Sunday at the SBL
In addition to the bibliobloggers lunch, I also attended a couple of sections. The first was the Pentateuch section. I heard the tail end of Konrad Schmid’s paper “The Emergence and disappearance of the Separation between Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History,” all of Thomas Romer’s paper “How Many Books (teuchs): Pentateuch, Hexateuch, Deuteronomistic History, or Enneateuch,” and all of Erhard Blum’s “How to Determine the Scope of Literary Works in Genesis to Kings.” Blum was not present, so his paper was read by David Carr. These guys always deliver very dense papers, so I am hoping to be able to get copies of the papers to read and digest at length.
It was then off to a meeting with Jim, who graciously agreed to chat with me about starting a publishing company. This was followed by a quick stop at the first biblical law section, where I heard Henning Graf Reventlow’s paper “Canaanite Cultic Law and Its Yahwistic Repainting in Leviticus 1-16, Shown by a Close Reading of the Chapter Leviticus 1.” I was an interesting paper which tried to remove Israelite elements in Leviticus 1 in order to recover a Canaanite layer. He argues that the basis of biblical cultic law was pre-Yahwistic. I wasn’t convinced.
The evening consisted of the Yale reception from 7:00-8:30 and the Johns Hopkins reception from 9:00-11:00. Both were enjoyable, but I couldn’t socialize the way I wanted to due to my laryngitis.