilou S. Ibita, De la Salle University Manila
The paper posits that a digitally enhanced version of the well-known pastoral-theological spiral help students discern the presence of the Word in the World in a Liberal Arts course at the De la Salle University in the Philippines in a pandemic setting and beyond. The pastoral spiral is generally composed of three basic steps: See (to assess a problem in a particular context) -Judge (Social and Theological Analyses) and Act (the planning and executing actions to solve the problem). This spiral has been enhanced with the addition of Evaluate-Celebrate steps for a more complete process (Talavera, 2020). Nonetheless, while the Celebrate step includes varied forms, the language obscures the need for much-needed ritualization under the negative experiences in the pandemic. Thus, an enriched version of See-Judge-Act-Evaluate-Celebrate/Ritualize becomes necessary to explore issues such as the loss of lives and work and to provide pandemic coping from the religious tradition in the Philippines which commemorates the 500 years of Christianity and yet beset by inadequate government response to COVID-19 (Ibita, 2021). Matthew 20:1-16 will serve as a test-case. The biblical exploration will employ combined contextual hermeneutics (liberationist, feminist, empire, and postcolonial) while the delivery of the process will show how students learn through a combination of the Learning Management System Canvas, Mentimeter, Google Jamboard, Canva poster and Spotify.
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Israel and Judah among the Nations: The Poetics of Literary Structure in Isaiah 13–23
Program Unit: Israelite Prophetic Literature
Terry Iles, Harvard University
Many scholars have noted that the book of Isaiah’s collection of nations prophecies is organized symmetrically according to the tenfold use of the noun משׂא in superscriptions, with the first five units (chapters 13–20) corresponding to the second five units (chapters 21–23; Berges 2012, Kim 2015, Stromberg 2020). What has not been duly considered, however, is whether each subcollection has its own meaningful arrangement. I argue that the principle of symmetry seen at the highest level of organization in the book of Isaiah’s nations collection is reflected recursively in the organization of its subunits as well. Both Isaiah 13–20 and Isaiah 21–23 exhibit a concentric arrangement with a surprising feature: the central position in each half of the nations collection is occupied by Israel (17:4–11) and Judah (22:1–25). This compositional strategy is similar to that seen in Amos’s nations collection (1:3–2:16), in which Judah and Israel occupy the climactic final positions (Barton 1980; Hutton 2014). The prominence given to prophetic addresses to Israel and Judah within these collections problematizes the terminology of “oracles against the nations” and calls for further attention to their formal principles of organization in discerning their argument.
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The Contribution of New Institutional Economics in Explaining Religious “Competitive Relationships” in Late Antiquity
Program Unit: Religious Competition in Late Antiquity
Alex IP, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Making use of the concept of market and competition in understanding relationship among and within religion is new and promising because it applies a new and well developed framework to explain ancient religious phenomena. However, it could have a risk of merely using a new term to describe an old phenomenon without giving any new perspective nor providing new insight to the field. Scholars have also observed that there are competition among religions on the one hand, but not every relationship can fit the concept of competition on the other hand.
This paper proposes, first, that without clearly defining and choosing an appropriate concept of market and its relevant theoretical framework, the use of the concept of competition may not necessarily lead to new and deeper perspective. In light of that, the paper further proposes, instead of using the traditional concept of market as places, either physical or non-physical, for exchange, the concept of market under the branch of New Institutional Economics (NIE) is more relevant and helpful to illuminate the inter and intra religion relationships and behaviors. Under the theory of NIE, market in narrow sense is just one form of contracts being chosen subject to different constraints. Therefore, a better concept to explain religious relationships will be theory of contract, focusing on how specific form of contract is be chosen, instead of assuming market as the predetermined form of interaction. In this direction, different interactions or relationships resulted from different form of chosen contract can be interpreted as different form of religious competition. Competition in this sense is not limited to rivalry relationship but provides us a broader lens to look into the complicated relationships based on the framework of NIE. The final part of the paper will use the relationship between gentile Christians and Jewish Christians as a demonstrating example of how the suggested NIE concept and theory can help to generate a better theoretically ground to explain religious competitive relationships.
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Profiling Child(ren) and Childbearing in Isaiah: A Childist Appraisal
Program Unit: Israelite Prophetic Literature
Dominic S. Irudayaraj, Pontificio Istituto Biblico, Rome
With over 30 occurrences, spread almost evenly across the book of Isaiah, the root (ילד), with its predominant semantic scope of child(ren) and childbearing, connects with no small number of salient themes in this prophetic mega corpus. These themes include God, king(s), prophet, Zion/Jerusalem, nation(s), animals and even the Earth.
Taking a definite cue from childist lens (cf. Betsworth) and childist criticism (Garroway & Martens), the present paper aims to bring under focus how the conceptual registry of children and childbearing significantly contributes to the prophetic vision and message of (i) the pericope in question (ii) the book, at large. The latter will then be probed to see how it might contribute to the continued conversation on the question of Isaian unity(s).
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Divine Visibility in John's Gospel
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Luke Irwin, University of Durham
This paper argues that John’s Christology affirms the material visibility of God by reconciling the notion of an “unseen” God (1:18a; 5:37; 6:46) to the visibility of the Father that Jesus presents (Jn 12:45; 14:9). It proposes that John 1:18a is best read as “no one has ever [fully] seen God [yet]”. Three pieces of evidence support this claim. The first is that “unseen” and “invisible” are not synonymous. A survey of Second Temple, Biblical, and Rabbinic literature reveals that one may not assume that all Hellenized Jews embraced Platonist notions of invisibility. Second, John 1:18a exists in the same Gospel as John 12:45 and 14:9 – in which Jesus presents the Father as visible, however restricted that visibility may be to Jesus’s person. Third, John’s use of Isaiah (Jn 12:41) suggests that the visibility of God in Jesus is consistent with God’s visibility in the theophanies. The divine corporeality evident across the Hebrew Bible sets a precedent for the incarnation.
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Mass-Suicides: A History of Resistance, Survival, and Trauma: Reading Mark 5:1–20 alongside the Ritual of Jauhar
Program Unit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible
Sharon Jacob, Pacific School of Religion
Interpretations of Jesus healing a demon possessed man in the region of Gerasene have often focused on the character of Jesus, the possessed man, maybe even the spirits who call themselves Legion. Meanwhile, minor characters like the swine or the swineherds are often left at the margins. Although the swine in this text perform one of the most gruesome, violent, and traumatic action they never rise to the level of Subjects in our readings of the text. At the same time, the sight of two thousand swine “willingly” rushing towards their deaths a visible sign of protest against foreign colonization is no ordinary feat and cannot be ignored. Mass-suicides are not new. In many cultures, mass-suicides were used as a form of protest against foreign colonization. In particular, Mass-suicides were often used by women to protect themselves from the horrific war crime of Rape. The ritual of Jauhar in India was one such example where upper caste Rajput women immolated themselves en masse by jumping into flames. Mass-suicides like Jauhar where women “willingly” jumped into the flames choosing the purity of their bodies rather than co-habiting with the foreign enemy were fetishized into symbols of courage, valor, and national pride. At the same time, rituals like Jauhar in the Indian context also reinforced a regressive form of rape culture that overtly suggested to women that it is better for women to choose death rather than live with the stigma of rape. Recently, the retelling of Jauhar, re-inserted into the Indian consciousness through a popular Bollywood movie brought to the fore the patriarchal mindset that not only continues to view Indian women as objects but was a stark reminder that survivors of rape and sexual assault continued to have no place in the Indian society. David G. Gerber Jr in his essay, “Trauma Theory and Biblical Studies,” writes, “Trauma does not deny access to history; it prevents history from being lost in abstraction.” My paper reads Mark 5:1-20 and in particular the mass suicide committed by the swine and intersects this text with the historical events of Jauhar in pre-colonial India. By placing the two texts alongside each other brings to light a more complex interpretation that complicates issues of agency, choice, and even resistance. The application of trauma theory, rape culture analysis, and postcolonial analysis, I argue allows one to interpret mass-suicides as traumatic literature rather than abstract historical events that are evoked at opportune moments to create feelings of nostalgia that glorify and normalize a culture of violence against women.
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Born in the Likeness of Their Mothers! Hagar, Sarah, and Surrogate Indian Mothers: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Galatians 4:21–31
Program Unit: Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics
Sharon Jacob, Pacific School of Religion
In the letter to Galatians, Paul uses the story of Sarah and Hagar as an allegory to create a hierarchy between mothers and their children. The superiority of a free, upper class mother contrasted against the inferior, slave mother, fractures maternal subjectivity and splits maternal bodies into an idealized Subject or realized object. The maternal fragmentation performative in mothers also extends to their children as dichotomized mothers bring forth children whose subjectivity is fractured and disjointed. The emergence of these fragmented infants are dichotomized by Paul as “child of the slave born out of flesh,” and “child of the free born out of promise.” Thus, born in the likeness of their mothers, these children are subjected to a hierarchy where the life of some children are valued, preserved, and protected more than, and at the cost of the life of other children. The appraisal of some maternal and infantile life over and above the rest in the Letter to Galatians 4:21-31 sheds light on a new citizen whose value is based on the geographical, social, and cultural location of the womb in which they were conceived.
The surrogacy industry in India is estimated to be a 2.3 billion dollar industry. Surrogacy in the contemporary context, is depicted as a “win-win” situation where “women help other women.” However, a closer look reveals that lax laws, cheap maternal labor, the availability of English speaking doctors, and accessible technology in the Indian context promotes the exploitation of third world women at the hands of their first world contemporaries. Surrogacy not only highlights the ways in which Indian surrogate mothers are exploited, but also raises questions around the identity and citizenship of both the mother and her child. In other words, the life of a child born to an Indian surrogate mother receiving financial, emotional, physical, and medical support is valued at a much higher cost than the biological child of the surrogate mother; conceived through the flesh. Furthermore, the subjectivity of the surrogate child conceived through “non-traditional means” is uplifted as the “ideal citizen” and given the privilege to share in the wealth of the Nation; a right that is taken away from the biological children of surrogate mothers living in poverty.
Although, the context of Sarah and Hagar and their children is different from the Indian surrogate mothers living in postcolonial India, the subjectivities of both these mothers and their children bear some similarities. Reading Galatians 4:21-31 alongside and through the contextual and real-life experiences of Indian surrogate mothers, this paper seeks to reinterpret the subjectivities of Hagar, Sarah, and their children through the lens of Race, Nation, and Citizenship. Thus, drawing on postcolonial, feminist, and race theories, my paper will attempt to construct a nuanced reading of this text as conversations of identity relating to surrogate mothers and their children pertaining to Race, Nation, and Citizenship come to be seen through a more complex and ambivalent light
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Inner Lives and Outer Worlds: Nock, Conversion, and Religion in the Late Roman Empire
Program Unit: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti
Andrew S. Jacobs, Harvard Divinity School
For Nock, in antiquity only Judaism and Christianity were "religions" (as opposed to pagan "cults") and only Jews and Christians required "conversion" (as opposed to "adhesion"). This paper proposes an alternative understanding of "conversion" not as an inner reorientation but as a public response to power. I read two stories about baptized Jews from the fifth-century Christian historian Socrates first through Nock's lens of renunciation and reorientation. I then ask how we might understand these stories without Nock's assumptions, as evidence for the fractured mosaic of overlapping identities available to subjects of the Roman Empire. The disruption of Nock's "conversion" may also lead us to discard assumptions about "religion" in the late Roman Empire.
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What Do "Dots and Bars" and DNA Have in Common?
Program Unit: Ethiopic Bible and Literature
Jarod Jacobs, Independent Scholar
Over the years, the Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament (THEOT) research group has developed many processes to transcribe, compare, and research Ethiopic manuscripts. A lot of this work has been automated, yet some bottlenecks remain such as the manual creation of the “Dots and Bars” document. This document is built to align manuscript transcriptions so that they can be compared using the scripts developed by Garry Jost. The Dots and Bars document starts off with parallel lines of text, often coming from 30+ manuscripts. From that starting point, researchers manually align each segment of text, creating columns for matching words. This work can take many hours to complete. In this paper, I will explore the possibility of automating this process. The need to align sequences of texts arises in many areas of research, one of which is DNA comparison. As researchers compare two or more DNA sequences, they need to find the places where they match and where there are differences. Due to the large amount of data encoded in a DNA sequence, automated tools have been developed to accomplish the comparison. One such tool is the BioPython pairwise2 module. This module is a Python package that was built to compare similar strings of text. In this paper, I will explore the pairwise2 package and how it can be used to compare Ethiopic manuscripts. I will present a Python program I have built around pairwise2 that starts with a corpus of manuscripts and outputs an Excel file containing the aligned texts. The goal of this program is to produce a file that reduces the manual work necessary in text alignment. While the automated approach will likely never be one hundred percent accurate, the hope is that the program can complete a majority of the work, thus speeding up the process of producing the Dots and Bars file.
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Patrick Miller's Interpreting the Psalms and Beyond
Program Unit: Book of Psalms
Rolf Jacobson, Luther Seminary
This paper will use Patrick D. Miller's, Interpreting the Psalms (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986) as a point of departure to consider Miller's several contributions to the study of the Psalter, including his role as a founding member of the SBL Book of Psalms Section.
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The Little Ant’s Portal into the Qur’an: Towards a Hermeneutics of Nonresistance
Program Unit: The Qur’an: Surah Studies (IQSA)
Afra Jalabi, Concordia University
The presentation aims to offer a reading of the qur’anic narrative in Surah 27 (Q al-Naml 27: 15—44) whose initial opening scene zooms into a little ant laying a strategy of nonresistance in the face of Sulayman’s encroaching army. The ant’s story functions as a foreshadowing to the politics of the Queen of Sheba, where the ants’ survival plan is later amplified as the Queen’s diplomatic response to Sulayman and his threat of a military invasion. The scenes move back and forth between the courts of the Queen and Sulayman, both of whose opposing dynamics are presented as two modes of being in the world. I make use of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s dialogical ontology to read the inevitable encounters that arise between humans and nature, man and woman, power, and powerlessness, but most importantly the modality of the political as an alternative to armed action. By reading the subtexts of the dramatic dialogue and eventful plot, I propose to present a qur’anic politics of nonresistance as an alternative to armed patriarchy. I present a hermeneutics of power relations by using Christopher Long’s analysis of Greek mythology. His use of the way Zeus swallowed Metis as a metaphor of subverting feminine power provides a political reading of Sulayman’s interest in de-throning the Queen. Sulayman’s obsession with “stealing” the throne, resembles the obsession of Zeus, and therefore “articulates a dimension of the tragic dialectic of patriarchal dominion,” as Long argues. Sulayman’s reliance on physical force as his means of consolidating his multi-dimensional sovereignty over being, represents an invincible form of power immune to challenge. One feels like an unheard ant in the face of such an armed, epistemologically framed, and religiously justified, patriarchal power and authority. The parallels that arise in the stories of the ant and Queen, woven into a unified narrative, are worth noting because they echo an ethics of nonviolence that underpin the qur’anic text, and which is emphasized as being marginalized and unheard. The passage therefore functions as a compressed ethical code in whose tropes the larger ethical themes of the Qur’an are enlisted. The nonresistance of the ant and Queen echo the qur’anic Prophetic archetypal response(s) as an alternative to domination and the threat of force when facing authoritarian nations or tyrants. The passage unfolds between the tragic authority of patriarchal and military dominion and the promise of a nonviolent dialogical politics in which a woman, diplomatically, and non-violently, resolves an inter-state conflict while also laying a larger ethical paradigm as an alternative politics of encounter.
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Adam and Eve’s Garden in Islamic Thought: Heaven or Earth?
Program Unit: Qur’anic Studies: Methodology and Hermeneutics (IQSA)
David Solomon Jalajel, King Saud University
Muslims exhibit a wide spectrum of opinions about Islam and evolution. The growing literature on the subject identifies several points of contention, including the role of chance in evolution, the intelligent design argument, flaws in the science, and the creation narrative in Islamic scripture. One scriptural point that reappears is the location of the Garden from which Adam was expelled. This matter has been instrumentalised by both sides in the creation/evolution debate. Historically, Muslims have been divided about the location of Adam and Eve’s Garden. Today, this classical disagreement is attracting renewed attention for its perceived relevance to the question of human evolution. This study examines sixteen exegeses covering all of Islamic history to determine how exegetes perceived, contextualised, approached and responded to this question, and what influenced their responses. Four major opinions are identified – two placing the Garden in heaven, one locating it on Earth, and a stance of non-commitment (tawaqquf) – with supporting arguments and counter-arguments. The research finds that there is no consensus on this issue and it is not regarded as theologically binding, leaving the matter open to interpretation. The sheds light on the value this disagreement has for contemporary Muslim responses to human evolution, since even though the evolution debate is a distinctly contemporary one, the greatest resistance to evolution today, and particularly to human evolution, comes from contemporary Muslims who claim strict adherence to scriptural authority and received religious tradition.
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Misogyny's Logic: Feminist Readings of the Song of Songs
Program Unit: Ideological Criticism
Elaine James, Princeton Theological Seminary
Feminist scholarship of The Song of Songs has often treated the poem as a celebration of femininity, a kind of subversive enclave from the pervasive androcentrism of the biblical texts. And yet, as J. Cheryl Exum, Fiona Black, and others have rightly pointed out, the text is not immune from the dynamics and discourse of patriarchy. This paper takes an intersectional approach using the recent work of feminist philosopher Kate Manne, who argues that the distinction between “sexism,” and “misogyny” sheds analytical insight on the pervasive experiences of women in patriarchal contexts. Song 5 meets her criteria of “misogyny” insofar as it offers evidence of a regulatory or “punishing” dimension of feminine experience. Manne’s work offers terminological clarity that helps to explain the conundrum of how a text so celebratory of female eroticism also witnesses to and encodes gendered forms of domination. At the same time, her distinction also helps to open a path for reparative feminist readings.
