Blue Cord

No, not Last Day when everyone has to go to Carousel (five points to the first person to name the movie reference). Instead, this is our last day in Lithuania.

Just about everything is packed. I have one more trip to the post office to mail two more boxes, but other than that everything is in our suitcases. We leave tomorrow at 8:00 am to go to Vilnius, then a flight to Frankfurt, then to Washington, DC, and then on to Boston. We will arrive in Boston about 11:00 pm.

It has been a pain getting everything packed so quickly, but going through some of our stuff has been interesting. For example, I had a big pile of coins that I had to sort. In it, I found:

• Lithuanian Litas
• Latvian Lats
• Estonian Kroons
• Russian Rubles and Kopeks
• Ukrainian Rubles and Kopeks
• Polish Zlotys
• Turkish Liras
• Hungarian Forints
• European Euros

My kids and I also got to playing a game last night about foods we had eaten since moving to Europe. Here is what we ate and where:

• Turkish delight in Turkey
• Chicken Kiev in Kiev
• Wiener schnitzel in Vienna
• Hamburgers in Hamburg
• Frankfurters in Frankfurt
• Polish sausage in Poland
• French fries in France
• Hungarian Goulash in Hungary
• Kolsch in Koln

Although I am looking forward to being back in the States, it is hard to leave Lithuania.

The thirteenth Biblical Studies Blog Carnival is up and running at Codex. Tyler Williams has done a great job. The carnival grows each month as more and more biblical scholars start blogs. The carnival is a good place to find the best that biblical studies blogs had to offer in the month of December. Every ride at this carnival is worth an E Ticket.

And, just to whet your appetite, Tyler has promised that a “Best of 2006″ carnival will be up some time later this month.

For those of you who like a little rap with your biblical scholarship, check out this video called Baby Got Book.  It was brought to my attention by Suzanna, a future Belorussian OT scholar.

One of the books I picked up at the SBL this year was Missing Priests: The Zadokites in Tradition and History by Alice Hunt. The book focuses on the evidence (or lack thereof) for a Zadokite priesthood in the preexilic, exilic, and postexilic periods. Given my research on the history of the priesthood, I wanted to offer a review.

Hunt begins by surveying the consensus concerning the Zadokites. The prevailing view is that prior to the time of David, two main priestly lines were active in Israel: Zadok and Abiathar. Both functioned under David, but Abiathar was banished to Anathoth due to his support of Adonijah as king instead of Solomon. This left only the Zadokites in control, and they were the predominant priestly line in Jerusalem until its destruction in 587 BCE. Ezekiel, who was from the Zadokites, promoted the Zadokites as not only the main priests but the only priests, demoting all other Levites to secondary status. This made the Zadokites the only priestly line in the postexilic period up until the time they were replaced by the Hasmoneans.

Hunt surveys the biblical evidence for the Zadokites and find them strangely missing from the preexilic literature. There is a priest named Zadok in the time of David, but none of the priests who are mentioned in DtrH are called Zadokites, even those that clearly are descended from him. In Chronicles, she notes that the emphasis is always on their being descended from Aaron. Zadok is included in that line, but little is made of him. The stress is always on Aaron. The only place where the phrase “sons of Zadok” shows up in the OT is in Ezekiel 40-48, and she places little importance on this material.

She also looks at evidence for the Zadokites in extrabiblical texts, primary Josephus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. She rejects the idea that the Zadokites were fundamental in the founding of Qumran, seeing them as a later addition to the community. In this, she has text critical evidence to support her claim.

Hunt’s review of scholarship comes across as rather preachy. In each instance, she notes that a particular scholar has seen the Zadokites as the predominant priesthood in preexilic times, but says that the scholar has simply assumed it without any evidence. She then moves to another scholar that has seen the Zadokites as the predominant priesthood in preexilic times, but says that this scholar too has simply assumed it without any evidence. It gets very repetitive, and the reader is tempted to skim over that part. In the next section, she takes scholars to task for not paying attention to currents in historical writing, which is odd considering how much has been written about biblical historiography in the last two decades. Reading this section is much like listening to a sermon where the preacher’s point is clear in the first two minutes but has nothing to do with you. The sermon goes on for quite some time.

