Blue Cord

My afternoon at the conference was spent at the Europrean Seminar on Historical Methodology. For those of you who have been following the debate that is similisticaly referred to as the minimalist / maximalist debate, this seminar is usually considered the epitome of minimalism. The seminar was started by Phillip Davies, and it includes Rainer Albertz, Thomas Thompson, and Niels Peter Lemche (although the latter two were not able to attend this year). It is somewhat unfair to refer to this as a minimalist-only camp, however, as it also includes Marc Zvi Brettler and Joseph Blenkinsopp. Papers for the seminar were circulated in advance, so most of the time was spent in discussion.

The first paper was by Blenkinsopp. It was on the Midianite hypothesis for the origins of Yahwism. The difference with his paper, however, was that he proposed that Yahwism came in through Judah, whereas most see it as coming in through Israel. It seems to me that Frank Moore Cross’s idea of Yahwism being adopted from the Midianites through the tribe of Reuben is more convincing.

The second paper was by Brettler, who argues that the stories of David not killing Saul when he had the chance have little historical basis. Not much to argue with here. Apparently he laid out a method in the paper (which I did not get to read before hand) for dealing with historical sources.

The third paper was by Davies, who argued that even if the Tel Dan inscription does refer to the house of David, it doesn’t tell us anything of importance. Some archaeologists from Dan were there, and they (rightly) took great umbrage when he mentioned that some people thought the inscription was a forgery.

The final paper was given by Lester Grabbe on historical information about David and Solomon. The paper was scheduled to be given the next day, but they made time for part of his paper today because it dealt with Shoshenq. Since my book is the latest work on Shoshenq, they wanted me to talk for a few minutes about my research.

We went to dinner that night at a traditional Hungarian restaurant. After dinner, I was talking briefly with Phillip Davies, and he was waxing eloquent about how we cannot use any information in the Bible unless it is corroborate by external sources. I have to say that I find such an approach highly problematic. There are plenty of events in history for which we have only one piece of evidence, and that is not a reason to reject them. I am neither a maximalist nor the son of a maximalist, but just because something is written in the Bible is not a reason to treat it as any more or less reliable than other historical datum. Obviously, the Bible does present some things that are not historical, but we judge each case on its own merits. Events that are historically probably need little evidence, while those that are improbable need more. There is nothing improbable about Shoshenq campaigning against Jerusalem, and we have two small pieces of evidence that also suggest a campaign, so I see no reason for not taking 1 Kings 14:25-28 as indicating an attack on Jerusalem by Shoshenq. A confluence of evidence allows us to write history.

It is now day three of the EABS conference, and I finally have a chance to blog about the conference. We are on lunch break, so i have found an Internet cafe in downtown Budapest. I will blog more about papers and the first two days of the conference when I get regular computer access, but I wanted to make a quick post while I was here.

First, let me say that if you are planning a conference, Budapest is the way to go. It is a beautiful city and very relaxing. Although most of the conference is at a Catholic university 15 miles north of Budapest, today we are in the city at a Reformed university.

The only papers I have heard so far today were one on Second Isaiah and its original composition. Rainer Albertz gave the paper and wants to date the composition to about 521 BCE. He also pointed to a number of literary factors in the book, but also to oral factors, which suggest that the book was written in order to be read aloud (which is not surprising).

The other paper was horrible. I won’t give the scholars name, although you would not recognize it anyway, but he wanted to argue that Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings were first combined in the second century BCE under Ptolomaic patronage in Alexandria. He rejects the idea of a DtrH (with which I have some problems as well), but his solution is hardly the way to go.

I also met Michael Bird, one of the bibliobloggers at Euangelion. We had a lively discussion about the Episcopal church and his (mis)perceptions of its problems. Of course, he was also kind enough to allow me to solve all the problems of the Baptist church, of which he is a part. I enjoyed chatting with him and a couple of people I met from McMaster Divinity University in Canada.