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“Against All Other Humans Hostile Hate”: Tacitus’ Accusation against Jews in Histories 5.5.1 within Its Historical Context
Program Unit: Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature
Torsten Jantsch, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
In his account of the Jewish war in Histories 5, Tacitus provides a detailed excursus on Palestine, on the origins of the Jews, their religion and their customs (5.2–5). His account is full of misunderstandings, false information, and prejudice against the Jews. The paper will briefly outline Tacitus’ excursus on the Jews with a particular interest in his description of the Jewish religion and customs. It will then focus on Tacitus’ accusation of the Jew’s hostility against all other humans (Hist. 5.5.1). It will argue that, whereas the accusation of superstition of the Jewish people and their opposition against the polytheistic worship is as old as anti-Jewish resentments in Greek and Latin literature are, its explicit interpretation as hostility against all people occurs not earlier than Diodorus Siculus (Diodor 34/35.1; 1st century BCE). Based on a comparison with similar allegations against the Jews in Greek and Latin literature, the paper will show that this topic became more prominent since the Flavian age because the Flavians’ propaganda legitimated the new dynasty with the victory over the rebellious and hostile Jewish people. Tacitus’ accusation, it will be argued, cannot be understood without the background of the Flavian propaganda on the occasion of the Jewish war.
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Unity and Peace in Ephesians 2:11–22 and Their Background in the Imperial Propaganda
Program Unit: Disputed Paulines
Torsten Jantsch, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
The unity of the church is a keen issue in the Epistle to the Ephesians. In Ephesians 2:11–22, the concept of unity despite diversity is exemplified by unity and peace between Jews and Gentiles, which have been established by Christ’s death. The paper interprets the discourse in Ephesians 2:11–22 before the backdrop of the imperial propaganda of the Flavian age. The paper will briefly outline that unity is a central topic of the Epistle to the Ephesians. It will then argue that the section of Ephesians 2:11–22 serves as a specific example within the broader discourse on unity. I will show that two aspects in this section can best be explained before the backdrop of the propaganda of the Flavian age, which will be presented by source texts, inscriptions, and iconographic representations. The first aspect to be discussed is the hostility and separation between Jews and Gentiles, which is a characteristic of Ephesians 2:11–22. It was a topic in Greek and Latin anti-Jewish literature, whereas the explicit focus on hostility, which occurs not earlier than the first century BCE, became more prominent since the times of the Flavian Emperors. The prominence of this topic resulted from the Flavian propaganda, which made the victory over the Jews in the Jewish war the legitimating narrative of the new dynasty. The second aspect is that the surmounting of this hostility and the creation of unity and concord mirrors the Flavian self-representation as the bringers of peace and enmity (homonoia) throughout the whole Roman Empire. Fueled by the imperial propaganda, the antagonism between the Jewish people and all other people became a perfect example of hostility and overcoming this enmity an ideal paradigm for peace and concord.
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“I Am Your Disciple” (Log. 61): Discipleship in the Gospel of Thomas
Program Unit: Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism
Stephanie Janz, Universität Zürich
This paper will examine the theme of discipleship in the Gospel of Thomas (G.Thom). In recent decades, research on the gospel has primarily focused on factors external to the text itself. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that its individual sayings have often been interpreted in comparison to other texts and in isolation from the overall context of the work. One such example is the scholarly discussion of Logion 61. This saying, in which Salome declares herself Jesus’ disciple, has been either examined against the background of its canonical parallels to demonstrate the otherness of the Thomasine Jesus or it has been taken as evidence for G.Thom drawing from the Gospel of the Egyptians. However, such an approach is insufficient, in as much as meaning rests first of all in the text rather than outside of it. Furthermore, it appears that Saying 61 is not isolated in G.Thom but linked to other sayings in this gospel through the use of catch words, literary forms, and not least through the theme of discipleship. By looking for these connections with other sayings this short paper will examine Saying 61 within the broader context of the work, paying particular attention to what it means to be a disciple of Jesus according to G.Thom. In this way, this paper will attempt to look at the text in its peculiarity and wholeness and in light of its hermeneutic principle to find the meaning of the “hidden words”.
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Reconsidering the Archaeological Context of Alphabetical Sacred Scriptures: Some Questions about Sociopolitical Organization and Scribal Practices
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible, History, and Archaeology
Pablo Jaruf, Universidad de Buenos Aires
The aim of this paper is to revisit the question about the relationship between archaeological record and the writing of sacred scriptures like those of the Hebrew Bible. Some scholars assumed that large institutions like palaces or temples and, most importantly, evidence of extensive bureaucratic practices need to exist. For example, the well-known work of Finkelstein and Silberman affirms that this kind of sociopolitical context appears after the foundation of the Omrite Dynasty in Samaria, but particularly during the last decades of the Kingdom of Judah. From this point of view, it was in that time that the sacred scriptures began to be written. However, from a minimalist perspective, like Thompson's, the evidence of those kingdoms remains insufficient to affirm the existence of large institutions and bureaucratic practices, so he preferred, instead, to consider the Persian and Hellenistic periods as the moment when the sacred scriptures began to be written. In spite of this, the archaeological record of these last periods, as Na’aman shows, does not allow to affirm the existence of such socio-political context in Yehud Medinta either. One last possible answer could be that the sacred scriptures began to be written in Mesopotamia or Egypt, but once again there is no evidence of it to the present day.
We think that the main problem of this common proposal is that it applied a model that is more adequate for the polities of the Bronze Age, whose institutions used the complex cuneiform or hieroglyphic system closely related to ancient and prestige scribal schools. In contrast, the linear alphabetical systems originated in marginal areas of palatial regimes by people who apparently were not causally related with scribal schools and its diffusion corresponds with the peripheral regions of great empires of the Iron Age. Indeed, the imperial powers adapted it once they conquered a large population familiarized with this kind of scripture, as the Aramean kingdoms of Syria. The linear alphabet was first used by small polities of the Levant, but its use may have extended to other sectors of society later on. Objects with this kind of scripture appeared in different contexts, not only in cities, towns, and possible villages, but also in isolated locations in arid zones. Even more, the most ancient biblical texts were found in desertic regions associated with small communities like Qumran, a kind of organization that practised opposing principles to those of the palaces and temples. A similar scenario can be proposed for the Greek cities of the Archaic period, where the first writings of presocratic philosophers appeared, like Thales of Miletus. In those regions a particular kind of sociopolitical organization emerged, where we neither find relevant bureaucratic practices.
In sum, it is necessary to review our models about the relationship between archaeological record and the writing of sacred and philosophical scriptures in a linear alphabet, because this system emerged in a particular social context and was used by distinct kinds of polities, some resembling traditional palatial systems, but others not.
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Metaphors of Creation – Creation through Metaphors?
Program Unit: SBL International Meeting Presentations
Mirjam Jekel, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Language creates reality and metaphors are necessarily creative. But can metaphors themselves contribute to creation? This paper advocates the thesis that the Gospel of John uses metaphors to initiate a process in its readers that leads to new life and re-creation.
The linguistic turn has made clear that language not only represents reality, but also influences and even creates it. As Ricœur demonstrates, metaphors in particular have the creative potential to evoke change. Change is exactly what the Gospel of John aims for: according to Jn 20:31, it intends to initiate a process of re-creation that eventually results in ζωὴ αἰώνιον. In parallel with the creation of human life in Gen 2,7, Jesus gives the already living disciples a new quality of life by breathing the Holy Spirit on them (Jn 20:22).Thus, ζωή can be interpreted as the result of a re-creation (see also Jn 3, where Jesus talks about being born anew as prerequisite for ζωή).
For its readers, the Gospel aims to facilitate this re-creation through its language. Just as in Jn 1 the Logos is the means of creation and in the body of the Gospel Jesus Christ is presented as mediator of the new creation, so the Gospel itself is also a text that tries to make re-creation possible.
But how can language facilitate this kind of radical change? To answer this question, the paper will investigate metaphors of creation in Jn 20 as well as Jn 3 and 5, focusing on their functions and effects for the readers. Ultimately, the question will be to what extent metaphors work as an instrument of new creation as understood by the Gospel of John.
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Review of David Brakke, The Gnostic Scriptures
Program Unit: Bible, Myth, and Myth Theory
Lance Jenott, Washington University
Review of David Brakke, The Gnostic Scriptures
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The OFW (Overseas Foreign Workers) as the “Etceteras” of the Gospel of Mark: A Korean Filipino Re-reading of the Markan “Ochlos”
Program Unit: Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics
Dong Hyeon Jeong, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
The OFW (Overseas Foreign Workers) as the “Etceteras” of the Gospel of Mark: A Korean Filipino Re-Reading of the Markan “Ochlos”
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Envisioning Survivance for AAPI Communities: An Asian and Native American Reading of Luke 16:1–8a
Program Unit: Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics
Dong Hyeon Jeong, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
This paper is a scholarly protest against the racism and xenophobia experienced by Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in the United States. Channeling their anger and frustration,
I read Luke 16:1-8a as a narrative of injustice and survivance (“survival” + “resistance”). The manager of unjust wealth is accused of alleged wrongdoing, and punished immediately without due process. At the face of being thrown into (social) death (digging and begging), the manager protests against his plight through survivance (Gerald Vizenor). The manager refuses the colonial narrative that forces him to cower and be subservient to the oppressive structure(s) of his time. Instead, he fights back in ways that says “NO” to the symbolic Order (model minority myth) imposed upon him. By doing so, the manager fractures the limitations of survival with trickster resistance that taps into the mundane and yet crafty, ordinary and yet subversive technologies. Luke 16:1-8a is a “gospel” to those who unsubscribe and resist the colonial social contract (model minority myth).
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Christiani Necantes? Walter Burkert and Early Christian Martyrdom
Program Unit: Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Donghyun Jeong, Emory University
In Die Religion der ersten Christen: Eine Theorie des Urchristentums (2000), Gerd Theißen provides a comprehensive theory of early Christian religion as a “kulturelles Zeichensystem” that consists of myths, rites, and ethos. In one chapter, Theißen engages with Walter Burkert’s theory presented in Homo Necans. Theißen observes that for early Christians, the function of sacrifice as Aggressionsopfer is only found at the level of Mythos, namely, the myth of Christ’s sacrificial death, and there is no corresponding element either in early Christian ritual or ethos. This observation seems true, considering the earliest period of Christianity. Indeed, when compared to their Jewish and pagan contemporaries, early Christians did not often engage in physically sacrificing animals to their deity.
Despite Theißen’s claim, more elements of Aggressionsopfer did indeed exist in early Christianity, and these elements are found not only at the level of myth, but also of ritual and ethos. Although animal sacrifice in Christian practice can be explored (Burkert briefly mentions it), my focus is on another prominent sacrificial manifestation of aggression, namely, martyrdom (as a social, historical phenomenon) and martyrdom literature (as a discursive phenomenon). Early Christian martyrdom myths use sacrificial language to describe the death of martyrs. The martyrs refused to sacrifice (θύειν), whereas the pagan antagonists insisted on sacrifice (θῦσαί σε δεῖ) (e.g., Ac. Carpus). Thus, it is the martyrs who became the “sacrificed” (they ἐτύθησαν) (Lyons 40). From the body of martyrs, “the sacrificial savor (ἡ κνῖσα) arose” (Lyons 1.52). Polycarp “was bound like a noble ram chosen for an oblation from a great flock, a holocaust prepared and made acceptable to God” (Mart. Pol. 14). The New Testament metaphorically appropriated a lot of sacrificial language and notions. Yet, martyrdom literature takes them back to more physical experiences. “The sweet ordour of Christ” (cf. 2 Cor 2:15) is applied to martyrs being tortured and dying bravely for Christ (Lyons 1.35). The myths of early Christian martyrs paired with ritual, namely, the cults of the martyrs. Examples include the collection/veneration of martyrs’ relics, pilgrimage toward burial sites, communal meals, etc. Finally, the martyrdom stories have explicitly moralizing effects, since they are exemplary examples of recent events (Mart. Mont. 23; cf. Pass. Perp. 1). In short, Burkert’s theory in Homo Necans is relevant not only to the myth of Jesus’s death, but also to the myth, ritual, and ethos of early Christian martyrs. Early Christianity incorporated the logic of aggression deep in its emergence and development.
In this paper, however, I will use Burkert’s theory as a heuristic lens, rather than an explanatory key. Burkert’s original thesis focuses on the origins of sacrifice in prehistoric hunters, and he primarily analyzes ancient Greek myth and ritual. Thus, his thesis may not have a direct point of contact wit
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Participants' Analysis in the Second Major Division of Numbers
Program Unit: Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures
Gyusang Jin, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
I used text linguistics of ETCBC (Eep Talstra Center for Bible and Computer) located at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. It mainly observes the syntax of the book of Numbers and defines the relationship between a preceding clause and the following clause, by the iterative process from the first clause to the last clause of a text I built up a syntactic-hierarchical structure of the Pentateuch, in which I find the location of the structure of Numbers. In this session, I would like to elaborate on the thematic progress in the second major division (4 sections) of Numbers.
Whereas the first major division focuses on the theoretical foundation on which the second major division develops, the second major division focuses on how the theory was performed by participants and how YHWH responded to them and instructed them, and how it instructs contemporary generations.
I note syntactic patterns, in other words, constituents' orders (Wayyiqtol + explicit subject clause in which divine formula is combined with locative phrase or time phrase) work as textual frames of the Pentateuch and in Numbers and extract the thematic meaning of the delimitations in the structure. I list persuasive linguistic clues, rhetorical clues to support the demarcations in Numbers. The theme of a section comes from a thorough observation of the participants and their roles in a section. The observation is based on thorough participants' identification in all the lexemes, prefixes, suffixes that are attached to substantive, preposition, infinitive. The process helps a reader to see who are the main players in a section, how they affect other participants or events, and what is the main theme of a section. I compare two adjacent sections between a syntactic pattern in terms of the percentage change of shared participants, shared roles, explain the percentage change indicate linguistic connectivity between two sections, thematic separability between them. I argue the arrangement of sections in the second major division of Numbers reflects a well-organized plot, well-designed literary structure.
Moving from the first section to the last section in the second major division of Numbers develops the plot of a story systematically, the process causes exciting suspense of the thematic flow. Through the presentation, I argue the second major division of Numbers gives hope to readers, not despair. It encourages contemporary readers to hear the word of YHWH, obey it, and achieve the promise of YHWH.
The main theme of the second major division of Numbers is relevant to the authority in the community of YHWH. It will shed light on the question of 'how much authority, how much flexibility, and how much influence should/could the educators (including professors, teachers, rabbis, and pastors) have in their teaching?'.
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The participants’ analysis in the first major division of Numbers
Program Unit: Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies
Gyusang Jin, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
ETCBC database of the Hebrew Bible has thorough linguistic annotations at grapheme, word, phrase, and clause level. It also includes the annotation of clauses' relationships and text-hierarchical structures based on the text-linguistics of Eep Talstra, who made the theoretical methodology on the linguistics of Harald Weinrich and Wolfgang Schneider. The syntactic-hierarchical analysis has been applied in many dissertations and ongoing research on the text of Numbers. The unique characteristic of the ETCBC approach focuses on the verb form and its position in the clause, as well as other elements in the clause. This research demarcated the text of Numbers by a syntactic pattern, investigates the effect of the demarcation in terms of participants’ analysis. This paper primarily focuses on Num 1-8.
Syntactic patterns [divine formula + locative phrase] in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy have a common function to demarcate the preceding section and the following section. The two sections have a common ground, participants, based on which the comparison between the two sections is possible. In this paper, I will observe whether each section demarcated by a syntactic pattern [divine formula + locative phrase] has weak connectivity and strong separability in terms of participants. I will see whether the observation validates the demarcations.
I judge Num 1-8 is the first major division, which is comprised of Num 1:1-3:13 and Num 3:14-8:26. To elaborate on the validity of the demarcation I first compare Num 1:1-3:13 and its preceding section Lev 25-27, and second Num 1:1-3:13 and Num 3:14-8:26, and lastly Num 3:14-8:26 and its following section Num 9:1-20:22.
In this session, I would like to elaborate on the thorough observation of the participants in a section and how I processed the work by computational data mining. The observation is based on thorough participants' identification in all the lexemes, prefixes, suffixes that are attached to substantive, preposition, infinitive. The process helps a reader to see who are the main players in a section, how they affect other participants or events, and what is the main theme of a section. I compare two adjacent sections between a syntactic pattern in terms of the percentage change of shared participants, explain the percentage change indicate linguistic connectivity between two sections, thematic separability between them. For the analysis, I extracted the Hebrew text from grapheme level to word, phrase, clause, and text level with the relevant linguistic annotations. In the extracted database of ETCBC, I added participants' annotation on Numbers.
It sheds light on how each section in Numbers develops the plot of a story systematically, composes the inner cohesiveness of Num 1-8, the first major division of Numbers. It encourages contemporary readers to hear the word of YHWH, obey it, and achieve the promise of YHWH.
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On Metaphor and Frames of Reference: The Seed of Blessing in Isaiah 40–66
Program Unit: Nature Imagery and Conceptions of Nature in the Bible
Job Jindo, Academy for Jewish Religion
The paper will explore the use of the Hebrew word “seed” in Isaiah 40–66 in order to advance some guiding principles for interpreting figurative expressions in poetic prophecy. More often than not, the word “seed” in Second Isaiah is understood to mean “offspring” in a general sense, and is so rendered in many standard translations (41:8; 43:5; 44:3; 45:25; 48:19; 57:3, 4; 59:21; 61:9; 65:9, 23; 66:22). The paper reconsiders this convention. Poetic discourse is generally referential and implicit in nature, and much of the underlying conceptual knowledge is left unsaid in the text. Accordingly, once that conceptual background is clarified, images and figurative expressions—which might first appear vague or incoherent—may appear to express a rhetorical or poetic concept substantively fitted to its context. The paper will consider if the same holds true for the word “seed” in Isaiah 40–66.