Given all of her focus on historiography, it is interesting that her own conclusion pays little attention to it. She draws on one work, Gerhard Lenski’s Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification, and this forms the basis for her reconstruction of the place of the Zadokites in the Hasmonean period. Nothing is said about the early postexilic period, let alone the preexilic period. Having surveyed the material from the Bible, she then drops it completely, apparently thinking it is of little value.

In the end, the book seems rather incomplete. It provides a summary of scholarship on the Zadokites, but doesn’t really engage it other than to say it rests on presuppositions. What she fails to recognize is that all historical writing is a hermeneutical circle: we read the data, draw up theories to explain the data, and then use those theories to make sense of even more data. While it is fine to criticize the theories, she seems to take scholar to task just for using theories to explain data. But if we say only what the data says, then we are not actually writing history. It is also interesting that in her conclusion she uses a theory to explain the data, and it is a theory drawn from sociology instead of from the textual data. Sociological theory is great and helps us understand the Bible, but she seems to be using it in a rather non-critical way.

In the end, I would like to have seen a few more chapters that explore the idea of the priesthood in preexilic and early postexilic times. Perhaps the Bible does not call them “sons of Zadok,” but so be it. Clearly many of them were descended from Zadok, and this seems to be an important point. If we have a priesthood descended from Zadok, and they are the only ones who can exercise priestly prerogatives in Jerusalem, surely this is important. This is what scholars mean by Zadokites. Is it the same as the Zadokites in the Hasmonean period? Of course not. But Hunt wants to limit the term to that period. Certainly we must recognize the difference between the groups (as well as the connections!), but that is no reason to ignore the evidence that we do have for priests descended from Zadok in the preexilic period.

Chris Heard at Higgaion asked what teaching grammars people prefer for Hebrew. I just finished a year long Hebrew course, I thought I would give my thoughts on Mark Futato’s Beginning Biblical Hebrew. I have only taught Hebrew once, so this will not be a comparative review. Instead I will list what I found to be the pluses and minuses of this particular grammar.

On the plus side:

• Futato explains concepts well. He gives enough information to explain what is going on, but does not bog students down with a detailed description of every exception. It gives students enough to learn without overwhelming them.
• The exercises have a grading key in the back, even in the student version. If you have honest students who will use it well, this is helpful.
• The exercises move into complex sentences quickly, which helps the students develop proficiency.
• The exercises always have two or three sets aimed at the new material, three or four review material from previous chapters, one integrating the two, and a final exercise giving actual passages from the Bible for them to translate.
• Futato does a good job of focusing on what students will need to know most. He covers the qal, pi’el, hiph’il, and niph’al in depth, first giving the strong verbs and then the weak verbs.
• Futato is available in electronic format for those who use the Libronix system (the text program that powers Logos).

The minuses:

• There is no full chart giving the strong verb in all stems. Since this is one thing I require my students to memorize, it would be helpful.
• The treatment of the pu’al, hithpa’el, and hoph’al seems rather tacked on.
• Many of the exercises are not ones that you can have students turn in for grades. For the translation exercises, he gives the text in the left column and the translation in the right column. The right column is shifted down so that students can cover the answers with a sheet of paper for practice. But this makes it harder to have the students turn in the answers, which makes it more difficult to track their progress, particularly in a large class.

The book has 40 chapters, and we got through those with two weeks to spare in the second semester. Granted, the class my second semester was down to three students, all of whom were excellent and had experience learning languages. After all, I was teaching it at LCC where most students are trilingual, so we moved pretty quickly. On the other hand, we did a three week review of the first part of the book at the beginning of the second semester, due to the fact that I taught the first semester in the spring. But when we finished the book, my students had little problem reading the first two chapters of Ruth.

As I mentioned before, this is the first time I have taught Hebrew and this is the only grammar I have used, so I cannot say how it stacks up against others. But I hope the information given here will be helpful in making a decision. I liked Futato, but I would also want to look at a few other grammars when it is time for me to teach Hebrew again.