Blue Cord

The SBL Forum has started including links to bloggers and discussion lists that discuss articles in the Forum.  This month’s page includes links to three discussions of Ehud Ben Zvi’s article on the Journal of Hebrew Scripture.  Because I had written a response to Alan Hauser’s article on source criticism, I sent an e-mail to the address at the bottom of the page to let them know about it. They sent me a response within a day and added a link to my blog.

For those of you who interact with articles in the SBL Forum, this is a great way to get further exposure for your blog.

I have long felt that one aspect of Old Testament studies that has been neglected has been the study of rituals. This is especially the case among Protestant scholars. Protestantism began as a protest against the Roman Catholic church, and as a result many things associated with the Catholic church, including ritual, have often been viewed in a negative light. Add to this are the critiques of ritual in the prophetic books and the New Testament. Because of this, Christians have often seen little reason to study rituals.

But considering that ritual is such a central part of the Old Testament — especially the Torah — we cannot ignore it if we are going to understand the Old Testament in all its fullness. Fortunately, a number of scholars have begun to focus on rituals in the past couple of decades.

This month’s RBL has a review of a new book by Gerald Klingbeil entitled Bridging the Gap: Ritual and Ritual Texts in the Bible. The publisher’s description of the book:

This volume is intended to introduce university and seminary students and scholars to the neglected field of ritual studies, particularly within the larger context of biblical and theological studies. At the same time, the author hopes to further the discussion by interacting with numerous scholars in the field, providing an extensive bibliography of relevant works. Klingbeil defines the basic terms used in ritual studies and explains the concepts involved in interpreting biblical ritual. He offers a broad history of the study of biblical ritual, beginning with the critiques of ritual found in the Old Testament prophetic books and surveying attitudes toward ritual down to modern times. Drawing on the fields of anthropology and sociology, as well as his decade of work in the field, Klingbeil presents a comprehensive reading strategy for biblical ritual texts. In addition, he explores connections between ritual studies and theological research. This ground-breaking study promises to generate discussion about biblical ritual and provides an excellent introduction to this growing field of study for students and scholars.

The review of the book by Wes Bergen is worth a read. Although he critiques the book for a number of shortcomings — particularly its failure to define terms adequately — he sees it as fulfilling the role of a much needed introduction to the field of ritual studies.  Although I have done some work in ritual studies, I could use a good solid introduction.  I think I will have to try to pick this one up at the SBL meeting next month.

Chris Brady just signed up for the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars annual meeting, which will be taking place on Friday, November 16, prior to the SBL meeting. Like Chris, I signed up for it using the AABS web site. But because I am the web master for that site, I was more interested in the technical details and making sure everything was functioning properly.

Chris, however, paid more attention to the receipt he received. According to him, the following statement was added by PayPal:

This Payment will appear on your credit card statement as “ANGLICANASS”

In a post on his blog, Targuman, Chris playfully chided me for chosing this abbreviation. For the record, I thought I would state that I didn’t get to choose the abbreviation. It was selected automatically by PayPal.

I always enjoying seeing how computers truncate text. When I was in the Near Eastern Studies Department at Johns Hopkins, the computer couldn’t fit the entire name of the department on envelopes. But it was quite a boost to the ego to get mail addressed to “Kevin Wilson, Near Eastern Stud.”

Fred Glynn has written a letter responding to Hauser’s article entitled “Sources of the Pentateuch” in the SBL Forum. Glynn is listed on the SBL Forum only as living in San Francisco. A search of the web reveals that he is the author of Authors of the Bible: Who, When, Where, What, and Why. The author’s page on the book’s site describes Glynn as a “historical researcher and journalist.” Five years ago, he began to explore the question of who wrote the Bible.

Hauser’s article is a good one, and it certainly deserves engagement. I posted my own critique of Hauser’s essay last week. Unfortunately, Glynn’s response to the article can serve only as an example of how not to do source criticism.

Hauser begins by offering the following rhetorical questions:

Isn’t it reasonable to suspect that before a single line of Genesis was written, someone — possibly a court historian hired by Solomon (as the late Stefan Heym has so engagingly proposed in his novel, The King David Report) to legitimize his ascension to David’s throne — had written the original version of the book of Samuel?