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Sabbath and Temple as Identity Markers in Isaiah 56 and Nehemiah 13
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Kristin Joachimsen, MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society
Accepted paper for IBR research group on Isaiah and Intertextuality.
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Hortense Spillers and the Reclamation of Biblical “Flesh”
Program Unit: LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics
Sarah Jobe, Duke University
This paper advances Hortense Spillers’ use of the term “flesh” as that basic materiality that resists captivity, dispersion, and the dissolution of kinship ties by surfacing the ways that flesh operates according to these black feminist claims in the Hebrew terms bāśār and shĕ'er. If Spiller’s “flesh” is to become a generative theological category, “flesh” must be exhumed from the mound of sin-talk piled upon it by the Apostle Paul. This paper seeks to contribute to that effort by showing how the Hebrew concepts found in bāśār and shĕ'er function according to at least three of Spiller’s fundamental claims about flesh as they appear in a number of her essays in *Black, White, and In Color*:
(1) Flesh is the something that stands behind the body, prior to categorization and the violences of social organization. bāśār connotes a basic materiality that marks all of humankind and can even indicate the materiality of non-human creation. bāśār can connote male, female, or uncategorized genitalia (Exo 28:4; Lev 6:3, 15:2-19, 16:4; Ezek 16:26, 23:20). This materiality is not averse to spirit but rather operates in partnership with spirit (Gen 17:3, Job 189:26, Ps 84:2, Ezek 11:19, 36:26, etc.).
(2) Flesh is inherently social, corporate, and relational. shĕ'er can be translated “flesh” or “kin.” Leviticus especially is concerned with the relationships between kin-flesh, the protection of vulnerable kin-flesh from violation (Lev 18:6, 12, 13, 20:19, 21:2, 25:49), and the right of flesh to redeem its kin (Lev 25:49).
(3) To tell the story of flesh is to tell the story of the “high crimes” done against it (Spillers, “Mama’s Baby”). The Psalms and exilic prophets tell the story of a bāśār that thins, dies, rots, and becomes food for scavengers (Ps 38:3-7, 70:2, 102:5, 109:24, Ezek 11:7, 24:10, etc.). In both Spillers and the exilic texts, the “seared, divided, ripped-apartness” of flesh never exhausts the potential of flesh (Ibid., 206). Coming from the root shĕ'ar, “to remain or be left over,” the semantics of flesh is the story of what remains.
The paper then turns back to Spiller’s corpus showing how Spillers herself engages in creative appropriation of explicitly biblical flesh talk, suggesting that Spillers’ project has been a re-imagining of a biblical concept all along. The paper concludes with one example of what emerges when a biblical text and black feminist theorist are read together through a hermeneutics of flesh. Following Spiller’s call for attention to the work of “fugitive poets,” the paper engages the poetry of NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! in which Philip engages the poetry of Ezekiel 37 (Spillers, “Black, White, and in Color,” 299). These fugitive poets point to a flesh that exceeds its own scattering and insists upon its own en-Spirited re-membering, even after the mass murders of Middle Passage and Babylonian exile. Philip and Ezekiel exemplify how black feminist thought and biblical imagination collaborate to insist that all flesh holds a basic integrity, insistent relationality, and inherent en-Spiritedness that demands an alternative sociality in which all flesh is honored.
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How Media Fosters Theological and Pedagogical Imagination
Program Unit: Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
Lindsey Jodrey (Trozzo), Princeton Theological Seminary
When we consider incorporating media into the classroom, we often envision instructors using media to deliver content. In this presentation, I will turn attention to providing opportunities for students to use diverse media in their engagement of course material, participation in class activities, and fulfillment of assignments. When students are invited to engage activities and assignments using media, they often interact more robustly with the content. This presentation will offer specific examples of student work and consider what we as instructors can learn from them about media, assessment, engagement, and pedagogy.
The context for these examples will be drawn from “Queer Hermeneutics: The Bible in Queer Imagination,” which I taught at Princeton Theological Seminary in the Fall of 2020. In weekly assignments, in-class activities, and even more robustly in a collaborative class project, I invited students to engage diverse media including producing original artwork, composing music, producing podcasts, creating videos, and ultimately developing a website that collected and shared our work beyond the classroom. The class’s work can be found at https://www.wordmadequeer.com/.
This presentation will provide concrete examples of student work and discuss the particular learning objectives connected to those assignments and activities. Reflecting on the creativity and collaboration of this group of 29 students, I will conclude the presentation by offering a few pedagogical reflections.
1. Inviting the use of diverse and creative formats can result in more innovative and theologically imaginative engagement with course concepts and material.
2. Student work that uses diverse media can be helpful for all students; the nontraditional format creates an imaginative context that fosters curiosity and encourages the class to entertain new ideas and consider alternative viewpoints.
3. The invitation to use diverse media can be especially rich for those students whose learning styles do not align with traditionally encouraged formats (like written academic prose) and can generate a much-needed energy for learning.
4. The use of diverse and creative formats facilitates a personal connection to course material that is especially important for certain theological subject matter.
Incorporating digital media richly enhanced the teaching and learning experience for me as an instructor and for all participants in our class. This particular example prompts further reflection on how we can continue to use digital media and other creative pedagogical strategies to foster curiosity, creativity, and collaboration as we authentically and meaningfully engage in theological education.
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The Book of Joshua and Settler Colonialism
Program Unit: Racism, Pedagogy, and Biblical Studies
Mari Joerstad, Duke University
In this paper, I illustrate how the Book of Joshua can open up discussions of contemporary forms of settler colonialism. I put Joshua's lists of place names in Joshua 13-21, the story of the Gibeonites in Joshua 9, and the narrative of the altar in Joshua 22 into conversation with the history of the place I now live (Durham, NC) and with the Naqbah and subsequent Israeli encroachment on Palestinian land. The paper is not a discussion of pedagogical method, but is intended to model forms of interpretation that allow students and biblical scholars to engage more deeply in the issues that affect their communities.
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Moses and God: Two Characters in the Zone
Program Unit: Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures
Benjamin J.M. Johnson, LeTourneau University
From the time that we meet Moses in the early chapters of Exodus until the episode of his death in the final chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses is a character that is defined by his relationship with the God of Israel. The back and forth between God and Moses is one of the most interesting and contentious relationships between characters in all of biblical literature. The complexity of this relationship means it is a place that is always ripe for fresh analysis. The present essay will attempt to elucidate the characterization of God, Moses, and their relationship through the literary category of ‘character zones.’ A ‘character zone’ can be thought of as a character’s sphere of influence or voice which may overlap and infiltrate other characters’ zones and which may contain varying degrees of the narrator’s zone. This concept is particularly useful to explore the Moses and God relationship. The dynamic of an overlapping character zone is explicitly highlighted when God tells Moses that Aaron “shall serve as a mouth for you, and you shall serve as God for him” (Exod. 4:16). The co-mingling of God’s and Moses’s character zones is explicit. Nevertheless, the narrative makes it clear that the distinction between Moses and God is important to grasp (e.g. Num. 20). This analysis will explore this dynamic of the overlapping character zones of God and Moses (and to some degree the narrator), focusing especially on the scenes of conflict (e.g. Exod. 3–4; 32; Num. 13–14; 20; 21; etc.).
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Light of the Land and Sun of the People: The Solarization of Ancient Near Eastern Lawgivers
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Dylan R. Johnson, University of Zürich
In comparative analyses of lawgiving in biblical and Mesopotamian tradition, scholars generally talk about two fundamentally different mentalities or modes of thought defining each. Mesopotamian lawgiving was based on a “dualistic” model, whereby the human lawgiver (usually the king) was a temporal representative of the gods whom they had mandated to create and maintain social order. The divine law of the Bible, by contrast, represented an innovation (or theologization) of this older tradition, depicting Israel’s god Yahweh as the source of both cosmic justice as well as the civil laws governing human beings. The current study challenges this model, which essentializes Mesopotamian mentality as a stage of thinking anterior to biblical tradition, one Jewish thought ultimately leaves behind. In a diachronic manner, I trace how both Mesopotamian and biblical literature compared and at times equated human rulers with gods in their shared capacities as lawgivers. This is not a study of divine kingship in the ancient Near East, but a more focused analysis on how the very act of lawgiving was in some sense divine. This mentality was most apparent in literary, ritual, and iconographic depictions of the king in his judicial capacity as a sun god. Relying on interpretive approaches from the fields of Assyriology, biblical studies, art history, and cognitive metaphor theory, I argue that solar imagery extended beyond figurative rhetoric and metaphor in some contexts, blurring the lines between mortal and divine lawgivers.
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Righteousness and Wisdom: A Comparison of Interrelated Virtues in Matthew and 4 Maccabees
Program Unit: Matthew
Morgan K. Johnson, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Righteousness and wisdom are prominent moral themes in the New Testament and in its Hellenistic Jewish milieu. The Greco-Roman virtue tradition discusses the virtues of righteousness or justice along with practical wisdom. Fourth Maccabees, a thoroughly Hellenistic and Jewish work, argues for the Jewish way of life by making use of Greco-Roman moral categories such as justice and practical wisdom. The Gospel According to Matthew also connects righteousness and practical wisdom as moral categories. In this paper, to better elucidate this connection in Matthew, I place Matthew in conversation with 4 Maccabees, arguing that righteousness and practical wisdom in Matthew can be redescribed as interrelated virtues based on terms and categories used by 4 Maccabees. I do this by first analyzing 4 Maccabees and Matthew on their own and then placing them in conversation.
Many scholars (H.D. Betz, D.A. Hagner, W. C. Mattison III, J.T. Pennington, and B. Pryzbylski) have discussed Matthew’s conception of righteousness, especially as it appears in the Sermon on the Mount. One contribution I make to Matthean studies, as well as to the subfields of Hellenistic Judaism and New Testament ethics, is that Matthew’s righteousness (δικαιοσύνη) should be understood in relation to practical wisdom (φρόνησις) or one who is practically wise (φρόνιμος), distinguishing these from another kind of wisdom (σοφία). This connection between righteousness and these two kinds of wisdom in Matthew is more clearly seen when viewed through a heuristic comparison with 4 Maccabees.
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“His Blood Be upon Us and upon Our Children” in Narrative Context: Eschatological Inversion in Matthew 27:25
Program Unit: Matthew
Nathan C. Johnson, University of Indianapolis
Matthew 27:25, “his blood be upon us and upon our children,” has been a problematic and troubling verse for interpreters, and worse for those who have suffered its Wirkungsgeschichte. C. G. Montefiore laments that it is “a terrible verse, a horrible invention…. one of those phrases which have been responsible for oceans of human blood and a ceaseless stream of misery and desolation” (1947). Various readings have been offered, which Catherine Sider Hamilton groups under two headings: “standard” views which take the passage to presage the destruction of Jerusalem and rejection of Israel, and “ironic” readings which see in the spilling of Jesus’ blood the “unwitting” redemption of the people (2017). With her, I concur that neither reading convinces fully. Sider Hamilton has productively fit the passage within the matrix of traditions concerning innocent bloodshed (2008; 2017). Recently, Richard Hays has attempted to deal with these two sides of the issue by noting the “hermeneutical potentiality” of an ironic, intertextual reading that, though likely unperceived by Matthew himself, is nevertheless felicitous to later readers (2016). Whereas Sider Hamilton focuses on innocent blood traditions, and Hays on the encyclopedia of reception rather than production (cf. Alkier, 2009), this paper goes in a different, though perhaps not contradictory, direction by fitting Matt 27:25 within a wider narrative-critical pattern in Matthew’s passion centered on eschatological inversion.
After noting issues with both the “standard” salvation-historical reading of Matt 27:25 (e.g., Clark, 1947; Gaston, 1975) and the “ironic” interpretation (e.g., Cargal, 1991; Carter, 2001), I then make the case for eschatological inversion in Matthew’s Passion. I first note the pattern that Jesus’ death brings about the inversion of what is normal. For example, the sun is darkened; Jesus’ closest followers flee from him; his nearest companion, who claimed he would rather die than desert, thrice denies knowing him; a notorious prisoner is freed while the innocent Jesus is led to his execution; the religious elite, previously worried about a riot, end up inciting one; even Jesus’ God, so close to him otherwise, apparently abandons Jesus in his final moments. Viewed within this sequence, the rejection of Jesus by the Jerusalem crowd comes into sharper narratological focus: even those among Jesus’ own people, whom he is to save (1:21), call for his crucifixion after being “seduced” by the religious elite (Konradt, 2014). Having established the inversion motif, I adduce patterns of inversion in late-antique eschatological texts (e.g., 1QpHab 2:12-15; 4 Ezra 5:1-13; T. Mos. 7-8; m. Soṭah 9:15; b. Sanh. 97a) to argue that Matthew’s use of the inversion motif for Jesus’ rejection is similarly eschatological.
Lastly, the paper challenges those who take this inverted temporary state to be indicative of Matthew’s rejection of Israel tout court (Origen; Dahl, 1983; Marguerat, 1995; yet cf. Saldarini, 1994; Davies and Allison, 1997; Sider Hamilton, 2017). Instead, it is argued, since the other relationships are restored in Matthew, so too should the reader expect the possibility of a similar rapprochement between Jesus and the people.
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Blood of the Covenant: The Orientalist Origins of the Anglo-American Conception of Covenant
Program Unit: Biblical Law
Sophia Johnson, University of Cambridge
Frank Moore Cross’1998 essay “Kinship and Covenant in Ancient Israel” came on the downslide of the “covenant centrality” movement of the late 20th century, propelling it into the limelight of the ancient history of religion field and magnifying its influence on Anglo-American scholarship. His proposed model of understanding covenant as an early legal means of extending fictive kinship provides an appealing, simple system of interpretation for every instance of ברית and its cognates which plays nicely into widely-held assumptions about kinship as the quintessence of ancient (and modern) Near Eastern social values. However, these assumptions and Cross’ theory which feeds them are based on outdated sociological data and models from the late 19th-early 20th century. Cross relies heavily on William Robertson Smith, whose accounts of his journeys through the Arabian Peninsula paint the Bedouin and Arab inhabitants as primitive barbarians stuck in a social dichotomy between family and blood enemies. The inherent orientalism of Robertson Smith’s models of Arabian social and legal organization is not lost in Cross’ adoption of them, as he too depicts the ancient Israelites as unable to conceive of obligation or relationship outside of kinship and the necessity of legal construction to extend such relations only arises out of dire threat of war. In order to avoid Cross’ pitfalls, his insightful observations on kinship language in the treaties and legal literature of the ancient Near East, particularly Hittite and Neo-Assyrian, must be revisited with a fresh sociological framework. In this paper, I critique Cross’ model of covenant, demonstrating its orientalist origins in Robertson Smith and its influence on contemporary scholarship, before proposing a new model of interpreting legal obligation exemplified by the biblical concept of covenant in the context of the ancient Near Eastern treaty traditions.
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Learning from Contemporary Culture: Making the Hermeneutical Flow Interactive on Romans 1–2
Program Unit: Scripture and Paul
Robert K. Johnston, Fuller Seminary
Robert Jewett was a leader among biblical scholars in seeking insight from popular culture and then using that insight intertextually to help discover new meaning resident in a biblical text. This essay will seek to assess Jewett's contribution methodologically, place that contribution within the larger discussion of constructive theology, and then illustrate that approach with reference to Romans 1-2, particularly those texts which speak of the limitations and possibilities of “natural” theology.
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Here Lies Hecate: Poetry and Apotheosis in Second Century Mesembria
Program Unit: Greco-Roman Religions
Sarah Iles Johnston, The Ohio State University
Session 4:
A second-century CE grave stele from Roman Mesembria presents a remarkable claim of apotheosis (IG Bulg. I2 345):
Here I lie, Hecate, a goddess as you see.
I used to be mortal, but now I am immortal and ageless;
Julia, daughter of Nicias, a great-hearted man.
My homeland is called Mesembria, from ‘Melsa’ and ‘Bria.’
I lived as many years as my stele records: fifteen years,
twenty weeks and fifteen days
Farewell, traveler!
The stele also includes four figural reliefs. In the topmost, Artemis wields a bow and arrow, flanked by a dog and a doe. In the second, Hecate holds a lowered torch in each hand. Next to her, a girl holds a pitcher and mirror and a woman holds a basket and spindle. In the third, Hecate sits in a chariot drawn by horses, holding torches and turning her head to gaze at us. In the bottom relief, two dogs chase a rabbit.
The few attempts to understand the inscription’s claim that Julia has become Hecate have contextualized it within an increasing tendency towards heroization or catasterism of the dead. Yet this claim is remarkably bolder than those; outside of the imperial family, humans (alive or dead) were not equated with divinities. No scholar, moreover, has really addressed why the girl becomes *Hecate* (rather than another goddess), or why Artemis appears in the top panel. The worship of Hecate was not particularly common in this part of Thrace.
I argue that the second half of line 2, ‘now I am immortal and ageless’ (νῦν δὲ ἀθάνατος καὶ ἀγήρως) is key. This Homeric formula is sometimes applied to gods (e.g., Calypso at Od. 5.218) but is more often applied to male mortals who become divine (e.g., Ganymede at HHAph. 214, Heracles at Hes. fr. 22.28). Only two female mortals are thus described: an otherwise unknown daughter of Leda named Phylonoe (Hes. Cat. fr. 19.20), whom ‘Artemis made ἀθάνατος καὶ ἀγήρως;’ and Iphimede (=Iphigenia) whom ‘Artemis made ἀθάνατος καὶ ἀγήρως all her days…now mortals call her Artemis Enodia, attendant of the arrow-shooter [i.e, Artemis]’ (Hes. Cat. fr. 19.17-26). ‘Enodia’ is a common name for Hecate, and our other early reference to this myth straightforwardly equated Iphigenia with Hecate (Stes. fr. 215).
