Today began with an interview, which means I missed the morning sessions. The interview went well, so giving up a session in favor of a possible job is an easy trade off.

After lunch with a good friend who teaches at Perkins School of Theology, I was off to the afternoon sessions. I first went to the Computer Assisted Research Group session to hear Tim Bulkeley’s talk about the Hypertext Bible Dictionary. Tim is best known for his Amos: A Hypertext Commentary. When we had talked the day before, Tim said one of the things that took the most time in writing the commentary was developing the dictionary entries. So, he has shifted to first completing a good on-line Bible dictionary first, so that those who write future commentaries in the series will have an easier time.

Obviously, there are similarities between what time is doing and my own Blue Cord Bible Dictionary. We discussed this on Sunday at the bibliobloggers meeting. Our hope is to be able to find some way that the two projects can complement each other instead of being competitors. One possibility is that articles written on Blue Cord could be sent to Tim once they reach a certain level of completeness. They could then be peer-reviewed and added to his dictionary. At this point, the text would become stable in his dictionary, while people could continue to add to and up date the entries in the Blue Cord Bible Dictionary.

The second session of the afternoon found me at the Pentateuch section. Only three papers were given in this session, as one of the presenters had to cancel. but all were good papers (which is unusual for one session). One by Jeffrey R. Stackert was entitled “Does the Covenant Collection Have a Fallow Law?: Clarifying the Grammatical and Lexical Ambiguity in Exodus 23:10-11.” He argues that Exodus 23:10-11 does not say that the land should be fallow in the seventh year but that the ground should be planted and harvested as usual, but that the produce should be left for the poor and animals. The interpretation turns on the question of the 3fs suffix on the verbs at the beginning of v.11. Stackert thinks they refer to “produce” in v.10, and I found his argument convincing. It implies an even greater responsibility on the part of the Israelites to care for the poor, since it means they don’t passively leave the aftergrowth for the poor but actively work to provide them with food.

Another paper was by James W. Watts on “Rhetoric of Ritual Narrative in Leviticus 10.” Since I am writing a paper that deals in part with this passage, I was interested in hearing what he had to say. He focused mostly on the rhetorical impact of this passage. He argues that the repetition of “as the Lord commanded,” which occurs thirteen times in chaps.8-10, draws those chapters into a unity. What is startling is the beginning of chap.10, where the opposite phrase is found. Aaron’s two sons did what the Lord did not command. He concludes that the overall effect of the passage was to show that the work of the priests was dangerous and they should not be begrudged the benefits that they received from their position.

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