Blue Cord

This was generally a slow year for me in terms of books at the SBL, owing to the fact that I am currently somewhat underemployed. I did manage to pick up some books, so I thought I would list them here.

• Kittredge, Cynthia Briggs. Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of John. Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars Study Series. Harrisburg, Penn.: Morehouse Publishing, 2007.

This is the latest book in the Conversations with Scripture series. My book on the legal material in the Pentateuch was released in this series last year. I got this one for free because I am on the editorial board for the series. Cynthia’s book is being sent to all the Anglican bishops who will be attending Lambeth, since the Gospel of John is going to be the subject of their Bible study for the conference. If you are looking for books to use in parish Bible studies, I would urge you to consider this series. The books that are out so far are Revelation, The Law, Parables, and The Gospel of John.

• Van der Toorn, Karel. Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.

This book was the subject of one of the Hebrew Bible and Cognate Literature sections this year. I tried to go to the session, but it was overflowing with people. I will have to settle for reading the book.

• Watts, James W., ed. Persia and Torah: The Theory of Imperial Authorization of the Pentateuch. SBL Symposium Series. Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001.

This book has been out a while, but I haven’t picked it up until now. I find the idea of Persia commissioning the Torah to be unlikely, but I thought I would give it a shot. Apparently many of the contributors to this book also find it unlikely, but the SBL Symposium Series always goes a good job of exploring issues such as this.

• Nihan, Christophe. From Priestly Torah to Pentateuch: A Study in the Composition of the Book of Leviticus. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 2. Reihe 25. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007.

This is the book I am most looking forward to reading. As I mentioned in a previous post, I heard Nihan speak at one of the Pentateuch sections. The book is an expanded form of the author’s dissertation at University of Lausanne, Switzerland, under Thomas Romer. It was a bit more than I had planned to spend, but I did get an author’s discount since my own dissertation was published in this series. As it turns out, the author’s discount at Mohr Siebeck is larger than the standard convention discount for their books, so that made it a little more affordable. It still cost more than a paperback book has a right to cost. Nihan apparently draws on Israel Knohl’s ideas, which have been so helpful in my own work.

• Roncace, Mark, and Patrick Gray. Teaching the Bible through Popular Culture and the Arts. Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007.

This is the second book on which Roncace and Gray have collaborated. Their first, Teaching the Bible: Practical Strategies for Classroom Instruction, was very helpful. Both books offer practical classroom exercises for teaching classes in the Bible. As the title suggests, this volume contains activities that draw on television, movies, music, poetry, and literature as a way to help students understand elements of the biblical text.

I have been sitting in the San Diego airport for four hours so far and I still have four hours before the plane takes off. I have used the time to read the first essay in Persia and Torah: The Theory of Imperial Authorization of the Pentateuch. This is a translation of Peter Frei’s article, “Die persische Reichsautorisation: Ein Uberblick.”¹ Frei was the first to propose the idea that the Torah was the officially authorized law of Yehud in the Persian period, and James Watts has done American scholars a great service by translating it for this volume.

The article consists of a catalogue of instances in the Persian period where the Persian authorities authorized local laws. Frei cites examples from Egypt, Greece, and Asia Minor, including examples from Nehemiah, Daniel, Esther, and the letters from Elephantine.

The evidence falls in two different groups. First is the command under Darius to codify all the laws in Egypt. This is the example that seems to me to be parallel with Ezra’s work with the Torah. Yet even here it is not clear that Darius is authorizing the laws. He is the one who has them collected, but they are already the law of the land. He may be responsible for the laws as a collection, but I don’t know if I would say he authorized these laws to be the law of the land, unless we mean that in the sense of him reaffirming them.

The second group - that is, the rest of the examples - consists of the king authorizing individual laws or giving his approval to judicial decisions. These seem to me to bear little resemblance to what Ezra was doing.