In commissioning the inscription, I suggest that Julia’s father was referencing a famous story in which another unmarried girl died and received the extraordinary honor of becoming a goddess who subsequently attended Artemis, divine protector of unmarried girls. To do so, he evoked hexameter poetry, a high-register cultural product. Yet did he really mean us to believe that Julia had *become* Hecate, an already established goddess? I suggest, instead, that the claim opens up a storyworld that affords a template through which Julia’s death and afterlife can be remodeled into something more desirable, conducing belief in the viability of the general experience to which it gestures.
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Others and Othering in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Program Unit: Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature
Jutta Jokiranta, University of Helsinki
This paper analyses the ways in which the Qumran texts draw the lines between “us and them” and which “others” are testified in the scrolls. The theoretical framework is the social identity perspective, according to which the human tendency to categorize their social environment and draw their sense of self from various group memberships is a built-in natural capacity. “Othering” is normally understood as a negative or extreme form of this categorization. Whereas the Qumran movement is often viewed as the prime example of Jewish sectarianism, I will view it as a set of dynamic group processes, negotiations, and competitions. Texts do not reflect reality, they construct it. From this angle, it is also possible to ask if the texts include any recognition of entanglement with the “others” while striving to keep boundaries clear.
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Artemisia’s Bible: Gentileschi’s Biblical Heroines as Proto-Feminist Exegesis
Program Unit: Recovering Female Interpreters of the Bible
Siobhán Jolley, University of Manchester
This paper analyses Artemisia Gentileschi’s use of canonical scripture in the production of three of her biblical heroines - 'Judith Slaying Holofernes' (1620-1); 'Esther before Ahasuerus' (c.1628-35); 'Mary Magdalene' (1616-17) - in the context of the Italian renewal of the Querelle des Femmes. Through analysis of the religious underpinnings of these culturally significant works, it will consider Artemisia as a Christian exegete and proto-feminist, and address the often-overlooked question of how Artemisia was engaging with biblical sources. Using the narratological approach evident in Artemisia’s contribution to Bronzini’s contemporaneous biography as exemplar, it will argue that her works offer a proto-feminist exegesis that remains relevant.
Artemisia’s artworks give insight into a generational resistance to the rampant cultural misogyny that was frequently dependent upon the patriarchal framework of Christianity. Though much discussion is given to Artemisia’s proto-feminism, due consideration of the relationship between that feminism and her (at least culturally) Christian faith is notably absent. Garrard, for example, makes a compelling case for reading Artemisia’s work in the long trajectory of feminist movements but her focus on the socio-political context fails to provide a full account of the distinct role of Christianity. By considering Artemisia’s various portrayals of biblical women in the context of her faith as well as her feminism, this paper will seek to offer a more fulsome account of both the works themselves and the significance of the Bible in the context of Christian proto-feminism in Counter-Reformation Italy.
Artemisia’s ‘auto’biography in Bronzini, which creatively rewrites the most traumatic period in her personal life, takes an approach to narratology that shows limited concern for historical objectivity in favour of restoring female agency. This paper will argue that a similar approach can be seen in her visual interpretation of biblical texts, and will thus argue that this mode of narratology can be understood as interpretive method. By using this approach as a lens to reconsider Artemisia’s portrayals of Judith, Esther and Mary Magdalene in dialogue with the biblical texts, this paper will analyse how faith and feminism are at work in the act of adapting word to image. Hutcheon (2006: xvi, 9) variously describes adaptation as “repetition without replication” and “derivation that is not derivative”. In this sense, this paper will use these three case studies to demonstrate that Artemisia’s biblical women offer an adaptive exegesis of scripture. More than just a replication of the Douay Rheims text, it will argue that these works offer an adaptation grounded in her specific personal and cultural milieu. Moreover, it will show that the works offer a unique perspective on the role of Christianity in the burgeoning feminist movement of Artemisia’s age, that resists the false separation of religion and gender-politics.
Ultimately, this paper will argue that Artemisia’s paintings here model a mode of biblical interpretation that prioritises amplification of marginalised female voices over direct replication, and therefore that Artemisia can be understood as a foremother of modern feminist historiography in her exegetical narratology.
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A Grounding Duality: FKA Twigs’ MAGDALENE and the Liberating Power of Myth
Program Unit: Bible and Popular Culture
Siobhán Jolley, University of Manchester
FKA Twigs’ critically acclaimed second album, MAGDALENE is named for and inspired by the biblical figure of the same name and addresses broader ideas about gender and sexuality. However, analysis of the lyrics and Twigs’ commentary on the album reveals a Mary Magdalene that is only loosely aligned with the woman described in the Gospels. This paper will use MAGDALENE as a lens through which to explore the complicated relationship between scripture and myth borne out in reception. It will argue that, despite various attempts to the contrary, mythologisation is inherently part of the conceptualisation of the Magdalene. It provides a grounding duality to her story that cements its enduring interest and relevance in popular culture; feminist approaches, like Twigs, can embrace this.
Under the process of mythologisation, as characterised by Barthes (1957), an object becomes emptied of its contextual content and refilled with apparent objective truth. In the case of Mary Magdalene, such mythologisation is typically understood in terms of a patriarchally-shaped narrative of sexual sin, marginalisation and conflation with other women. However, as shown in MAGDALENE, redemptive mythologies can be equally pervasive. Twigs’ description of Mary Magdalene as a “herbalist”, “healer” and “Jesus’ closest confident” are equally rooted in myth. This paper will thus begin by undertaking close reading of Twigs’ characterisation of Mary Magdalene as a liberating female archetype across the album. This will be placed in dialogue with both the biblical texts which provide the foundations for such reception and the patriarchal Magdalene mythologies which have become normative.
Considering the scarcity of biblical source material, the paper will then make the case that mythologisation is an inevitable consequence of attempts to construct knowledge and meaning in relation to the figure of Mary Magdalene. Using MAGDALENE as a case study, it will thus show that reclaiming mythic narratives can function as an effective feminist exegetical tool for re-platforming female agency and exploring what is left unsaid in the biblical texts. Any attempt to demythologise the Magdalene will be limited by the insufficiency of the accounts in the texts alone as well as the patriarchal confines of the typical historiographical method (as illustrated by Steffaniw, 2020).
The manner in which biblical themes and characters are embedded in western culture more broadly affords popular media a particular utility as a lens for assessing complex imagery, including the way ideals about gender and femininity are communicated. Moreover, the dialectical nature of popular culture as both descriptive and prescriptive offers a unique means of engaging with established ideas in novel and liberative ways. In MAGDALENE, the complex presentation both draws upon and subverts the way in which Mary Magdalene is conventionally characterised, and thus offers a challenge to the subsequent types in which other women are cast. Ultimately, this paper will thus demonstrate that Twigs’ reclaiming of archetypal narratives that perpetuate patriarchal ideas about Mary Magdalene is a germane example of a liberative exegesis that focusses on texts as used and received rather than appealing to historical objectivity.
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Divine Anger, Divine Favor, and the Ongoing Dynamics of Intercession: Comparing the Moses-Yhwh Relationship in Exod 32–34 and Num 11
Program Unit: Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures
Allen Jones, Corban University
While current trends in Pentateuchal criticism remind us of the long and complicated formation history of the Torah and our frequent lack of certainty on many matters, the enduring need to make theological sense of the text remains a salient task for interpreters of the Bible. In this paper, then, we will highlight the interaction between divine anger and divine favor in Exod 32-34 and Num 11, two key passages within the Moses-Yhwh-conflict motif, as a platform for investigating Moses’ unique contribution to our understanding of intercession and the divine-human relationship. In Exod 32, immediately following Yhwh’s disclosure of the golden calf to Moses (vv. 7-8), Yhwh commands Moses to stand aside so his anger can burn against Israel as a pretext to annihilating the people (v. 10). Yet, Moses does not. He intercedes for the people and staves off their destruction (vv. 11-14). Tensions lower somewhat in the subsequent scenes as Moses puts the camp to rights, but, as the narrative later indicates, Yhwh’s ongoing presence with the people is now in doubt (Exod 32:34-33:3). It is only later that Moses secures Yhwh’s promise to carry on in covenant relationship with Israel into the Promised Land, and that only because he – Moses – has found favor in Yhwh’s eyes (Exod 33:12-17). Thus, it is Moses’ intercession that preserves the people, and it is his leveraging of his special status as favored that continues to bind Yhwh to the people. Surprisingly, the interaction of these poignant characteristics – divine anger and divine favor – disappear from the text through the remainder of Exodus, through all of Leviticus, and through the first ten chapters of Numbers, only to reappear in Num 11. At this point, Yhwh’s anger burns against the people for their desire to return to the abundant provision of Egypt (Num 11:4-6, 10). In response, Moses makes two claims to Yhwh: 1) Yhwh has failed to treat him according to his favored status by giving him an unfair burden to care for the people, and 2) Yhwh has failed in his own responsibility to be an attentive mother to the people (Num 11:11-12). In Moses’ eyes, Yhwh’s anger against the people is troublesome/unjust/evil (Num 11:10). This nexus, then, between Moses’ evolving relationship with Yhwh and his duty as prophet to the people gives us an opportunity to compare these pivotal moments in the Torah (Exod 32-34, Num 11), to situate the theme of divine anger and divine favor within the arc of the Torah, and last, to help rehabilitate traditionally negative interpretations of Moses in Num 11.
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The Neo-Assyrian Background of Genesis 10:1–4 and Its Implications for Dating the Priestly Source
Program Unit: Assyriology and the Bible
Christopher W. Jones, Columbia University in the City of New York
The ‘Table of Nations’ in Genesis 10 has long been recognized as combining material from the Priestly Source (vv. 1-7, 20, 22-23, 31-32) with non-Priestly material (vv. 8-19, 21, 24-30). While the non-Priestly material contains material from a wide variety of sources, much of it dependent on other material from the Pentateuch, the list of eponymous ancestors in the Priestly material contains a large number of names which make their first appearance in other sources during the Neo-Assyrian period.
This paper will examine the list of descendants of Japheth in vv. 1-4 in light of threats to Assyria’s northern border during the reigns of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal to argue that the extent of Neo-Assyrian influence on this material and its implications for dating the Priestly source has been overlooked. While toponyms and ethnonyms such as Gomer (as Gamir/Gimir), Madai, Javan, Tubal (as Tabal), Mešek (as Mušku), Tiras (as Tiris), and Tarshish first emerged in the first millennium and appear in Neo-Assyrian sources from the ninth to seventh centuries, other names from the line of Japheth appear only in a much narrower date range and can be linked to the ‘Cimmerian’ (Assyrian Gimirayya) migration of nomadic groups originating from north of the Caucasus which began to threaten Assyria in the middle of the seventh century BC.
Omen queries from the reign of Esarhaddon show that the Assyrian king was concerned with the threat posed by the Gimirayya as well as another group called the Iškuza. Earlier attempts to equate the term with the Greek skythoi have been discarded, and the name is known only from the omen queries and royal inscriptions of Esarhaddon. The similarity between Iškuza and Aškenaz in v. 3 has long been noted, but the significance of Aškenaz’s status as a son of Gomer and the chronological narrowness of the term have not been fully understood. Furthermore, this paper will argue that Togarmah, the third son of Gomer in v. 3, can likely be equated with the Gimirayya ruler Tugdummê, who alternately allied with Ashurbanipal and then turned against him, threatening Assyria’s northern frontier from the 660s to the 640s and killing Gyges of Lydia.
The threat posed by the Cimmerian migration brought the land beyond Assyria’s northern border into the consciousness of ancient Judah, and the mention of specific names related to these events allow this passage to the closely dated to the mid to late seventh century BC. Further examination of other Priestly genealogies such as the descendants of Ishmael in Gen. 25:12-18 reveal additional names of seventh century date, suggesting that the entire Priestly source may have been composed in the latter half of the seventh century, and further suggesting a Josianic origin for the source.
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Is Trump Cyrus, Nehemiah, or Someone Else?
Program Unit: Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship
Christopher M. Jones, Washburn University
In this paper, I argue that the historical-critical method, which still predominates in our guild, is ill-equipped to offer a critical evaluation of contemporary white Evangelical Christian typological treatment of scripture, either as an object of study in its own right or as a public discourse that demands an informed secular response. First, a little background. I begin by noting that the rise of Trump has led to an attendant resurgence of typological engagement with scripture on the part of white Evangelical Protestants. Evangelicals had generally viewed past presidents like Bush and Obama as the real-time fulfillments of biblical prophecies. However, they have added an element of typological interpretation to their understanding of Trump. They have used the narrative frames of Jehu, Nehemiah, and especially Cyrus to explain to themselves how they are able to express devotion and fealty to a leader who, in so many respects, contradicts their central convictions about theology, morality, and right conduct. Cyrus in particular appeals to Evangelicals because he is an outsider who is nevertheless anointed by God to defend and restore God's people. Nehemiah, meanwhile, is an iconic wall-builder and ethno-nativist. Following my survey of Evangelical typologies of Trump, I lay out my argument concerning scholarly engagements with these typologies. Our training in biblical studies often leaves us ill-equipped for the task because the assumptions of our guild depend so much on the same historical roots as those of Evangelical Christians. We engage the substantive content of biblical canons in light of the Bible's iconic status, and we relegate everything else--contemporaneous "extrabiblical" material as well as subsequent interpretive texts--to "history of interpretation," much as Evangelicals have historically regarded the Bible as a closed set of factual propositions about the universe. Scholarly engagements with Evangelical typology have therefore generally involved historical corrections--using the tools of our discipline to observe the ways that Trump does not fit the "real" Cyrus, for example. These critiques have little impact because they fail to appreciate why typological interpretation appeals to Evangelicals: it gives them an iconic narrative through which the particular substantive details of Trump's presidency can be rearranged to their liking. I end, then, with a programmatic suggestion that biblical scholars need to rediscover our roots as humanists, and argue publicly for alternate typologies for Trump, typologies that highlight the dangers in his ethno-nativism, opportunism, and authoritarianism.
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The Role of Psycholinguistics in Biblical Interpretation: A Look at Gender in Genesis 3
Program Unit: Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation
Christopher Ryan Jones, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
At the intersection of cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics is the principle of concepts, “…mind frames that make up the common currency of our thoughts and are required in our normal day-to-day thinking and behavioral functioning,” which are associated with words. Not only do words vary in meaning from one location to another, within one location the meanings of words change over periods of time. Likewise, concepts also take on new meaning, especially cross-culturally. In this paper, I will explore how grammatical gender influences not only the understanding of a text but also the translation, interpretation, and embodiment of texts cross-culturally. The Hebrew term נחשׁ will be used as the highlighted example for this presentation, with demonstration how its translation into German changes the conceptualization based upon the grammatical gender. Additionally, information will be shared about future studies concerning this phenomenon.
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(Im)Politeness and Emotion: Psalm 7 as a Test Case
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Ethan C. Jones, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary
Politeness is generally understood as culturally bound. Recently, however, scholars have been mining the world’s languages to discover a typology of linguistic politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987). While living languages have been studied extensively, scholars have also begun investigating ancient languages, such as Egyptian and Hittite, for any evidence and use of such (Ridealgh 2016; Cajnko 2016; Mari 2016). Fortunately, scholarship on the Hebrew Bible has made some initial steps in this type of pragmatic study (Bridge 2019). The research thus far has centered on speeches within Hebrew narrative (Bridge 2010; 2016; 2019). Little to no attention has been paid to poetry. This is unfortunate as the book of Psalms consists of performative prayers directed to Yhwh. To begin to fill this gap in the research, this paper seeks to explore the possible categories of linguistic politeness in the Hebrew text of Psalm 7 using cross-linguistic typology. From such study, this paper will attempt to discover whether or not there is any correlation between linguistic politeness and emotion. The intersection of emotional restraint and politeness, for example, should be particularly illuminating.
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Integrating Divergent Approaches to Verbal Complementation: Promise or Peril?
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Ethan C. Jones, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary
The field of Hebrew studies is slowly becoming aware of the role and significance of verbal complementation (valency). Recent grammars give witness to this fact (Van der Merwe et al. 2017; Cook & Holmstedt 2013). When applying valency to the Hebrew Bible, the analysis in a number of cases is straight-forward, if not intuitive. ‘Give’ (ntn), for example, is trivalent: I1 give it2 to you3 (Gen. 23:11). Yet the verb ‘eat’ is notoriously difficult, both in Hebrew (’kl) (Forbes 2016) and throughout the world’s languages (Gillon 2012; Cennamo 2017; Puglielli & Frascarelli 2011). Even more complicated are phrases that might be termed ‘idiomatic’. In an effort to handle the complexities of verbal valency throughout the world’s languages, some linguists are combining two distinct and seemingly contradictory approaches: projectionist and constructionist (Ágel 2015; Ágel & Fischer 2015; Willems & Coene 2006; Coene 2006). The former approach is verb-centric, by which the verb determines the complements. The latter, on the other hand, de-centers the verb, giving prominence to arguments and other contextual features that combine with the verb. A constructionist approach can make sense of the trivalent She1 sneezed her tooth2 across the yard3 (Goldberg 2006), whereas a projectionist approach struggles because ‘sneeze’ is prototypically a monovalent verb. This paper attempts to further the study of verbal complementation by applying both projectionist and constructionist approaches to the Hebrew Bible. In hopes of showing the promise (or peril) of combining such approaches, the application will be made on one of the more difficult, albeit productive, binyanim in the Hebrew Bible, namely, the Niphal.
