Blue Cord

Although today was the first day of the SBL conference, I don’t have much to report from sessions. Most of the morning was spent at the Employment Information Services, the people that provide interview space for all the universities that are hiring. I had a good interview this morning and was very pleased with my perception of the school. I can only hope they felt the same about me.

I did get to two sessions in the afternoon, but was only able to stay for thirty minutes of the second one. The first one was on teaching the Bible in a liberal arts setting, something that has been discussed on this blog lately. The papers certainly brought up a lot of good questions. One of them was a survey of students and how they respond to biblical studies courses. The most important thing I got out of this paper was that students who expect to learn new material in a biblical studies class usually learn more new things. Now, this may sound obvious, but there are some students who come to class expecting a Bible class just to be review of things they already know. In such cases, the students do not learn as much, even when confronted with new material. This suggests that we need to spend some time in the first few days of class trying to get student expectations to match our hope that they will be learning new things. In theory, this should help them learn more.

The highlight of this session was a paper by Christian Brady at Targuman, which he had made available on his blog. Chris referenced the recent discussions of his topic in the biblioblogosphere and his paper points out several issues that are involved in teaching a text that is inherently theological. We — as well as Steve Cook — were able to chat about teaching for a few minutes afterwards, and I look forward to getting together tomorrow with the two of them and other bibliobloggers.

I also was able to attend thirty minutes of the biblical exegesis for homiletics session. Although none of the two presentations I heard were ground breaking, they did point to the fact (often overlooked) that when we interpret a text we need to be aware of the audience for whom we are interpreting it.

Dinner tonight was with my good friend and hotel roommate Ramon Luzarraga who treated me to a dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House. We had a good discussion on issues of faith in the classroom, much of which built on questions raised by the session on teaching the Bible in liberal arts. Although Ramon is a theologian instead of a biblical scholar, the question of how to approach issues of faith in an academic setting overlap to a certain extent.

After a remarkably long day of travel, I arrived in Washington, DC, last night after midnight.  Our plane had been delayed for the last leg of the flight, so it was 1:00 am before I got to sleep.  My mother and her husband met me at the airport and are spending the day with me in DC before heading back to Tennessee on Friday morning.

This morning we headed to the Smithsonian to see the biblical exhibit that has been set up in conjunction with the SBL meeting.  Located in the Sackler Gallery, it is entitled In the Beginning: The Bible Before the Year 1000.  The center piece of the exhibit is the Freer Codices, a collection of several manuscripts from Egypt that were discovered in the early 20th century.  These codices contain the four gospels, some of the letters of Paul, and part of the Old Greek translation of the minor prophets.  These codices are owned by the Smithsonian, and the SBL had published a study of these manuscripts to coincide with the exhibit.  There will also be special sessions on the Freer Codices at the conference this weekend.

There were some other manuscripts there that interested me just as much.  They had one of the Isaiah scrolls (1QIsab) from the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as a very small fragment of Matthew from the 2nd century CE.  The Edgerton Gospel (a fragment of a non-canonical gospel) is also on display.  Several manuscripts from Papyrus Chester Beatty are there too.  For me, the highlight was seeing a page from Codex Sinaiticus, a manuscript I had never seen in person before.

One of the manuscripts that I found fascinating is a 9th century Armenian manuscript containing a copy of the gospels.  At the end of the Gospel of Mark, the scribe left out Mark 16:9-20 and expanded 16:7-8 to take up the space.  This was done because the Armenian church had the tradition that said 16:9-20 were not written by Mark but were added by someone else.  Modern textual critics would agree with this conclusion.

The exhibition is well done.  The numerous old manuscripts of biblical texts are arranged in such a way that you not only get a sense of the preservation of the text, but also see how the technology of manuscript production changed through the years.  The rise of the codex as opposed to scrolls is an interesting sub-theme of the exhibit.  For any of the scholars who are visiting the SBL, I would encourage you to see this exhibit.  It is worth the Metro ride, and the Sackler Gallery is only one block from the Smithsonian Metro station.

