Blue Cord

I am in the process of gathering a collection of on-line sites for the study of the Bible. I am not intending this to be a resource for other scholars. Rather, it is intended to help undergraduate student who are just starting out in their academic study of the Scriptures. I am publishing it on the Blue Cord resource page. Right now the list is pretty sparse.

As we all know, there some excellent resources on the web for the study of the Bible. There is also a lot of junk out there. What I am looking for are links that will direct students to information that is both reliable and accessible for them at this level of study. I am not looking for sites that provide searchable Bible texts. Instead, what I want are secondary materials that supplement and expand the students’ knowledge of the Bible and its historical and social background.

For those of you who are scholars - particularly those who have been teaching for some time - I would appreciate receiving any links that you have used with your students. Of particular use would be those that you have found your students returning to again and again. I have been looking over my bookmarks, as well as some web pages where scholars have collected links. Right now I am focusing on the Old Testament, because (like many of you) I teach the Old Testament in the fall and the New Testament in the spring. But feel free to submit any links from either testament.

Thank you for your help. I am making this list available on the Blue Cord main site, so feel free to send your students here once this list is long enough to be useful.

This year I am looking to add an on-line component to some of my classes, especially for quizzes and other materials that take up class time.  I am looking to implement a Learning Management System (LMS) on Blue Cord, because our college does not yet have such a system in place.  I am only using Open Source LMS because they are free.

I have installed Dokeos, but am unhappy with it.  It allows students to take quizzes multiple times and gives them the right answers once they are finished.  This is great if the entire course is on-line and students are spread out, but not when multiple students who can interact outside of class are all in the same place.  I am now looking at Moodle.  It seems to solve this problem as well as some others I am having.

I would love to hear from other scholars who have tried such software.  Is there some you would recommend?  What problems have you had?  Any suggestions for how to integrate this into a regular course?  I am open to any discussion that improves student learning.

In 1974, Rolf Rendtorff presented a paper at the International SBL that was later printed in the JSOT with responses from other scholars¹. It is a seminal article in the field of OT source criticism, and it represents a watermark in the breakdown in consensus concerning the Documentary Hypothesis.

In this month’s SBL Forum, Rendtorff follows up on that article with a retrospective on source critical research in the last 30 years, focusing particularly on different views of the Yahwist. He lists three different ways of understanding the Yahwist within a framework of a Documentary Hypothesis (in addition to those like Friedman who still hold to the traditional Documentary Hypothesis):

• For von Rad, the Yahwist is an author who also was a theologian. This Yahwist is essentially responsible for the shape of the Pentateuch (Hexateuch) as we have it today.
• For Van Seters, the Yahwist is an authors who is also a historian. He lived in the exilic period, much later than von Rad’s Yahwist. This Yahwist wrote a prequal to the book of Deuteronomy.
• For Levin, the Yahwist is a collector and redactor, who pulled together earlier sources. He lived in the exile and post-dates Deuteronomy but is earlier than the DtrH.

A second group of scholars, which includes Levin, are those who have had difficulty identifying a Yahwist. While there is still a consensus on the P materials in the text, identifying the Yahwist has become more difficult, not only in regard to the texts that belong to him but also in regard to his date and location. For some in this circle, the Yahwist has even ceased to exist.

This second group takes a variety of positions concerning the Yahwist and the texts assigned to this layer. Levin brought together a number of scholars in this camp for a conference, and their papers were published in a compilation² Rendtorff provides a brief overview of some of the papers in this book, and they illustrate the lack of consensus in the field at this point.

Rendtorff ends by noting that an end to the Yahwist means an end to the Documentary Hypothesis. The Elohist was abandoned in the 60s and 70s, though unlike the Yahwist it has few defenders now. If the Yahwist is dropped as well, we cease to have a Documentary Hypothesis, as a source critical hypothesis with only one source (P) is not a theory. As Rendtorff says,

What happened to the Yahwist? The answer: He faded away, and he took with him the building he had lived in because there are no inhabitants any longer.

For those who are interested in source critical questions, I highly recommend this survey of current through.

1. Rolf Rendtorff, “The ‘Yahwist’ as Theologian? The Dilemma of Pentateuchal Criticism.” JSOT 3 (1977): 2-10. [back]
2. Gertz, Jan Christian, Konrad Schmid, and M. Witte, eds., Abschied vom Jahwisten. Die Komposition des Hexateuch in der jüngsten Diskussion. BZAW 315 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002). [back]

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post pointing to the Acronym Replacer plugin for WordPress. Tyler Williams suggested that we get a list of acronyms for biblical studies for those of us who are writing biblioblogs. I took a few minutes today to type in a few of the more common acronyms for our field. The text is reproduced below. All you need to do is replace or add the list to the array in you acronyms.php file.

Please note that the list is far from complete. I used the SBL Handbook of Style for the acronyms, plus a few that I use more often. This represents only a small percentage of the actual acronyms in the handbook, and because of my interests it is slanted towards the OT. If anyone is interested in adding more acronyms to the list, feel free to send your acronyms to me and I will try to keep the latest list on file here. Please note the syntax of the array when you are writing it, especially the comma at the end of each entry. Leaving out the comma causes an error message.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today was the final day of the conference, and my paper was the first one in the morning. It was entitled “From Horeb to Shechem: Deuteronomy and Joshua as a Combined Document.” The paper argues that the earliest stage of the formation of the Pentateuch was the combination of Deuteronomy 4-28* with Joshua 2-11,23 to form a history that led from Egypt (in retrospect from the border of Canaan) through the conquest.

The idea was brilliant. It was so brilliant, in fact, that Norbert Lohfink thought of it twenty years ago. I was informed of this by Rainer Albertz after the paper was finished. This is one of the problems of having access to a research library for only two weeks a year. The article in which he put forth this theory is in ZAW apparently, and the ATLA serials database does not index that journal. Nor did I come across it in my two weeks in the library. So, I presented a paper that puts forth a theory that most Germans knew but few English speaking people did.

While it was somewhat deflating to be told someone else had already thought of it, it is at least comforting to know that I can do original research and come up with some of the same ideas as a great scholar like Lohfink. This means that instead of being submitted for a journal article, I will just turn it into a chapter of a book on source criticism in the Pentateuch (with appropriate footnotes to Lohfink, of course).

If anyone is interested in reading the paper, I will be happy to send you a copy.

I was unable to attend the session in the afternoon, as I needed to get back to Budapest to meet my family. They were coming in from Vienna to see Budapest for a couple of days. If you are interested in hearing about the non-academic part of our time in Austria and Hungary, check our blog Out and About in the coming days for posts on our vacation.

Next year’s EABS meeting will be in Vienna in conjunction with the International SBL.