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Sweeter than Honey: A Lyric Reading of Psalm 19
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Jennifer Brown Jones, Liberty University
As early as Jerome in the fourth century CE, readers of the Psalter have observed the similarities between the poetry of the Hebrew Bible and what has become known as “lyric poetry.” More recently, F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp highlighted the usefulness of this category in his 2015 volume, On Biblical Poetry, which also addresses such concepts as line, rhythm, and orality. This focus on a variety of literary aspects of biblical poetry, moving beyond parallelism and the historic, scholarly focus on form critical research, holds the potential to continue deepening our appreciation of the psalms by expanding our interpretive framework. As a test case, this paper will examine Psalm 19 through the lens of lyric poetry, moving the conversation on the psalm’s interpretation beyond the traditional focus on the psalm’s origins, disunity, or unity. Instead, this analysis will build on Jonathan Culler’s framework for lyric poetry that focuses on lyric’s use of language and voicing, particularly as seen in the poetry’s enunciative apparatus, ritualistic qualities, hyperbolic tendencies, and status as an event in its own right. Combining this lyric analysis with a historically sensitive reading of the psalm will suggest that not only can Psalm 19 reasonably be read as a unified composition, but that an appreciation of its aesthetic qualities expands the psalm’s message for the contemporary audience.
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Figuring David in the Mephibosheth Story
Program Unit: Healthcare and Disability in the Ancient World
Kirsty Jones, Georgetown University
In 2 Sam 5, David is threatened by the ‘blind and lame’ and attacks the ‘blind and lame.’ His hatred for them is exposed, and associated with a decree that ‘the blind and the lame shall not enter the house’ (2 Sam 5:8). In 2 Sam 9, however, he welcomes Mephibosheth, who is ‘lame’ into his house and gives him dining rights (2 Sam 9:7). This contrast is rarely explored, except through brief comments about David’s kindness towards someone ‘hated by his soul’ (pace Ceresko and Vargon).2 Such readings emphasize Mephibosheth’s dependency and David’s kindness, but ignore Mephibosheth’s power and the power of including the hated in the house. I argue that Mephibosheth has power because of his lineage and his disability; both render him different and dangerous before a jealous king who is nonetheless concerned with his duty. In this paper, I survey these issues through a Girardian lens, giving Mephibosheth back the agency which the biblical text bestows on him, and figuring David into the Mephibosheth story.
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More than a Question of Dating Chronicles: Should Redaction-Historical Models Be Employed to Challenge the Consensus?
Program Unit: Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah
Louis Jonker, Universiteit van Stellenbosch - University of Stellenbosch
Older (Steins, Mathys) and more recent (Finkelstein) studies challenge the consensus view that Chronicles originated in the late Achaemenid or early Hellenistic period (middle to end of fourth century BCE). While Steins and Mathys shift the book into the Hasmonean period (early third century BCE), Finkelstein relies on archaeological evidence to indicate that many parts of the book reflect realities in the Hasmonean era (middle of second century BCE). These and other studies interact with the majority view in Chronicles studies of minimal redactional activity in the formation of the book. Diachronic studies of Chronicles therefore engage mainly in debates about how the Deuteronomistic and Pentateuchal sources were used and adapted by the Chronicler who is considered to be an author, historian, theologian, and even exegete in his own right. Earlier diachronic theories are considered less attractive for explaining the coherence in the Chronicler’s literary work. My paper will reopen the diachronic question to indicate that one cannot limit the present debate merely to a dating exercise. Perhaps, redaction-historical models should be employed to challenge the consensus view about the book’s formation.
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Input, Algorithms, Output: Helping Ethiopic Scholars Answer Questions about the Text
Program Unit: Ethiopic Bible and Literature
Garry Jost, Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament
The Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament (THEOT) project has been well served by the development of its methodology, which employs manual and computer processes to compare and analyze Ethiopic texts. The computer processes have been implemented in a set of Google Apps scripts, where input data housed in Word docs and Google Sheets has been converted to output data in additional Google docs, in some cases with informative hover tips, and in visualizations such as a dendrogram. Also, a website, the THEOT Ethiopic Text Viewer, displays the texts in convenient fashion for further analysis.
Now, aided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the THEOT Team is afforded the opportunity to re-think or re-imagine the nature of these processes. This endeavor involves the collaboration of the two teams of the NEH grant, the Philology Team (Curt Niccum, Steve Delamarter, Ralph Lee, Daniel Assefa, and Garry Jost), and the Data Team (Brent Reeves, James Prather, Steve Delamarter, and Garry Jost). The teams have adapted the principles of industry best practice Agile development, whereby the teams 1) define the desired user stories, that is, what the scholars/users want to be able to do, or what questions they want to have answered), 2) implement the highest priority user stories in short one- or two-week iterations, and 3) demo the results to the teams for evaluation against the acceptance criteria of the user stories.
Although my presentation will include information about technology decisions, it will focus on defining the needs/requirements of the scholars to help answer their questions about the Ethiopic texts and the textual history of those texts. The “Input, Algorithms, Output” of the title of this presentation could be re-framed as: 1) the raw data of the manuscripts along with select metadata; 2) the research processes that the scholars employ to help answer their questions; and 3) the resulting reports, visualizations, and websites that support this research.
The presentation will end with a brief discussion on future directions for my research.
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The Monster Is Already in the House! Reading Judges 19 as Horror Film
Program Unit: Bible and Film
Andrew Judd, Ridley College
The history of interpretation of Judges 19 is almost as horrific as the story itself.
Commentators blame the victim and excuse the men who betray her. A Rhetorical Genre
Studies approach is used to understand how assumptions about genre condition certain kinds of ‘uptakes’ and not others. To resist the tradition while retaining the text requires a
disruption of these automatic uptakes. Reading Judges 19 alongside Psycho and Night of the Living Dead suggests other possibilities for what kind-of-thing the text is. It highlights the
role of incongruities and occlusions in generating tension and disrupting normality. The
ambiguous morality of the characters is central to its depiction of the darkness. Reading the
story as if it is a horror film suggests new ways the text might be received, and opens up new ways that we can respond.
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Looking beyond Monotheism: Rethinking the Relationship between Demonic Discourse and the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Hebrew Bible, History, and Archaeology
Blake A. Jurgens, Florida State University
By and large, scholars have posited that the relative dearth of demonic beings and incantatory literature in the Hebrew Bible was due to the stringent monotheistic theology endorsed by the biblical scribes. According to this traditional model, the uncontested divinity of the God of Israel did not allow for the existence of capricious numinous entities whose exercise of misfortune and harm occurred outside the direct jurisdiction of the deity, thus prompting their general exclusion from the biblical writings save for a few anecdotal remnants that somehow escaped complete censorship. This study challenges this preeminent perspective and instead proposes that the cursory and obscure role of demonological traditions and knowledge in the Hebrew Bible most likely reflects the specific social, cultural, intellectual, and material realities embedding demonic discourse in ancient Israel and Judah rather than simply the monotheistic beliefs of its writers and redactors. After briefly tracing the intellectual history of the monotheistic model, this study will unpack how material culture, scribal education and occupation, socioeconomic contingencies, and the canonical process each played a formative role in shaping the relative disinterest in demonological customs, knowledge, and ritual displayed in the Hebrew Bible. In doing so, this study strives to move past the unilinear theological narratives that have dominated our understanding of the transmundane realm experienced and envisioned by the biblical writers and more authentically situate the demonological landscape of ancient Judaism within its proper historical context.
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Punishing Angels, Perverse Demons: The Angels of Destruction in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Jewish Demonic Discourse
Program Unit: Qumran
Blake A. Jurgens, Florida State University
Appearing only four times throughout the Dead Sea Scrolls, the angels of destruction (mal’akê ḥebel) have thus far garnered only cursory attention from scholars. This is due in large part to the sporadic role of these interstitial entities within the Qumran manuscripts as well as their seemingly incongruous portrayal as both punishers of the wicked (Damascus Document, Treatise on the Two Spirits) and corruptors of the righteous (War Scroll, Songs of the Sage). This study addresses this lacuna by exploring the curious treatment of the angels of destruction in the Dead Sea Scrolls and navigating its broader implications for our understanding of early Jewish demonic discourse. After first detailing the four references to these mal’akîm at Qumran, this essay will evaluate these allusions in light of the diverse traditions regarding the angels of destruction featured in the Babylonian Talmud and other rabbinic literature. Following this analysis, I argue that the angels of destruction should be read as neither strictly good nor evil beings in the Scrolls, but rather as volatile and dangerous spiritual entities whose created role as interstitial punishers encompassed both the divinely sanctioned retribution of the wicked alongside more capricious acts of misfortune and harm that required negotiation and ritual management. In doing so, this study challenges our deep-seated tendency to polarize the ancient Jewish transmundane landscape along the good versus evil paradigm endemic to the Western religious tradition and demonstrates a more nuanced approach to early Jewish demonic discourse that more authentically captures its complex and malleable character.
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The Hebrew Vorlage of G Proverbs: Evidence for a Variant Hebrew Recension Older than M
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Joseph Justiss, Oxford University
The textual history of Proverbs has puzzled researchers due to the large-scale order differences between LXX/G Proverbs and Masoretic/M Proverbs. The difference concerns the location of two large text-blocks (Prov 30:1-14 and 30:15-31:9). In this paper I focus on the last two verses of the Words of the Wise (WW) text-block (24:21-22) and the first two verses of the Words of Agur (WA) text-block (Prov 30:1-2)—the seam uniting the two according to G’s arrangement. When we examine the way these two texts interact literarily in Hebrew, we find an overlooked, sophisticated instance of paronomasia between Proverbs 24:22 and 30:2 which exploits the polysemous nature of the root בע"ר and the sound similarity of אידם (24:22) and אדם
(30:2)—a Hebrew pun only recognizable in a Hebrew version of Proverbs with G’s arrangement of materials. Finally, I discuss implications for viewing G’s positioning of the WA text-block as chronologically prior to M’s arrangement.
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Lost Dead Sea Scroll Fragments
Program Unit: Qumran
Arstein Justnes, Universitetet i Agder
According to the official series Discoveries in the Judaen Desert, hundreds of Dead Sea Scrolls fragments are lost, misplaced, missing or stolen. In addition, many fragments have deteriorated. The Twitter tread #LostDeadSeaScrollFragments, which was launced in February 2021, presents one lost fragment every day, and will probably continue for several years. In this paper I will present over hundred fragments that once were found, but now is lost, and present a new project called Lost Dead Sea Scroll Fragments.
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I Thirst: Spirit, Truth, and Living Water (John 4:7–42)
Program Unit: Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics
Jennifer Kaalund, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
I Thirst: Spirit, Truth, and Living Water (John 4:7–42)
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Reading Galatians with the Barbarians: West African and East European Perspectives
Program Unit: Scripture and Paul
Brigitte Kahl, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York
Triumphantly reined in by the civilizing mission of Roman colonialism, Paul’s Galatians are the most notorious (ex-)barbarians of the ancient world. Reading the letter before the backdrop of 19th/20th century French and German imperialism and the Christian-occidental mission civilisatrice among “barbarians” like the Senegalese Diola people, offers striking cross-contextual insights into the elusive context and subversive texture of Paul’s radical text.
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A Different Kind of Romance: Naomi-Ruth-Boaz
Program Unit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible
Deborah Kahn-Harris, Leo Baeck College
Though a wide range of scholars have posited much about the sexual relationships and identities of the main characters of the book of Ruth (Ruth and Boaz as heterosexual romance; Ruth and Naomi as lesbian romance; Boaz as homosexual; Ruth as bisexual), all of these readings have relied on a straightforward dyadic resolution to the tensions in the text. But to what extent is a dyadic resolution to the reading of the story a result of social and cultural conditioning that allows neither readers nor exegetes to be more imaginative with the triangular/triadic nature of the Naomi-Ruth-Boaz relationship?
Attending to the textual lacunae as well as the textual clues – the use of the roots חסד and אהב, for example – in the Book of Ruth, I will argue for a triadic resolution to the story. I will explore the ways in which gender identity, cultural stereotypes, and disability may play into our readings of this narrative. Using contemporary ideas about polyamory, in particular, I will consider the ways in which Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz may interrelate to each other not as rivals for affection, but as a hidden transcript for a relationship of polyfidelity between the three of them, ultimately thereby sustaining a fertile and caring family unit.
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Rage and Social Distancing in Jeremiah and Ezekiel
Program Unit: Book of Jeremiah
Amy Kalmanofsky, Jewish Theological Seminary of America
Anger often is viewed as a raw emotional response that, as Mathew Micahel observes, “negates our humanness” and “transforms one into an animal-like entity.” Yet, as T. M. Lemos notes, anger also can be a “mobilizing emotion” that has “social functions.” According to Lemos, anger “increases social distance” which enables an individual to exercise power or influence over another. This paper builds off of Lemos’s study of anger as a response to trauma, and explores the rhetorical impact of anger in the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. I will compare expressions of divine and prophetic anger in Ezekiel and Jeremiah and consider if anger manifests and functions similarly in these books.
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Reading Ezekiel as a Jewish Lesbian Biblicist: A Thirty Year Relationship
Program Unit: Contextual Biblical Interpretation
Tamar Kamionkowski, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
This paper traces the research in which I have engaged with the Book of Ezekiel against the backdrop of my identity as a middle-class Jew, lesbian, feminist and biblical scholar - as they have shifted over the course of three decades. I note direct connections between my social, economic, cultural and religious locations and the questions I brought to the text. I reflect on my initial lack of awareness of how circumstances in my life were impacting on my scholarship and how I now find that my awareness strengthens my work, makes it more meaningful for me personally, as a scholar, and perhaps most importantly as a teacher.
This paper begins with a story that emerges in the mid-1980’s when I was in my twenties, preparing for my doctoral comprehensives, coming out as a lesbian, involved with Take Back the Night marches, deeply involved in a progressive Jewish community and fighting against apartheid in South Africa. While all of this was happening, I was preparing for my comprehensives and after reading carefully through the Bible in Hebrew, I landed in the Book of Ezekiel. I would never have predicted living with Ezekiel, from day to day; but that is exactly what happened.
The paper closes with reflections on why I am currently equally engaged in studies of the Book of the Leviticus alongside Jewish biblical theology and queer readings of biblical narrative.
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Laughing until It Hurts: Comedy and Violence in the Scroll of Esther
Program Unit: Violence and Representations of Violence in Antiquity
Rosy Kandathil, Emory University
The Scroll of Esther has been described as funny and frightening at the same time. Long critiqued by Christian interpreters as a nationalistic Jewish tale that culminates in a festival to celebrate the full-blown slaughter of Gentile enemies, the Scroll of Esther has been condemned as a story about Jewish revenge. With its notorious absence of God and violence held up as example, Christian interpreters have traditionally found little to recommend it for moral and ethical formation. Trauma theory recognizes the value of revenge fantasy, but in the end also warns that such strategies may do more harm than good in the long-term, often drawing the victim closer to the perpetrator and a re-enactment of violence. Modern interpreters, however, have urged that the interpretative key to the book lies in recognizing its primary mode as comedy and note that laughter contributes strongly to its significance as survival literature. While these dual registers of comedy and tragedy each offer valuable reading strategies for approaching the violence in Esther, neither do justice to Esther’s hybrid form which oscillates between comic and tragic vision as it presents its concern for the topic of violence in relation to the polis. In its ritualized cultural performance, Esther’s annual Purim festival provides a metanarrative on a particular social context: Jews living under threat in diaspora. The paper argues that interpretations of the Scroll’s violence as merely comic or tragic are inadequate to the theological and ethical task raised by the haunting citation of “75,000 dead enemies” (9:16) that forms the happy-ending of the Esther story. In its annual proscriptive enactment of the Purim festival, the Scroll constructs a rich narrative and ritual performative space to host questions concerning an ethical response to threats to survival, self-defense as legitimate violence, the historical and political construction of religio-ethnic identity, and the ongoing vulnerability of people groups defined in some way as “different” and thus a threat to the dominant social fabric of the polis. The deliberate oscillation between horror and laughter, the dialogic lyric of violence and comedy, as well as its situation as a work of art that uniquely decrees and enforces its own ritual re-enactment, distinguishes the Scroll of Esther from other biblical books. Esther’s political violence charges its comedic form with critical undertones. Its repetitive performance resists closure so that it always remains open to reflection and new meanings—this is part of the risk and invitation in Esther that permits a reification of ancient hostilities and a reenactment of its violent retaliation. The ambivalence inscribed in scenes of comic violence accounts for our difficulties in discerning a consistent meaning for the violence in Esther, but within the liminal space of ritual performance the Scroll offers a critical distance that potentially encourages higher order reflection and resists simplistic moral assignations.
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Exposed and Violated: Affective Readings of Ezekiel 16
Program Unit: Israelite Prophetic Literature
Jina Kang, McCormick Theological Seminary
The violent language exhibited in Ezekiel 16 is apparent and unsettling. Without overlooking other texts of a similar orientation, this study examines the violent imagery imposed upon vulnerable female bodies and the “affective hold” (as W.A. Joh uses this terminology) of such imaginaries. While scholarly examinations have probed the historical and literary dimensions of the violent language in Ezekiel 16, the affective dimensions of the text have been broadly assumed in the response of interpreters that point to unsettling pornographic or voyeuristic posture presupposed in the metaphor. This study picks up on such responses to examine the text through the lens of affect theory, which foregrounds non-material responses of emotion, sensation, and being as essential registers that shape perceptions of power, gendered relationships, and other social constructs that are a part of embodied living. This study will prioritize grief as one affective dimension that is absent in the language of Ezekiel 16 that perpetuates and intensifies not only the violent effects of, but delimits the restorative (im)possibilities within the metaphor.