That means we are looking at Darius’s codification of the laws in Egypt as the main parallel to Ezra’s work. It seems to me, however, that these two “law codes” are very different in nature. For one thing, the Torah is hardly a law code. Large sections contain laws, but there are also huge swaths, such as the entirety of Genesis, that are narrative. And taken as a whole, the laws in the Pentateuch would hardly constitute a complete law code. There are many areas of life that are simply not covered. It doesn’t really compare to the law collection of Darius or to other law codes such as that of Hammurabi.

In addition, I don’t think Ezra 7:12-26 presents a picture of the Persian king calling for the codification of Jewish law. What we see is Ezra deciding to return to Yehud and Artaxerxes giving him permission. Undoubtedly, Ezra could not have returned to Yehud and carried out his program without the permission of the Persian king, but passive permission seems different than the active authorization that Frei envisions.

Obviously, this post is not doing justice to the full range of evidence that Frei presents. But after an initial reading of his article, I have to say I am not even slightly convinced.

1. Originally published in Zeitschrift fur altorientalische und biblische Rechtgeschichte 1 (1995): 1-35. [back]

As I mentioned in a previous post, the SmartPhone automatically moves all of your appointments when you enter a new time zone. I thought I had found a way to fix this by turning off the “Automatically Update Time Zone” feature.  What I discovered, however, is that when you turn the phone off and back on again, it automatically re-enables that feature.  Since I have to turn the phone off every time I get on a plane, my phone sets itself to the new time zone whenever I get off the plane and turn the phone back on. What good is it to be able to change settings when the phone resets its settings whenever it is turned off and back on?

The final day of the SBL began with me at the Pentateuch section. This was the second Pentateuch section that was held together with the Deuteronomistic History session. Although four presenters were scheduled, Mark Zvi Brettler and Albert De Pury were not able to attend.  So, we only heard two papers, but fortunately they were both very good.

Thomas B. Dozeman’s paper “The Golden Calf in the Enneateuch” was first.  The is probably the best paper I heard at the conference, mostly because he combined excellent scholarship and new interpretive approaches in a paper that was logically organized and easy to follow. He discussed the passages that discuss the Golden Calf: Exodus 32, Deuteronomy 9-10, and 1 Kings 12.  He argues that Exodus 32 is the latest of these and is engaged in innerbiblical exegesis on the other two texts.

This has implications for some of the work I am doing.  Obviously, Exodus 32, which is non-P, is pro-Levite and anti-Aaronid.  This would suggest that it was composed around the same time as texts such as Ezekiel 44 and the reworking of Numbers 16-18 by HS. It seems a part of a larger dialog taking place in the post-exilic period about the place of the Levites.

The second paper was “The Envisioning of the Land in the Priestly Material: Fulfilled Promise or Future Hope?” by Suzanne Boorer.  She argued that Priestly material does not continue into the book of Joshua, which leaves the promise of the land unfulfilled in the Priestly document. Although it was a good paper, I disagree with her. As I argued in a paper last year at the EABS, I think there is a good deal of P in Joshua 13-21. But I do agree with Boorer that at some point the promise of land was broken off when Joshua was removed in the process that created the Pentateuch out of the Hexateuch.

Some of the discussion surrounding the papers was helpful for my own thought process.  One idea that came to me is that the Priestly layers in Joshua might have been added by HS in the post-exilic period in order to encourage people to return to Judah/Yehud from Babylon. A focus on the land would make sense at that point.

After a quick run through the book sale, I headed to the Kansas City Barbecue place across from the Hyatt.  Some scenes from the movie Top Gun were filmed there, and being an aficionado of  barbecue I thought I should give it a try.  The barbecue was OK, but not quite up to the standards of North Carolina, although the sweet potato pie I had for desert was excellent.

I will be heading to the airport this afternoon.  I have a red-eye flight back tonight at 11:00 pm.

Next year in Jerusalem Boston!

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.

1. For a discussion of this question, see the articles in the first part of A Farewell to the Yahwist? [back]