Monday at the SBL
I attended the Pentateuch section at the SBL today. This has been a good year for Pentateuch, with four sections (two of them in conjunction with the Deuteronomistic History section). Today’s section was not thematic, so the papers were on a number of topics and several were on the topic of Numbers.
The first was Danny Mathews’s paper “‘A New King Arose over Egypt Who Did Not Know Joseph’: The Joseph Novella as Prologue to the Moses Biography.” Mathews argues that the Joseph and Moses stories run in parallel. He points to similarities between the two figures: both are shepherds at times, both are threatened but saved by family members, both are sent to save their brothers, etc. While the parallels are there, I did not find the paper convincing. It could simply be that these are common elements to stories like these. In addition, it is currently an open question whether there was a connection between the non-P strands in Genesis and Exodus prior to the work of P.1 Since all of the parallels that Mathews points out are in the non-P material, this is not an insignificant question.
The next paper was “Is ‘The Joseph Story’ a Misnomer for Genesis 37-50?” by Richard J. Clifford. I went into the paper already thinking it was a misnomer, so I was convinced by his argument. One new thing that he did point out was the importance of what he called “recognition stories.” These are points in the story where the main character realizes that there has been a plan in place that was different than the one he had planned. Among these are the moment when Judah realizes that Tamar has had a plan to carry on her husband’s name (Genesis 38) and when Joseph realizes that God used his misery to save his father’s family (Genesis 50).
The next two papers were alright, but did not really break any new ground. The first was Martien A. Halvorson-Taylor’s “Pentateuch and Exile.” The other was Nathan Lane’s paper “YHWH’s Mercy and Wrath: The Contribution of Exodus 34:6-7 to the Canonical Shape of the Torah.” The latter was not particularly convincing.
The final paper was Mark A. Christian’s “Integrating the Alien,” which dealt with Torah passages that specify how resident aliens (Heb. gerim) are to be treated. This is an issue in the post-exilic period, with Ezekiel and HS taking up position, so I enjoyed what he had to say. Of the presenters in this session, he seemed to be the only one aware of recent European scholarship on the Pentateuch.
The evening was finished off with dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House with one of my closest friends and some of his friends from graduate school.
- For a discussion of this question, see the articles in the first part of A Farewell to the Yahwist? [back]
On January 8th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
What do you think, please, of Obadiah Shoher’s interpretation of the story? (here: samsonblinded.org/blog/genesis-37.htm ) He takes the text literally to prove that the brothers played a practical joke on Yosef rather than intended to murder him or sell him into slavery. His argument seems fairly strong to me, but I’d like to hear other opinions.