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What Has Vaticanus to Do with Jerusalem? Productive Hebrew Phonological Knowledge of Scribe B of Codex Vaticanus
Program Unit: New Testament Textual Criticism
Benjamin Paul Kantor, University of Cambridge
Codex Vaticanus (4th c. CE) is one of the earliest copies of the Greek Bible that contains both the Septuagint and the New Testament. Although the complete manuscript is the product of multiple scribes, one particular scribe has been attributed with copying both portions of the Septuagint (1 Kingdoms 19.11b–Psalms 77.71; Hosea–Daniel) and the entire New Testament (Grenz 2019). Although scholars have differed with respect to the exact portions attributable to this copyist, this scribe has been termed “Scribe B” since the early days of text-critical work on Codex Vaticanus. In this paper, I will demonstrate that there are a handful of features in Scribe B (or his predecessor) that demonstrate advanced and/or productive knowledge of Hebrew phonology. In other words, Scribe B (or his predecessor) updated certain orthographic features (in transcribed or loaned Hebrew names) in such a way that only a scribe with knowledge of Hebrew phonology would be likely to do. Some of these features even find parallels in the epigraphic and documentary record of Hebrew/Aramaic‒Greek bilinguals writing in Greek in Judea-Palestine of the Roman and Byzantine periods. In this paper, I will cover features like (i) the use of the Greek digraph ει to represent long /iː/ in Hebrew names (see also Williams 2018), (ii) the use of χσ to transcribe /ʃ/ in letter names in Hebrew acrostics, (iii) the use of τιαδη to transcribe /ṣ/ (צ) in a letter name in Hebrew acrostics (see also Steiner 1982), (iv) the use of στ to transcribe /ṣ/ (צ) before /r/ in Hebrew names, and (v) the spelling ιωανης (with one ν instead of two νν) corresponding to the Hebrew name יוחנן. (The final example is more indicative of a Roman Jewish context). Although each individual feature might be explained otherwise—it is possible that one or more of these features are original—taken altogether these features point to knowledge of Hebrew phonology on the part of Scribe B (or his predecessor). The internal distribution of these features across the Scribe B material in Codex Vaticanus, in comparison with other early witnesses to the NT, can shed further light on original spelling conventions in the New Testament text.
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Gemination Following “Shewa” as an Orthoepic Phenomenon in the Biblical Hebrew Traditions of the Second Temple Period
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Benjamin Kantor, University of Cambridge
From a historical perspective, shewa mobile (שוא נע) in the Biblical Hebrew reading traditions may be regarded as an epenthetic vowel which breaks up a consonant cluster that came into being through the process of deletion, syncope, etc.
Each of the medieval Hebrew reading traditions handles this epenthetic in a slightly different way: (i) Tiberian Hebrew generally vocalizes it as a short [a] vowel, (ii) Palestinian Hebrew generally vocalizes it as a short [e]/[ε] vowel, and (iii) Babylonian Hebrew tends to allow the consonant cluster to remain (at least more so than the other traditions). (iv) Samaritan Hebrew, on the other hand, lengthens historical “shewa” into a full phonemic vowel.
The fact that each of these four traditions handles this epenthetic vowel in the “shewa slot” in a different way—yet not in accordance with the etymological vowel—suggests that the vowel reduction that eventually led to medieval shewa was already underway in the late Second Temple period.
In this paper, I will look at one particular “shewa”-related phenomenon attested sporadically both in the ancient transcriptions and in the Samaritan tradition, namely, the doubling of a consonant immediately following a vowel that otherwise might have undergone reduction: e.g., קְטוּרָה = Χεττουρα (LXX); חֹלְמִים = ωλεμμειμ (Secunda); לְבַבְכֶם λεββαβεχεμ (Secunda); קְטֹרָה = qiṭṭå̄rå (Samaritan). Though some such examples of gemination may be explained otherwise (e.g., some variant nominal patterns and/or syllable structure in Samaritan Hebrew in particular), it will be argued that this phenomenon generally reflects a Second Temple period orthoepic strategy for preserving a vowel in the “shewa slot” by geminating the following consonant.
This conclusion is significant because it demonstrates both that vowel reduction/deletion was already prone to occur in the late Second Temple period and that there was an impulse in a careful reading of the Biblical Hebrew tradition to avoid consonant clusters (at least in some cases) already in this early period.
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Aquila's "Hebrew Grammar": Isomorphism in Greek Renderings of the Hebrew Verbal System and Early Hebrew Grammar
Program Unit: International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies
Benjamin Paul Kantor, University of Cambridge
Among ancient Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures, Aquila’s translation (ca. 125 CE) has often been regarded by both ancient (e.g., Origen, Ep. ad Afric., §4) and modern readers as the most “literal”. In more linguistically measured terminology, it exhibits the greatest degree of isomorphism (i.e., form-to-form correspondence) in terms of its translation technique. The most famous of such examples is Aquila’s convention of translating the Hebrew direct object marker את followed by the definite article ה with the Greek preposition σύν followed by a Greek article in the accusative τόν-τήν-τό (e.g., את השמים ואת הארץ → συν τον ουρανον και συν την γην). And yet, these isomorphic renderings are not absent of sensitivity to high register Greek and Hebrew (see Aitken). Nevertheless, despite Aquila’s almost unfailing tendency to render Hebrew into Greek isomorphically, this feature has been somewhat downplayed with relation to verbal syntax. Hyvärinen (1977, 62), the primary scholar of Aquila’s translation technique, states that ‘the [Hebrew and Greek] temporal systems are so unalike in character, that it would be extremely difficult to translate according to certain rules’ (sind die beiden temporalen Systeme ihrem Charakter nach so ungleich, dass es äusserst schwer wäre, hier nach gewissen Regeln zu übersetzen), adding that ‘not even Aquila could find a logical guiding principle here, but rather proceeded more or less on a case-by-case basis’ (dass nicht einmal Aquila hier eine logische Richtschnur hat finden können, sondern mehr oder weniger von Fall zu Fall verfahren hat). Verbal syntax is indeed probably the grammatical category least susceptible to isomorphism in Aquila. In fact, it can even be demonstrated that he demonstrates a high degree of sensitivity to context, style, and register in his rendering of Hebrew verbs into Greek. Nevertheless, a careful analysis of his rendering of Hebrew verbs in light of historical Hebrew grammar will demonstrate that he was working with certain grammatical categories (appropriate to the Roman period) in his understanding of the Hebrew verbal system. When compared with other Greek translations, there are several specific contexts which may betray a certain categorization of the Hebrew verbal tenses and thus a higher degree of isomorphism. Perhaps most notable are cases where Aquila renders a yiqtol form used in a past-tense context for habitual/iterative action with an aorist indicative in Greek, though other translations (e.g., LXX) render it with an imperfect, which is more faithful to the context: e.g., ואד יעלה מן הארץ ‘and a mist was going up from the land’ (Gen. 2.6) → Aquila και επιβλυσμος ανεβη, but cf. LXX πηγὴ δὲ ἀνέβαινεν. This rendering may betray a category of “YIQTOL-in-the-past” for Aquila and the context in which he learned Biblical Hebrew. In short, although Aquila’s isomorphism is diminished somewhat in his rendering of verbs, when compared with other Greek versions, his renderings do still exhibit a greater degree of isomorphism. We might even discern latent Hebrew grammatical categories learned in a particular pedagogical context, which could maybe be linked to primitive/nascent Hebrew grammatical traditions of the late Roman period.
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Christ as God’s Image in Gregory of Nyssa’s De perfectione
Program Unit: Biblical Exegesis from Eastern Orthodox Perspectives
Ilya Kaplan, University of Bern
In Gregory of Nyssa’s De perfectione, the motif of imaging plays a prominent role since there he engages with biblical evidence of Christ being the image of God. Even if a Trinitarian dimension is present in the treatise, what should not be downplayed in reading Gregory is his emphasis on the economic paradigm of the Son’s imaging the Father. Thus, the paper argues that in De perf, Gregory, dealing with Col 1:15, speaks primarily not of the Trinity “in itself” but of the divine economy realised in the Son’s incarnation. It is an alternative to the evaluation of De perf by Giulio Maspero, for whom the Trinity is the dominant subject of Gregory’s discussion so that Gregory shifts to the oikonomia only for a moment, working mainly within the Trinitarian framework. But if the overall framework of Gregory’s exegesis of Col 1:15 is incarnational, then the “image” Gregory is writing about is not a “pre-incarnate” Son imaging the Father apart from the economic relation to creation but precisely the incarnate Son. Moreover, all of this has a direct impact on what the Christian life is like: it is imitatio Christi.
The paper consists of three parts. The first part focuses on a text that is crucial for the argument of the paper, namely a passage that explicitly points to Christ’s becoming God’s image. In this passage, one can find not only the term εἰκών but also μορφή and χαρακτήρ. The second part deals with Gregory’s further discussion on the way how human beings assimilate to the crucified Christ, becoming themselves God’s image. In the final part, where a parallel is drawn between Gregory and Irenaeus, some more general theological and anthropological implications of Gregory’s thought are shown.
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Progress on the ECM of the Apocalypse
Program Unit: Novum Testamentum Graecum: Editio Critica Maior
Martin Karrer, Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal/Bethel
This short presentation will report on progress towards the Editio Critica Maior of the Book of Revelation, which is now entering its final stages.
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Villains and Violence in the Visions of Proto-Zechariah
Program Unit: Apocalypse Now: Apocalyptic Reception and Impact throughout History
Robert C. Kashow, Brown University
Although scholars have spilled much ink over the topic of the Bible and otherworldly violence, little has been said about the function of such violence and the social effects it had on the original community to which the message was propagated. In this paper, I interrogate violence in the visions of proto-Zechariah, focusing specifically on violence enacted upon villainy figures. Specifically, I will analyze Zechariah’s second (the vision of four horns and four craftsmen), fourth (the vision of Satan and Joshua), and seventh (the vision of the flying ephah) vision. I ask why it is that the prophet chose to enact violence on such figures in imaginary realms and, in conversation with anthropological literature on violence, theorize the social work the propagation of these visions accomplished in their original context. I demonstrate that otherworldly violence performed against a villain accomplishes some of the things this-worldly violence against a human typically accomplishes, but eschews the expected consequences of physical violence, i.e., escalation and complete social and political disaffiliation. The violent image thus had tactical potential socially and politically for Zechariah and his program.
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Domesticating Samson
Program Unit: Joshua-Judges
Robert Kawashima, University of Florida
Samson is an ambiguous and liminal character. He functions in the Book of Judges as a type of anti-hero, that is, a man who achieves certain heroic deeds by accident, or even in spite of himself (Judg 14:1-4). His story unfolds in the liminal “borderlands” between Israel and Philistia (S. Weitzman). His name Samson or šimšon – etymologically related to šemeš or sun – links him to fire (J. Crenshaw). Fire, an ambiguous substance: on the one hand, a wild destructive force; on the other, a domesticated force that makes culture possible – cooking food, smelting metals, etc. Ultimately, he is a wildman (D. Bynum), thus, a human who is more at home in nature than in culture. The opposition between nature and culture, not coincidentally, corresponds to his status as a lifelong Nazirite. For the holiness of the Nazirite derives from the various prohibitions imposed upon him or her (Numbers 6), namely, against the consumption of alcohol, against the cutting of hair, and against even the burying of one’s family members, all of which are signs of culture. Not coincidentally, it is precisely two women – bringers of culture, like their ancestor, Eve (Genesis 3) – who manage, where men fail, to bend him to their will, namely, the woman from Timnah and Delilah, both Philistines. The latter, in particular, will bring about his downfall by shearing his locks. Not only does this violate his Nazirite vow, it also functions as a type of rite of initiation, insofar as a razor touches his previously unsullied head and thus effectively domesticates him. But not entirely. For with his dying breath he will topple over the pillars of the Philistine temple in which he is being displayed and cause it to come crashing down upon his tormentors – striking image of nature (the wildman) overwhelming culture – thus killing more Philistines in his death than he did in his life (Judg 16:30).
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The Changing Role and Character of the Torah: Jesus and the Scrolls
Program Unit: Qumran
Thomas Kazen, Stockholm School of Theology
The late Second Temple period saw numerous conflicts and dissensions concerning Torah interpretation and observance. While halakic controversies in the Jesus tradition focus on Jesus and the Pharisees, extant evidence for contemporary legal interpretation and development is mainly found in the Dead Sea texts. The character of many of these texts have often been described as realist, or legal essentialist, in contrast to the nominalism, or legal formalism, that came to predominate later rabbinic halakah, which is regularly ascribed anachronistically to the Pharisees. Within such a binary construction, Jesus frequently seems to side with the Qumran realism/essentialism.
For a more meaningful understanding, however, we need to see this within a broader framework and consider the gradual (and uneven) shift from Hebrew torah (instruction, guidance, as in ancient West Asian tradition) to Greek nomos (constitution, law, jurisdiction), taking place during the Greek and Roman periods and sometimes described as a development from a descriptive to a prescriptive function. The judicial shades of meaning that Jewish “law” was imbued with influenced the ways in which it was understood, interpreted, interacted with, and adhered to.
Within such a framework, some of the Dead Sea texts can be understood to take legal essentialism in an innovative direction, at times expanding or even breaking with previous custom and practice, while the Jesus tradition often suggests a custom-based and pragmatic or traditional approach, but without the more formalist defences, including some strained exegesis, found with later rabbis. I argue that Jesus did not understand the Torah as legislation in a Greco-Roman sense, but as a resource for wisdom and understanding, making people righteous and enabling them to exercise justice. Hence his legal interpretation was intrinsically bound up with his prophetic critique of the elite and defence of the weak. With such a traditional attitude to the law, there is no real conflict between the guidance and instruction of the Torah and its pragmatic and customary application.
Some of the texts from Qumran provide us with a window into a process of reorientation with regard to the role and character of the Torah, which characterised not only the yaḥad, but late Second Temple period Jewish society at large. The early Jesus tradition similarly attests to this process, albeit in a slightly different key. In this paper I compare a few key texts to illustrate similarities and differences.
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Why Mention Solomon in Biblical Superscriptions?
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Arthur Jan Keefer, Eton College
The name “Solomon” appears in the superscriptions of Proverbs, the Song of Songs, Psalms 72 and 127, and, by allusion, Ecclesiastes. Explanations for why his name occurs here are wide-ranging, including notions of authorship, a simple nominal purpose, and connotations of a broader biblical tradition. I offer an evaluation of these many interpretations to argue that some of them are cogent, some nearly irrefutable, and that they can function simultaneously rather than being mutually exclusive. Others are incomplete or implausible, in particular cases. Championing an undeveloped yet attested interpretation, I argue that Solomon is mentioned or alluded to in Proverbs, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes in order to authorize these texts in some way. He accredits several subsidiary authorities in Proverbs, such as the father, the figure of Wisdom, and foreign source material (Amenemope); for the Song of Songs, he supplements an assertion about the Song’s superlative quality; and Ecclesiastes, rather than making an effortless and candid reference to “Solomon,” mentions Qohelet, who bolsters his credibility by means of allusions to and assertions of royalty, wisdom and incomparability. While the cases in Psalms 72 and 127 remain inconclusive, the superscriptions of three biblical books cohere in their authorizing function, while, at the same time, incorporating their more plausible auxiliary roles, such as authorship and canonical connections. This argument has the advantage of being plausible, coherent and cohesive in view of alternative interpretations and the distinctive features of each book.
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Cursed by Law-Breaking, Blessed in Abraham (Gal 3:8–14)
Program Unit: Scripture and Paul
Craig Keener, Asbury Theological Seminary
In Gal 3:8-14, Paul begins and ends with blessing in Abraham, but in between addresses the curse. The curse is for law-breakers, but Jesus experienced the curse in their place on the tree. The present experience of the promised blessing of Abraham, inheriting the coming world, is experienced through the Spirit (3:5, 14), available to the families of the earth blessed in Abraham. Paul ingeniously links multiple texts based on shared key terms.
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Justice, Injustice, and the Care of the Most Vulnerable in Paul
Program Unit: Pauline Theology
Sylvia Keesmaat, Trinity College - Toronto
This exploration of justice in the Pauline epistles rests on the following three-legged stool: 1. that in the Pauline letters, adikia should be translated as “injustice” thereby providing a key to the widespread concern with justice in Paul’s letters; 2. that in Paul’s letters, dikaiosyné should be translated into English in a way that honours its translation of two Hebrew words in the LXX, tzedaqah (usually translated as “righteousness” in English) and mishpat (usually translated as “justice” in English); and 3. that Paul’s echoes of and allusions to the psalms (especially the psalms of lament) and the prophets reflects a deep concern with socio-economic and wider societal justice. These three points will provide the basis for my argument that throughout his letters Paul is concerned not only about our relationship with God, but also with the overarching biblical concern for justice, broadly conceived as care for the most vulnerable in our midst: not just the orphan, the widow and the stranger, but also the land and other creatures. In the end, it is this socially embodied expression of justice that encompasses the dikaiosyné of God.
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Women, Indigeneity, Walls, and Borders
Program Unit: Poverty in the Biblical World
Sylvia Keesmaat, Trinity College - Toronto
This paper will explore the prominent role of women in transgressing borders/walls both in the biblical text and our own day. Focussing primarily on stories of three women in the biblical narrative: Rahab, a marginal woman who lived, literally, in a wall; Ruth, a woman who both welcomed those who entered the borders of her own land, and who left her indigenous roots to cross over into the borders of another’s land; and the Syro-phoenecian/Canaanite woman, who forces Jesus to step over the border into a new relationship with the indigenous people of the land. These three stories provide an entrance into the various dynamics of women and borders: women who welcome those who cross borders; women who cross borders to become caregivers for family members; and the complicated tensions experienced by women for whom a border means the need to either abandon or reinforce their own indigenous identity. As the biblical story unfolds, it becomes clear that the border is the place of choice and possibility for not only for these women, but also a place of great possibility for the story of Jesus.
