(NB: This post and most of the following ones on the EABS annual conference were written after I had left the conference, but the time stamp on the entry has been adjusted to match the day of the conference about which I am writting.)

I arrived on the campus of Pazamany Peter Catholic University about 4:00 pm. The university is located about fifteen miles northwest of Budapest in the hills of Hungary. It is a beautiful campus. The buildings are all of one architectural style, although it would be difficult to define that style. The main building for our conference is the Stephanum, which looks like a white, domed, Byzantine church that is collapsing upon itself. They have purposefully built the columns and roof at a slant, although inside the colums are made to look like trees. All in all, it appears rather like something from Disney World, but I like the effect. Not everyone here shares that opinion, however.

We began with dinner and a reception. I dined with Saul Olyan and Susan Ackerman. Olyan was teach at Yale when I was there, but I did not have a chance to take a class with him. Like most people there, he had never heard about LCC, so I spent some time telling him about the college.

The only session that night was the plenary session in which a professor from the university gave a lecture on the historiography of DtrH. She focused on the presentation of the reigns of Saul and David, noting that each one begins well but ends poorly (although this does not completely carry through with David, since we get into the Succession Narrative for the end of his reign). It was an interesting paper, but it was more like a lecture on the DtrH in an introductory Bible class, as she mostly just retold the story of Saul and David.

This conference is much more intimate than the ones I have attended elsewhere. There are only about 125 people here, which is much smaller than the 7000-9000 who attend the SBL annual meeting. And it seems like every single person is giving a paper, which is something else you don’t get at the SBL, even in the regional meetings.

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