After that, we headed off for some dinner.  There is a wonderful Ethiopian restaurant called Zed’s in Georgetown.  I had taken my parents there once before when they visited.  I had decided on the plane trip here that I wanted to go there, and on the car ride from the airport my mom suggested it first.  Great minds think alike!  Our meal tonight had more spices in it than all the meals that I have eaten in Eastern Europe combined.  It is nice to be back in a place with spicy cuisine, even if that cuisine is from the other side of the world.

The New York Times has a fascinating article on mega-tsunamis caused by meteors impacting the world’s oceans. Although most scientists think no large ones have hit the earth in the past 10,000 years, a few scientists are pointing to one that could have occurred 4500-5000 years ago.

One scholar in particular thinks he can pinpoint the date. Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist, has surveyed a number of flood myths from around the world.  He notes that fourteen of them say that the sun stopped shining that day. Because there was an eclipse that occurred on May 10, 2807 BCE, he concludes that was the day this meteor hit.

It would be interesting to see how a wave created by such a tsunami (estimated to be thirteen times larger than the one two years ago) would have affected the ancient Near East. How would it have traveled up the Persian Gulf? Could it have led to the the flood stories in the Bible and in Mesopotamian literature? The tsunami could also have caused rains.

The article does not mention the biblical flood, but the dating would be around the right time (if there is such a thing) for the biblical flood. The one problem, however, is that Genesis seems to place the locus for Noah up in eastern Turkey. Mt. Ararat, for instance, is near the border with Armenia. That would have had to be quite a wave to reach that far. On the other hand, Mesopotamia is remarkably flat, and it is not hard to see a wave of great size reaching fairly far inland.

It would be interesting to see some modeling of the wave and how it would have affected Mesopotamia.

(I just did a search for chevrons and Middle East on the web. Chevrons are geological formations along the shore that are left by large tsunamis. Unfortunately, searching for chevron and Middle East gets you lots of sites talking about the Chevron oil company and its extraction efforts.)

I have been reflecting a bit in the past few months on Open Source Scholarship. Now, it may be a question of whether I actually mean Open Source Scholarship or Open Scholarship (a question Stephen Carlson has raised at Hypotyposeis), but I will ignore save that question for another day.

As most readers know, my contribution to Open Source Scholarship is the Blue Cord Bible Dictionary. But there are some other projects as well that I wanted to mention. One, that I just came across today, is the project on Open Source Religious Resources. Another, which I somehow missed in the blogosphere, is a fascinating post on open source Bible translation by David Ker at Lingamish. Ker is a translator who lives in Africa, so his need for translation is much more acute than those of us in English speaking societies.

One of the points the he brings up is how infrequently the people who will use a translation have input into its production. The RSV, NRSV, NIV, etc. all bring out their translations after scholars have considered all the issues they think relevant. While they (we) are, of course, the ones who know the issues and can do translation, it seems that there is a step missing. After all, every programmer will release a beta of the software she is developing so that those who will use the program will help in finding bugs. But we never do that with our translations. How would our translations look differently if we took a year to release a beta of a new version and then correct or modify the version based on the feedback.

Obviously in such a process, we must deal critically with the critiques. If we have set out to produce a gender-inclusive translation, for instance, it doesn’t matter of people complain that they don’t like gender-inclusive translations. That is a philosophical difference. But if particular terms do not communicate well or the phrasing of a verse does not read well, that would be something to take into account. It would also be a place for other scholars to comment as well.

Obviously, this creates more work for the translators, but it seems to me that it would be well worth the additional efford.

Rick at Ricoblog and Tim at Sansblogue have suggested that biblobloggers get together after the Computer Assisted Research Group meeting (1:00-3:00) on Sunday. We will be getting together at 3:00 pm in Room 103A - CC, which is where the CARG session will be.

Although we can talk about this at 3:00 on Monday, I also wanted to suggest a dinner on Monday night. Most of the receptions are over at that point, so this night would be the one when most people are free. Although we don’t need to decide this ahead of time, I did want to put the idea in people’s heads.

Also, I wanted to suggest that we communicate through the message boards at the SBL. If anyone has a general note for bibliobloggers, put it on the message board in the ‘B’ section with ‘Bibliobloggers’ on the outside. I hope most of us will also be able to blog from the conference, so we can pass message to each other that way as well. But because not everyone will have a computer, I suggest the message board as our primary means of communication.

I look forward to meeting some other bibliobloggers in person.