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A Modern Archive of an Ancient People: Unlocking Neglected Sources in Samaritan Studies
Program Unit: Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism
Katharina E. Keim, Lund University
This paper will engage with previously understudied and undervalued archival materials relating to the study of the Samaritans. It will question the received western scholarly position that values medieval manuscripts over modern productions and will demonstrate the impact that the quest for ‘authenticity’ and ‘antiquity’ have had on the way in which the Samaritans and their material culture has been studied. The paper will conclude by identifying new directions for the study of the Samaritans through a re-evaluation of the usefulness of existing sources.
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The Production of Natural Space in Isaiah 40–66
Program Unit: Book of Isaiah
William L. Kelly, University of Richmond
Among the potential clues for understanding the compositional history of Isaiah 40–66, scholars have long recognized the value of geographical and topographical language. These clues have primarily been understood in relation to questions of the social location of the prophet, for example, as in the case of the famous “desert motif” and “second exodus” (e.g. 40:3–5; 41:17–20). In this paper, I propose a different approach to such language by analyzing “natural” space in Isaiah 40–66 by using insights from the work of Henri Lefebvre. According to Lefebvre, space is not a passive container “indifferent to its content,” but instead it both produces and is produced by social and economic relations. Using this theoretical perspective, I will examine the production of “natural” space in Isaiah 40–66 with an eye toward questions of continuity and discontinuity in the major units of Isaiah 40–48, 49–55 and 56–66. What new insights might result from considering the relation between prophetic expectations in these texts and natural space — especially as it contrasts with urban space? Certain restorative and transformational descriptions of natural spaces might suggest a particular ideological framework, such as the wilderness becoming like a garden (51:3; cf. 58:11), deserts filling with water (41:18; 43:19–20; cf. 42:14–16; 50:2), or coastlands awaiting divine salvation (51:5; 60:9). Such hopeful expectations for natural space can be contrasted with texts focusing on Zion/Jerusalem. In the urban/rural dichotomy of Isaiah 40–66 too, there are instances where the restorative vision for Jerusalem extends outward from urban space (42:11; see also 40:9; 44:26; cf. 54:3); others remain strictly Zion/Jerusalem focused (52:1; 60:14; 61:4; 62:12; 64:9; 66:6), instead describing urban redevelopment, and the construction of walls and gates (e.g. 56:5; 58:12; 60:10, 18; 62:6). This kind of spatial analysis comes to a head in the case of Isaiah 60–62, a text often understood to contain the kernel of Trito-Isaiah. Here the natural sphere is understood in economically extractive terms, as natural space produces wealth which gravitates to the urban Zion/Jerusalem. Considering various constructs of natural space in such texts will reveal ideological patterns which can illustrate new avenues for understanding the (dis)unity of Isaiah 40–66.
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On the Corner: Streets and Urban Space in the Hebrew Bible
Program Unit: Space, Place, and Lived Experience in Antiquity
William L. Kelly, University of Richmond
One of the basic spatial constructs in the Hebrew Bible is the binary opposition of city/field (ʿîr/śādeh). This intellectual framework functions to define the city as a dividing line between urban (“inside”) and rural (“outside”) life. Within this conceptual opposition, however, there are additional spaces within the city, those that are both “inside” the urban world and “outside” the domestic sphere. In this paper, I explore the symbolic meanings of the street (ḥûṣ) in conversation with Henri Lefebvre’s conception of space. For Lefebvre, space is not passive, isolated, or static; rather, it is a dialectical concept, both produced by and producing social and economic relations. With this critical lens, I consider streets as spaces within the urban environment. Streets lie between other liminal spaces, linking together the boundaries of the doorstep (petaḥ) and the gate (šaʿar), and connecting the corner (pināh) and the square (rǝḥôb), but they also form a key part of the social and economic fabric of the city. I examine the variety of commercial, administrative and social activities that take place in these urban settings — as a part of their “social morphology” in Lefebvre’s words — as well as conceptual understandings of streets as public areas of vulnerability. Combining an analysis of such ambivalent attitudes with an exploration of urban space, this paper’s aim is to cast new light on the conceptual organization of space in the city within the intellectual world of the Hebrew Bible.
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Implications of 1 Corinthians 14:1–25 for Multicultural Church Gatherings
Program Unit: Bible and Practical Theology
Mark J. Keown, Laidlaw College
As is well known, the Corinthian community had a penchant for the gift of tongues. Scholars continue to argue whether Paul meant a Spirit-given ability to speak in known languages or some other kind of spiritual language. While this is an interesting argument, clearly within the setting Paul envisages, he has in mind people speaking languages largely unknown to the community gathered. Hence, the tongues must be translated (or interpreted). As such, I will simply assume in the paper that these languages are not the lingua franca of the majority in the gathered community.
With this in mind, one implication of his teaching is worth considering. Namely, what does Paul’s instruction suggest concerning the use of languages in a general sense in gathered worship settings?
This is an appropriate question, as Paul is clearly addressing practices within a gathered worship setting as he instructs the Corinthians. Further, he is speaking to a group or groups in which a variety of languages (spiritual or known) can potentially be spoken. It is also cogent as with increasing globalization, what were once monocultural church services across the world (especially in the west) are becoming increasingly multicultural gatherings. This transformation is certainly the case in my church in Glenfield, Auckland, NZ. Such things are also important in contexts where colonialism has marginalized indigenous populations and the rightful desire to do everything possible to ensure that indigenous languages are not only preserved but celebrated and encouraged. Finally, I have also observed differing approaches to the use of language in NZ churches and Christian gatherings. It is not uncommon to hear people speak in a language different from the dominant language. In some settings, this is even celebrated. However, when untranslated, people often have no idea what is being said. Is this appropriate? Conversely, some settings do not allow the use of languages other than the dominant language. Is this apposite? So, what might Paul say to us in such settings?
This paper will consider what Paul’s instructions to Corinth may say concerning the use of language in multicultural gatherings in today’s multicultural and multilingual churches.
A range of things will be canvassed including Paul’s positive view of different languages as a gift to be exercised, yet his disdain for them in the public space when not translated; his assumption of a lingua franca; the power that publicly spoken and translated tongues have in terms of prophecy, education and edification, prayer, song, thanksgiving, praise, and evangelism; the converse power of untranslated language to marginalize, render uncomprehending, offend, and completely put off and alienate others (especially guests); the expectation that the speaker will translate where no translator is found; multi-lingual communities as a fulfillment of OT eschatological hope; and so on.
I will specifically apply these things to my own church in New Zealand, confident that this will spark thoughts and responses from others in similar situations.
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“Have You Answered Me?” Situational Shift (or Not) in Psalm 22
Program Unit: Prayer in Antiquity
Michael Kibbe, Great Northern University
Psalm 22 is sometimes distinguished from other laments in the Hebrew Psalter by its abrupt turn to praise in v. 22 (MT). From the outset (“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”) to the first half of v. 22 (“save me from the mouth of the lion!”) the psalmist’s dire situation is clearly in view. But in v. 22b, the last word of the phrase (עֲנִיתָֽנִי) may signal a change of circumstance—the whole phrase could be translated “you rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen,” and the remainder of the psalm is a summons to and a declaration of praise. Questions remain, however, on two fronts. The first issue is whether עֲנִיתָֽנִי, or the OG’s τὴν ταπείνωσίν μου (likely stemming from a Hebrew source text having עָ֭נְיִי), is the preferred reading of the text. The OG parallels more closely the previous verse, which in both Greek and Hebrew texts has a single verb governing both clauses and ends with the possessive adjective (יְחִידָתִֽי). However, the extended praise in vv. 23–31, if taken to indicate a prior change in circumstance, lends credence to the marking of that change in vv. 22b. The second issue, then, is whether either version of the text marks that situational adjustment from predicament to vindication. The OG includes no such indication (contra some recent scholarship regarding the use of v. 23 in early Christian literature). The MT, on the other hand, requires further exploration both in light of its own literary coherence and in relation to the many other psalms that signal a shift from lament to praise, among which are psalms that envision future deliverance (e.g., Pss 3–5, 10–13, 42–43, 55, 57, 59) and others that appear to include the moment of deliverance at the present time (e.g., Pss 6, 54, 56).
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Conquering the Greco-Roman World in the First Letter of John
Program Unit: Jesus Traditions, Gospels, and Negotiating the Roman Imperial World
Ahreum Kim, University of Cambridge
In the New Testament, 1 John 5:4 is the only verse in which the noun for “victory” (nikē) appears, and it is associated with pistis (belief/faith): “…And this is the victory that conquers the world—our faith.” In the Greco-Roman world, nikē and pistis were also aligned: the concept of victory was associated with the goddess Nike (Roman: Victoria), who often appeared in the context of military battle, and writers like Polybius and Josephus reveal that these victories were often achieved through a “pistis to the Romans.” The Romans would conquer other cities by offering a pistis relationship in which opponents would submit themselves to Roman rule. Given this cultural background of pistis and victory, it is interesting that conquering language appears several times within the five chapters of 1 John (2:13-14; 4:4; 5:4-5), with multiple opponents including the evil one, the devil, false prophets, and antichrists. The first named conquerors are the “young men,” which underlines the sense of fighting as they are of military age. However, they are not to conquer the Greco-Roman world with violence. The multiple references to murder in chapter 3 suggest that others may threaten violence against them. However, the writer exhorts his audience not to respond like Cain who killed his own brother. While the Greco-Roman culture might respond in violence to those who have different beliefs, the Johannine community are to respond with love, a message that is reiterated several times in the letter. By the end of the epistle, the writer makes clear that the conqueror of the world is the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God, and that victory is pistis in Jesus. They do not conquer the world, as the Romans do, by enforcing a pistis toward the emperor; the Johannine believers conquer the idolatry of the Greco-Roman culture through pistis in Jesus as the true divine Son. Thus, conquering the world in 1 John means conquering through belief in Jesus as the Son of God and responding with love, even while the Greco-Roman world achieves victory through the threat of violence and by enforcing a pistis to the Roman emperor.
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Conquering the World in John and 1 John
Program Unit: Johannine Literature
Ahreum Kim, University of Cambridge
In both the Gospel of John and the First Letter of John, there is a clear sense of battle as each makes reference to “conquering the world.” In the Gospel, it is Jesus who conquers the world (16:33), and his opponent is the “ruler of this world” (12:31; 14:30; 16:11). This ruler is traditionally assumed to be the devil, but in the Greco-Roman cultural context could also refer to the emperor, who is represented by Pontius Pilate and the Roman soldiers who capture, torture, and crucify Jesus. The conquering in the Gospel, therefore, implies a violent struggle, not only for Jesus himself, but also for the disciples, as Jesus tells them that they will face persecution in the world. In the First Letter of John, there is an even stronger sense of battle as conquering language is used several times within its five chapters (2:13-14; 4:4; 5:4-5), and multiple opponents are named including the evil one, the devil, false prophets, and antichrists. The “young men,” in particular, are singled out as the first conquerors of the letter, which underlines the sense of fighting as they are of military age. However, by the end of the epistle, the writer makes clear that the conqueror of the world is the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God, and that victory is pistis (belief/faith). At first, the sense of conflict in 1 John may not appear to suggest any violence and that the Johannine believers are simply clashing with those who have different beliefs. However, the multiple references to murder in chapter 3 imply that a violent response is a very real possibility, not only from those “in the world,” that is, those who are not a part of the Johannine community, but also from the Johannine believers themselves. The writer exhorts his audience not to respond like Cain who killed his brother. Instead, they are to respond with love, a message that is reiterated several times in 1 John, and is also a repeated exhortation by Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. Thus, conquering the world in John and 1 John means conquering through belief in Jesus as the Son of God and responding with love, even when the people of different beliefs in the world around them respond with violence. It is certainly a message that is applicable to the world today, as violence continues to be a response to differences in belief, but these differences may better be overcome with responses of love and understanding.
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Theological Educators as Priests, Midwives, and Freedom Fighters: Seeking a More Inclusive Pedagogy
Program Unit: Institute for Biblical Research
Brittany Kim, Northeastern Seminary at Roberts Wesleyan College
Theological Educators as Priests, Midwives, and Freedom Fighters: Seeking a More Inclusive Pedagogy
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Poetic Allegory and Colonial Melancholy in Psalms of Individual Lament: A Case Study of Psalm 88
Program Unit: Bible and Emotion
Chwi-Woon Kim, Baylor University
Scholars have explored the dialogic, socio-rhetorical, and affective dimensions of psalms of individual lament (Carleen Mandolfo, Amy Cottrill, Fiona Black). While the previous studies underline the roles that individual laments perform in public and social domains, these studies pay little attention to power relations inscribed in public and religious discourses that privilege dominant culture while neglecting minoritized experiences. Acknowledging this reality calls for reimagining underrepresented experiences in the sanctioned discourse of Psalms. Recognizing Psalms as a colonial discourse (Jon Berquist), this presentation explores the affective and subversive role of individualized language in psalms of individual lament. Taking Ps 88 as a key text for this exploration, I argue that this psalm reflects and generates colonial melancholia through allegorization, meaning that the historically oppressed psalmist (and reader) conflates a collective feeling of national loss into the individual expressions of alienation from God and community. To demonstrate this argument, I first refer to Ranjana Khanna’s notion of “colonial melancholy,” which not only refers to a feeling of national loss emerging from colonial context but also functions as an individualized form of social critique. As colonial hegemony makes this affect unrecognized, the colonized subject internalizes this feeling and develops it as a subversive way to reveal the oppressive reality of colonialism. I explain how colonial melancholy comes into view through a reading process of Ps 88. According to Egbert Ballhorn, the reader’s perception and memory of interacting with Psalms shapes the way that she constructs the meanings of the text. Applying this idea to the present analysis, I refer to the Elohistic Psalter as a primary literary context of Ps 88. The Elohistic Psalter most frequently includes the majority of psalms of communal lament (e.g., Pss 44; 60; 74; 80; 83). These communal laments exhibit divine anger as the major cause for national catastrophes and hence convey a collective memory of national loss. With these historical and literary memories in mind, the reader of Ps 88 may understand the motif of divine anger in Ps 88 as the cause for the psalmist’s alienation from God and community (88:8–9, 15–19). The process of reading Ps 88 within the Elohistic Psalter, therefore, forges an allegorical reading by combining the memories of national loss with the perception of social alienation. This analysis concludes that exploring allegorical dimensions of Psalms provides a glimpse into the oft-invisible struggles of the minoritized and their discursive resistance to dominant power.
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The Historical Present in the LXX
Program Unit: Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics
Daniel Joosuk Kim, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
The precise meaning and function of the historical present is still a topic of debate. In order to contribute to the discussion, this paper examines the historical presents in LXX Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, and 1 Samuel. Analyses of certain tokens that may help elucidate the function of the historical present are then presented.
A potential problem with studies examining the historical present is the danger of circularity. One may come up with a theory of how the historical present functions and then read that function into the texts and contort the interpretation of the text to make it fit one’s theory. It is especially difficult to avoid this circularity with vague notions like prominence, vividness, and discontinuity. The LXX books are a useful corpus to examine because they provide minimal pairs and potentially allow one to discover the reasoning for a linguistic choice. By comparing the LXX with the Hebrew text, there may be some hints as to why the historical present was used in a particular environment. Thus, the tokens in the various LXX books are analyzed in an attempt to uncover factors in the syntactic and discourse environment that may have motivated the translators to choose the historical present over the much more common translation equivalent for wayyiqtol, the aorist. The analysis of both the Hebrew and Greek texts can hopefully help to constrain the interpreter’s tendency to make things fit into his or her proposed theory.
This paper makes much use of the work of Steven Runge and Talmy Givón, who work within a functional framework. Thus, this paper follows them and utilizes the tools of the functional tradition. Since this project requires an examination of the discourse environment above the clausal level, the discourse-pragmatic analyses prominent in functionalism are especially important.
In addition, the paper seeks to bring in the perspective of Cognitive Grammar (CG). According to the principles of CG, each linguistic form pairs with one or more meanings. Meaning is defined as the conceptualization associated with a linguistic form. Conceptualizing content, though not limited to visual perception, can be likened to the viewing of a scene. If this viewing metaphor may be elaborated and taken into the domain of film production, then the historical present may be conceptualized like a cut from one camera shot to another. The effect of this film-making technique is not too different from the everyday bodily experience of blinking and shifting one’s gaze.
In this paper, it is argued that the historical present functions to mark discontinuity and that it is able to do this because the present tense form in a historical context is associated with construing a shift in the viewing arrangement of a scene.
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The Touch of Her Flow: The Haptic Voices of the Bleeding Woman in the Synoptic Gospels and Etcetera
Program Unit: Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics
Dong Sung Kim, Drew University
The Touch of Her Flow: The Haptic Voices of the Bleeding Woman in the Synoptic Gospels, and Etcetera
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Information Structure of the Greek New Testament: A Methodological Proposal and an Application to Romans 14:1–15:13
Program Unit: Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics
Doosuk Kim, McMaster Divinity College
The earliest manuscript we have today does not show the section, paragraph, and chapter breaks. Since the third and fourth century manuscripts, some markers such as spacing and ekthesis are appearing. However, interestingly, the modern Greek New Testament has clear and explicit paragraph/section divisions indicated by the heading of a new line and spacing between verses. Then, in what criteria can we make breaks between chunks or clusters of a text? Also, what benefits can we acquire through paragraphing the individual book of the New Testament? The present essay will attempt to answer those questions through Information Structure (henceforth, IS). Without providing an overarching system, paragraphs may be arbitrarily or intuitively divided. Alongside this, if making a unit does not help to read or understand the Bible, there is no need to make such divisions. In this regard, this paper employs information structure and modifies it for the Greek New Testament accordingly. Then, finally, this essay utilizes the information structure to Romans 14 as a test case.