And, isn’t it reasonable to suspect that before a single line of Samuel was written, someone — possibly David with Abiathar acting as scribe — had written the now long-lost Book of Jashar?

And, isn’t it reasonable to suspect that before a single line of the Book of Jashar had been written, someone — possibly Israel’s first king, Saul — had dictated the Decalogue to a scribe of his own?

The problem with these questions is that they make a whole host of assumptions based on what he sees as being “reasonable to suspect.” Among these:

• He assumes Solomon had a court historian. This begs a number of questions regarding the nature of scribal activity in the 10th century BCE. Did scribes produce large works like this or were their activities limited to recording daily court activities?  Our knowledge of scribal activity in this period is very limited, so it would be a mistake to base source critical theories on ideas about what scribes might have done.
• He assumes the Throne Succession Narrative (which is what I assume he means by “the original version of the book of Samuel”) dates from the time of Solomon. This is certainly a possibility, but is by no means universally accepted.
• He assumes Abiathar was a scribe. Why he chooses Abiathar is unclear, since 2 Samuel 8:17 lists Abiathar as a priest and Seraiah as the scribe.
• He assumes the Book of Jashar was written in the time of David. We have no evidence for this.
• He assumes that the Decalogue predates the Book of Jashar.

Each of these assumptions may be correct. But we do not determine whether they are correct based on what seems “reasonable to suspect.” It may be reasonable to suspect that David and Solomon had scribes in their employment who could produce large literary works. But we cannot decide that a priori. We must find if there is actual evidence for such scribal activity and good reason to think that the books in question date from this period. As I wrote a year ago in my post “Dating of Pentateuchal Sources”, just because a document seems to fit in a period does not mean it was written then.

What is amazing in Glynn’s article is the number of conditional and subjunctive phrases he uses.  These include:

• “isn’t it possible . . .”
• “isn’t it reasonable . . .”
• “mightn’t X be the case”
• “isn’t it likely that . . .”
• “X may have been the case . . .”

There is a great deal of difference between what is possible and what is probable.  Proving that something was possible does not mean that it actually happened.  As biblical scholars, our reasons for dating a particular source to a particular period must be much more closely argued than that.  Linguistic characteristics and external references within the text are grounds for dating a text.  Musing about what might have been possible is not.The one positive thing about Glynn’s letter is that he says that source critical questions about the Pentateuch should be addressed in the content of source critical questions about the Hebrew Bible as a whole.  Books such as Reinhard Kratz’s The Composition of the Narrative Books of the Old Testament are moving in that direction.  But although Glynn’s suggestion of this goal is a good one, the steps he proposes for achieving that goal are severely lacking.

In writing my previous post about the Jezebel seal, I came across the following quote in Ha’aretz:

In her paper, scheduled to appear in the highly-respected Biblical Archaeology Review, Korpel lists observations pertaining to the seal’s symbolism, unusual size, shape and time period.

What struck me as odd about this sentence is the reference to the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review as “highly-respected.”

For those of my readers who don’t know, BAR is a monthly magazine published by the Biblical Archaeology Society that covers current topics in the field of archaeology related to the Bible.   It is a very enjoyable magazine and popular among non-experts.  It prints high-quality glossy photos of archaeological finds and site, and features articles by some of the top scholars in the field.

The presence of these top scholars as authors means that there are often high-quality articles.  But this is not always the case. It is not a peer-reviewed journal.  As a result,  BAR has a tendency to publishing highly-speculative and sensationalistic articles.  It also likes to personalize differences in opinions and portray scholarly debates as fierce feuds.  Such tactics help to sell magazines, but they are out of place in scholarly discourse.

To call BAR “highly-respected” is something of an overstatement.  In general, it is looked upon with mixed-feelings by scholars.  It has some good articles and great photos, but the negatives temper our love it.  We read it, but mostly as as guilty pleasure.

To put it another way:

Biblical Archaoelogical Review is to the Journal of Biblical Literature as People is to U.S. News & World Report.