I spent all of the morning and half of the afternoon sessions listening to papers on the Torah, which is my area of interest.  The topic of the sessions was The Torah and Canon - Five Books and a Concept?  Each of the five papers focused on one of the books of the Torah in turn.  The Leviticus paper was particularly interesting, as it focused on parallels with Leviticus 10 and the growth of the book of Leviticus.  It was along the lines of my own research, although focusing on different passages.  It is interesting to note that all Torah must be placed in the mouth of Moses.  So, even in an instance like Ezekiel 44, where Ezekiel gives Torah, later layers of the Pentateuch saw fit to incorporate these into the Pentateuch.  If they had remained with Ezekiel, they would not have had the same authority.

The Numbers paper asked whether Numbers was a book or not, which of course raises the question of what we mean when we talk about books in ancient times.  Obviously, our concept of book is quite different from what they produced, not only in technical matters (scrolls vs. bound pages) but also in definition.  Book implies something that is complete in itself, and this certainly does not apply to Numbers.  It is hard to imagine Numbers circulating by itself without the other parts of the Pentateuch,

One of the problems with these papers is that they were all in German.  After listening to all of them, one thing because clear: my German is not as good as it needs to be.  And since most of the scholars in these sessions were German, the difference between European and American scholarship on the Torah was greatly in evidence.  For instance, in talking to the scholar who delivered the paper on Leviticus, I asked him what he thought about Knohl’s division of P into PT and HS.  He replied that he thought it was merely a return to the method of Wellhausen and he didn’t like it.  Instead, he followed the current German approach of Rendtorff, which sees the formation of the Pentateuch through a more tradition critical process instead of a source critical one.

The rest of the afternoon session I spent in the section on Production and Reception of Authoritative Books in the Persian Period.  I heard Diane Edelman give a paper on how she thinks the prophetic books from the pre-exilic period came together.  In a nutshell, she thinks that temples kept records of all prophetic oracles, a practice that we know from Mesopotamia.  In the post-exilic period, those prophets who had predicted the fall of Jerusalem were pulled together and edited.  She also surveyed temple functionaries in Mesopotamia and Egypt, noting that in each case there were prophets associated with the temple.

I am not convinced that she is correct, although I am not completely opposed to her idea either.  One question I raised was whether temples would have collected oracles from peripheral prophets such as Amos and Hosea, who were obviously not temple prophets and opposed the temples in northern Israel.  Edelman pointed to an example from Assyria where an oracle against the king was recorded.  Apparently, all oracles concerning the king were considered important enough to be written down.

I have several other problems with her idea as well.  For one, we need to examine Assyrian and Babylonian policies about libraries associated with temples.  Did they usually destroy them, or did they protect them.  I find it hard to believe that documents concerning Amos and Hosea would have survived the fall of Samaria (even if they were kept in Bethel), and then also have survived the destruction in Jerusalem.  If we had evidence that the Assyrians and Babylonians made a point of protecting those libraries, her theory might be more plausible.

Also, we have evidence for writing and temple libraries in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but not in Israel.  We do not know of anything in Israel paralleling the temple and royal scribal system that is found in those other areas.  And we don’t get evidence for them until the Second Temple period.  Also, we have no mention of temple scriptorums in Israel and Judah, nor do terms for prophetic temple functionaries survive (unless ro’eh and hazon are such terms).  While the parallels from other areas are suggestive, in the complete absence of evidence in Judah I think we need to be very careful in assuming that the same systems were in place there.

(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.

I thought the most perfect book in the world had been written two years ago when I discovered Allen E. Hye’s book, The Great God Baseball, which explored religious themes in baseball literature. I may have to knock that to second place, however.

Brazos Press (a part of Baker Publishing) has just brought out The Truth is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction. This book does for science fiction what The Great God Baseball did for baseball fiction. The authors, noting that science fiction is the area of popular culture most likely to get tangled up with theology, deal with the ways questions of human origins, sin, and identity are discussed in TV SciFi. They cover six programs: Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, Dr. Who, Babylon Five, The Prisoner, and The X-Files.

For those of us who are Star Trek fans (Tyler Williams, I’m looking at you!), this book will be a must read.  By the way, did I ever mention to you all that I used to be the director of the project to translate the Bible into Klingon? Yup, it made me a Trivial Pursuit question in the Genus IV edition.