To succinctly explain, the trajectory of IS can be detected through three periods, pre-Prague school, Prague school, and post-Prague school. Though each era has its distinctiveness in terms of the notion and applications, there is a commonality throughout the trajectory of IS. That is, IS has been dealt with the clause level. However, this essay will propose that the analysis of IS ought not to be confined in the clause level but should go to the discourse level. A language user does not enumerate all information in a jumble of thoughts. Rather, s/he organizes it to convey the message. That is to say, as an architect, the author displays each information as a constituent of a particular information unit and constructs the discourse as a whole. Furthermore, the author introduces information linearly and hierarchically. It is linear because the author should choose the language and places it sequentially, from words to phrases, to clauses, to sentences, and to larger units. It is also hierarchical since information is regimented by structures of linguistic units. Thus, depending on how the author uses different language repertoires, the information would be structured differently. Therefore, through the analysis of IS, the reader would be able to identify how information is introduced and elaborated upon by the latter elements, how the author encloses a linguistic chunk as an information unit, and how each information unit collaborates to build up a discourse. In this regard, the present paper will project analytic tools for each level of language—the clause, clause complex (sentential/super-sentential level), and discourse. Finally, as a test case, this paper analyzes Rom 14:1–15:13 through information structure and proposes that Paul displays information and structures information units to convey his message of the discourse that is the unity in Christ.
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Deutero-Isaiah as a Resistance Poet: Disruptive Dialogues with Genesis, Qoheleth, and Modern Korean Resistance Poets
Program Unit: Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Paul Kim, Methodist Theological School in Ohio
This study intends to explore three aspects of Deutero-Isaiah as a resistance poet: (a) "symbolic" aspect of poetry (what is expressed), (b) "imaginative" aspect of the poetic brevity (what is not expressed), and (c) "reality" of the event or memory constructed by the poetic signifiers of social class, status, and ideology. Expounding the components of metaphor, ellipsis, and ideology, I will intertextually analyze the disruptive dialogues among the Genesis creation accounts (P and J/non-P), Qoheleth, and Deutero-Isaiah as to how these texts deconstruct one another, present counterarguments, and together invite readers to join in their struggles for survival and solidarity. I will then compare select work(s) of modern Korean resistance poets, which may shed further lights on the pertinent depictions of despair or hope, compromise or courage, amid (pandemic) threats and crises.
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Breaking the Asian-American Silence at a Time Like This: Lessons from the Diasporic Jews in Exile
Program Unit: Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics
Hyun Woo Kim, Emory University
Anti-Asian xenophobia and discriminatory acts against Asian Americans have increased significantly as the COVID-19 pandemic has increased across the US. On March 16, 2021, a series of mass shootings driven by racism took place in metro Atlanta. Eight individuals were killed and six of them were Asian women. While trying to make sense of this senseless tragedy, Asian American theologians, ministers, and leaders begin to raise a series of challenging questions: How can we comfort the families who have lost their loved ones? How can we as Asian Americans ever find a sense of belonging in this nation? How can we as Asian American Christians take faithful steps to break our overdue silence and stand in solidarity with our larger communities in great pain?
Seeking to address these questions, we examine the historical novella in Esther to explore and understand (1) what it means for the Jewish community in exile to embrace their bicultural identity and (2) how these Jewish cousins named Mordecai and Esther use their agency to protect and save their fellow Jewish people from annihilation at the hands of Haman.
Along with Daniel and Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther belongs to the post-exilic portions of the Bible. While Esther similarly addresses the issues of Jewish lifestyle in exile, what portrayed in Esther is different. Esther is not associated with loyalty to God (Daniel) and adherence to the Torah (Ezra-Nehemiah) that indicates the importance of the traditional Jewish identity. Specifically, in chapters 2-3, Esther and Mordecai are depicted as “assimilated” individuals who use pagan names, conceal their Jewish identity, and work in a cooperative manner with the Persian royals. In chapter 4, on the other hand, Esther and Mordecai observe the accepted codes of Jewish identity. They openly identify themselves as Jews and exhibit their concern to ensure the survival of the Jewish community on Persian soil. From the sociological perspective, what we see in the exiled lifestyle of Mordecai and Esther is “segmented assimilation.” These two Diasporic Jews learn and absorb the Persian culture, language, and rules while remaining continuously rooted in their Jewish community, which ultimately enable them to fight for the safety of their community in a time of great crisis.
In conversation with Asian American studies, sociology, and practical theology, this co-presentation will highlight how the Jewish lifestyle in exile of Esther and Mordecai are strikingly similar to how Asian Americans experience their lives as bicultural immigrants seeking a sense of belonging. Moreover, Mordecai asks Queen Esther to intervene for her people and challenges her not to “remain silent” at “a time like this” (4:14). What does it mean for Asian American faith communities to break our silence at a time like this as we lament the death of our women? The contextual re-reading of Esther will offer critical insight on how Asian Americans can use their agency and voices as a way of protecting and advancing the welfare of their communities in the face of a global pandemic, systemic racism, and xenophobia.
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The Function of Paul’s Grief in Romans 9:1–3
Program Unit: Pauline Epistles
Jin Young Kim, Oklahoma State University Main Campus
One of the topics that has been much discussed in the Pauline scholarship is Paul’s view on unbelieving Jews, especially their fate at the time of final judgment. In the last couple of decades, beginning with the so-called New Perspective on Paul, many scholars began to argue that Paul had a somewhat optimistic view on Israel’s salvation. While the debate is ongoing, Paul’s grief—which serves as one of the prime pieces of evidence to support Paul’s pessimistic stance for unbelieving Jews—has not been much discussed and remains a curious topic. In this essay, by analyzing Paul’s grief in Rom 9:1-3 in light of Hellenistic moralists’ understanding and use of grief, I will show that Paul’s grief is not a reflection of his belief in the destruction of unbelieving Jews. Instead, I argue that Paul’s grief functions as an indispensable part of his argumentation of Rom 9-11, where he uses his ethos, pathos, and logos to bring the moral progress of his gentile audience. Here Paul presents himself as a model of a Hellenistic wise man who experiences grief for his kindred’s present status but controls his emotion through the logical understanding of God’s logos. In this attempt, Paul also seeks to transform the gentile misunderstanding into a correct understanding and the erroneous emotion of boasting into the proper pathos of fear and hope.
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The Old and Young in Luke-Acts: The Lukan Literary Efforts for the Post-war Trauma, Generational Unity, and the Empowerment of Younger Generations
Program Unit: Book of Acts
Jin Young Kim, Oklahoma State University Main Campus
While many scholars pointed out the traumatic experience of the Jewish War and the Temple's destruction to be crucial in forming early Christian identities, not many have analyzed the generational dynamics over this issue present among early churches. While the impact of the War was limited in predominantly gentile churches in the diaspora, studies suggest that this was still seriously traumatic for the first few generations who were deeply associated with the Jewish religiosity and shared the symbolic significance of the Temple(Gruen 2002). Furthermore, sociological studies on post-war trauma suggest that the trauma transmits throughout generations, being dealt differently by older and younger generations. Younger generations, in particular, actively address the trauma through the redescription of the past and older generations, as creating their own generational identity and presenting new hopes for the community(Daiute and Turniski, 2005). In this article, through literary analyses of a selection of examples from Luke-Acts (ex. Mary-Zechariah; early apostles-Stephen; Saul), I explore how Luke addresses the problems of different understandings of the Temple between older and younger generations and trauma persisting in the community. By portraying the old and young in particular ways, Luke attempts to heal the communal trauma of the War, promote mutual understanding between generations, and empower the next generation of the church.
Erich S. Gruen, “Roman Perspectives on the Jews in the Age of the Great Revolt,” in Andrea M. Berlin and J. Andrew Overman(eds.), The First Jewish Revolt: Archaeology, History, and Ideology (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 27-43.
Colette Daiute and Maja Turniski, "Young People's Stories of Conflict and Development in Post-War Croatia," Narrative Inquiry 15.2 (2005): 217-40.
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The Rumination on the Sacrificial Death of the Levite’s Concubine and Saul’s Oxen (Judges 19:1–20:17 and 1 Samuel 11:1–15)
Program Unit: Ecological Hermeneutics
Jung Ae Kim, Drew University
In several narratives of the first king, Saul, the story of 1 Samuel 11:1-15 is about Saul’s military success, portraying his rescuing the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead from the oppression of Nahash, the king of the Ammonite. Saul seems to be a compassionate, strong military commander. The military success overshadows the frightening act of cutting oxen in pieces and sending them throughout the kingdom. The dismemberment and sacrificial death of oxen are unnoticed in the narrative and its interpretations.
In an ecological-feminist reading, I attempt to re-read the narrative of Saul’s oxen with another tragic story of the dismemberment of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19:1-20:17. This re-reading would draw attention to the victimization of the animal and the woman and accordingly to an ethics of care for animals. Just as feminist readings of Judges 19 have attempted to retrieve the silenced voice of the Levite’s concubine, my task would give readers an opportunity to listen to the silenced voices of oxen. In my opinion, the dismemberment of the woman and the animal presents that both the woman and animals are sacrificed to establish men’s dignity and authority. To demonstrate my argument, I first explore the relationships between oxen and the Levite’s concubine. To do so, I look at the socio-economic status of women and animals in patriarchal societies. I also investigate how the concubine is animalized and how the oxen are feminized. Secondly, I attempt to construe the dismemberment of bodies in relationships embedded in power. To retrieve men’s dignity, authority, and power, the woman and animals have sacrificial death in their relationships with the men in power. Finally, I turn my attention to the implication of the dismemberment of the concubine and animals. Their sacrificial death brings about war and genocide. No matter who degraded men—the Levite or Israelites, the whole community identified as Others is decimated. Just as animals in mass terms are killed, the entire group of people identified as Others is homogenized like animals and the genocide is enacted.
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Intercessio Tacita: ἔγγυος in Hebrews 7:22 in Light of Ancient Legal Practices and Documentary Papyri
Program Unit: Hebrews
WITHDRAWN: Kyu Seop Kim, Asia United Theological University
Exegetes concur that the term ἔγγυος (surety) is a legal concept or metaphor (e.g., Oepke, Spicq, Attridge, Graßer, Weiss), but despite its significance, the meaning of ἔγγυος has not attracted the careful attention that it deserves. Interpreters usually read ἔγγυος in the sense of ‘guarantee’ or ‘assurance’ (e.g., Preisker, Spicq, Backhaus, Bruce, Lane, NIV, NRSV, ESV) with respect to the salvation (e.g., Michel) or the future of the believers (e.g., Ellingworth) without specific historical and lexical studies. Some other scholars (e.g., Moffatt, Graßer, Koester) interpret the term ἔγγυος in terms of ‘mediatorship,’ but the meaning is still unclear. In this study, we will consider the concept of ἔγγυος in light of Greco-Roman legal practices and documentary papyri, which remain unexplored by NT scholars. It should be noted that, in this verse, the author of Hebrews does not employ βεβαίωσις or βεβαιότης (guarantee, assurance), but ἔγγυος (surety) which contains certain societal implications. In particular, we should perceive that the surety is a sort of intercessio (e.g., Digesta 46.1.48; 46.1.70.4) in the Roman law (ius intercessionis), as Domitius Ulpian mentions, “the giving of a pledge [of the surety] constitutes an intercession” (pignoris datio intercessionem faciat; Digesta 46.1.8). In this vein, to become a surety for someone is to incur liability by entering into a contract (i.e., fideiussio) with someone’s creditor as a third party, and also means the substitution or addition of a new debtor. This sense of the surety is also widely observed in Greco-Egyptian documentary papyri. For instance, the phrase ἔγγυος εἰς ἔκτισιν (the surety for repayment) is broadly used as a ‘surety formula’ in ancient contracts (e.g., BGU 2.592; P.Mich. 1.70; P.Mich. 5.328; P.Mich. 5.343; C.Pap.Gr. 1.14; P.Oxy. 12.1483; P.Col. 10.281, etc.), and signals that, by becoming a surety, a third party could assume the loan or the penalty which the original debtor could not pay off. From this perspective, ἔγγυος was not simply an assurance but an intercessor for the debt or the penalty. This definition matches well with the given context of Heb 7:22. In the adjacent context, the author of Hebrews takes up the theme of Christ’s priesthood and the oath (7:1-21; 7:22-28). The role of the surety as intercessor begins by the oath in ancient contracts (e.g., P.Oxy. 2.259), and this concept is reminiscent of ‘Christ’s mediatorship by oath’ in Heb 6:17b (he mediated it with an oath [ἐμεσίτευσεν ὅρκῳ]). Furthermore, the concept of ἔγγυος as intercessor fits with the notion of Christ’s priesthood (e.g., “Christ intercedes for us” [ἐντυγχάνειν ὑπὲρ αὐτῶν; 7:25]). Thus, in this study, we argue that, as a legal metaphor, the concept of ἔγγυος in Heb 7:22 does not merely refer to ‘the assurance of the salvation’ or ‘the assurance of the eschatological destiny of the believers,’ but conveys the intercessorship (intercessio tacita) of Christ, who paid the price on behalf of his people for the sake of their sins and covenantal failures through his atonement according to the new contract (i.e, the new covenant) as a surety (i.e., priestly intercessor).
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Anat as a Precursor of Lady Wisdom
Program Unit: Wisdom in Israelite and Cognate Traditions
Sehee Kim, Boston University
In recent decades, scholars have debated the origins and identity of personified wisdom in Prov 8:22–31. The passage contains lengthy, vivid descriptions of this female figure, as do several other texts in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Prov 1:20–21; 3:13–20; 9 cf. Job 28; 38—42). Moreover, a number of passages in the deuterocanonical literature depict Lady Wisdom’s characteristics and/or relate her self-presentations (Bar 3:15–38; Sir [Ecclesiasticus] 1:1–10; 4:11–19; 14:20—15:10; 24:1–19; Wis 7:22—8:1). The considerable number of references to personified wisdom suggests that this mysterious figure was an established character in and beyond the biblical traditions represented in the Hebrew Canon. Yet her origins and identity remain uncertain.
This paper suggests the Ugaritic goddess, Anat, as a strong candidate for the precursor of Lady Wisdom by explicating her birth, identity, and functions in the HB. Prov 8:22–31 shares ideas and a common background not only with creation traditions in the HB (Gen 1:1—2:4a) but also with the aNE texts. I argue that a fluid and complementary relationship exists between the depictions of Lady Wisdom in the HB and those of Anat in the Ugaritic corpus.
Anat is an Ugaritic goddess whose most common epithet in Ugaritic mythology is bltl ʿnt (“Maiden Anat”). In the Baal Cycle (BC), she is depicted as a daughter of El, the principal god in the Ugaritic pantheon, and as a sister of Baal (lord), the storm god. The basic storyline of the BC describes how Baal was endangered by the opposing power of Yam (the sea), killed by Mot (death), and resurrected from death with Anat’s assistance. As a sister of Baal, Anat saved Baal’s life by killing Mot and scattering him in pieces.
In Prov 8:22–31, the portrayal of Lady Wisdom evokes thoughts of Anat, who was present alongside the supreme male gods and actively participated in the Chaoskampf and as a co-creator of the universe. Anat and Lady Wisdom share many similarities in their origins, status, and functions; and Anat’s family relationships are key to understanding her relationship to Lady Wisdom. Anat is a daughter of El, the chief Canaanite deity; Lady Wisdom is explicitly described as brought forth by YHWH, ancient Israel’s chief deity. However, their positions as subordinate characters do not diminish their important roles in Chaoskampf or creation. Anat obtains the permission to build a house for Baal and saves Baal’s life in the BC, and Lady Wisdom participates in God’s creation as an assistant who contributes to the creation of a new cosmic order.
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A Discussion on Functional Sentence Perspective of the Prague School of Linguistics and Its Application to 1 Thess 1:2–4
Program Unit: Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics
Sungmin Kim, McMaster Divinity College
In this paper, I will discuss the fundamental theoretical notions and methodological frameworks of the Functional Sentence Perspective theory and apply them to a biblical text of the Greek of the New Testament. In the first section, I will examine the significance of the Functional Sentence Perspective theory in the context of modern linguistics and its core notions that are particularly founded by Vilém Mathesius, who represents the classical period of the Prague School of Linguistics. In the second section, I will deal with the new form of the Functional Sentence Perspective that has elaborated and advanced Mathesius’s theory in more systematically organized ways focusing on the Communicative Dynamism concept introduced by Jan Firbas in the post-classical period of the Prague School of Linguistics. In the third section, I will apply the Functional Sentence Perspective theory to 1 Thess 1:2–4 and then conclude by suggesting its methodological value for the study of the Greek of the New Testament and discussing the prospect of the theory in the field of New Testament studies.
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Ecclesiastical Histories as Competitive Texts: A Response
Program Unit: Religious Competition in Late Antiquity
Young Richard Kim, University of Illinois at Chicago
This paper responds to the analyses of ecclesiastical histories as texts that engage in religious competition.
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A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Kinship Terms of Address in Biblical Hebrew
Program Unit: Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Young Bok Kim, University of Chicago
This paper provides a sociolinguistic analysis of fifty-four kinship terms (KTs) used as free forms of address between two human interlocutors in biblical Hebrew prose. Unlike personal names (PNs) and occupational titles (OTs), KTs are inherently relational. They relate the referent of the term to the anchor by means of kinship, which can be establish | | | |