Blue Cord

Chris Heard tagged me in what has got to be one of the most bizarre memes I have seen yet. The instructions are as follows:

• Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more (no cheating!)
• Find page 123
• Find the first five sentences
• Post the next three sentences
• Tag five people

Chris lists three books. Which one is closest depends on the point on his body you choose as his starting point. The first two books are a Dungeon’s & Dragons book (monster manual?) and the BHS (Exodus 22:23-25), but I have no idea what the first one is.

The book that happens to be sitting next to me in my office is Dostoevsky’s Religion by Steven Cassedy. The passage the meme seeks is the following:

The model can mean at least two slightly different things, depending on our perspective. It can describe me, an individual, and my experience in this world from my perspective. This experience then consists in the path of development that, by a law of nature, I follow.

The excerpt is taken from chapter five, “Belief is Ideal.” I have no idea what the context is, as I have only just started the book. Just take solace in the fact that this book beat out the Hermeneia commentary on Deutero–Isaiah by three inches. Believe me, it could have been worse.

For the final portion of the meme, I need to tag five people. The honorees are: Christian Brady, Stephen Cook, Charles Halton, Tyler Williams, and Jim Getz.

There is another round of the minimalist vs. maximalist debate going on in certain parts of the biblioblogosphere right now. It appears to have started with Claude Mariottini’s post of Mario Liverani’s Israel’s History and the History of Israel. Jim West and Christian Brady have offered follow-up posts on the subject, as have a number of others.

I haven’t jumped into this debate when it has shown up in blogs before. I would probably call myself a medialist, since I fall somewhere between the minimalists and the maximalists. But I first got into this debate about ten years ago while I was in my doctoral program at the Johns Hopkins University. In order to make sure we got all sides of the debate, my dissertation director P. Kyle McCarter, Jr. invited Thomas Thompson, Israel Finkelstein, and William Dever to campus. In the course of one academic year, we go to hear papers by all three and have discussions with them afterwards. It was quite an experience.

I wanted to offer three thoughts on the debate.

First, I think arguing about whether what minimalists or maximalists do is right or wrong is a mistaken approach to the entire problem. We cannot say that all texts are historical reliable or that all texts are historically reliable. Some texts are and some texts are not, while most texts fall somewhere in between. The reliability of a text has to be determined on a case–by–case basis. If a minimalists has determined that an entire text is historically unreliable (as Liverani has done), we cannot argue against his position by claiming that all minimalists deny the historicity of the text (as Mariottini does). That is simply begging the question:

1. Liverani denies the historicity of the biblical text.
2. Liverani is a minimalist.
3. All minimalists are wrong because they deny the historicity of the biblical text.
4. Therefore, Liverani is wrong.

We have to look at the actual arguments made by the minimalists and show that they are wrong or — if we want to be intellectually honest — look at the arguments to determine whether they are right or wrong (we should not go into the debate assume that one side or the other is wrong). The best way to do this is to examine their claims about the origin of the text. Liverani claims that the DtrH is an invention of the post–exilic period. That in itself is a historical claim and is therefore open to debate. If we want to engage his argument, we have to look at the evidence he presents as well as the evidence of those who claim it is from an earlier period. Simply castigating him for using a minimalist approach will only convince people he is wrong if they are already convinced that the minimalists approach is wrong. As enjoyable as it is to argue in favor of something people already accept, it is not going to convince those who don’t already agree.

Second, I wanted to take issue with the claim made by West that it is the historian’s job to offer proof. Proof, however, is a luxury that we do not have as historians. All we have is evidence. That evidence may point in a certain direction, but it will never amount to proof. West is right that we cannot prove that Moses didn’t exist, but at the same time we cannot prove that he did exist either. All we can do is examine the evidence — both textual and artifactual — and attempt to write a history that best explains the evidence we have. Given the paucity of evidence, it is no surprise that people will come to different conclusions. As I always tell my students, writing the history of ancient Israel is like doing a 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzle when you only have 173 pieces and no picture on the box. The best to which we can aspire is to put the pieces in a meaningful order and sketch in what the other pieces might have looked like.

Third, we are doing things backwards when we are trying to use history to prove the biblical text. Our reconstruction of Israel’s history may inform our understanding of the text, but it cannot prove it because the reconstruction is based in large part on the Bible itself. Instead of using archaeological data and historical reconstructions to prove the text, we should be using archaeological data and the text to make historical reconstructions.

For those who don’t know, Cafe Press is a site where anyone can create t-shirts, mugs, and a number of other items that include whatever image you care to upload. It is a nice way to get personalized items with exactly the image you want.

Now, some scholar with too much time on his or her hands has created a host of items with the phrase “All I said . . . was, ‘That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah’” translated into Hebrew. (For historical accuracy, it should have been translated into Aramaic, but never mind that.) If you are unfamiliar with the phrase, you can see its origin in the following video.

A nice hat tip goes out to Jim West and Christian Brady for finding the site. And remember, if any of this was blasphemy to you, it was a blast for me too.

Thomas Black left a comment on my post “Through the Bible in One Semester.” He asked whether my students were required to read the entire Bible during that one semester. Sadly, they are not. Each year I find myself trying to reduce the amount of reading that they have to do in the Bible. I currently have them reading 10–15 chapters per class, which I feel is almost manageable. Unfortunately, that means leaving out a lot of material.

I think it would be interesting sometime to pull together a comparison of different reading lists that professor have when they teach the Bible in one semester (or the OT in one semester). I try to make mine representative of the biblical text, but I am sure some people would be shocked at what I leave out (e.g., “How can you teach the Bible without covering the Psalms?!?”).

Thomas also mentioned that he plans to read the entire Bible during the month of February and blog about it. Sounds like fun. When I was in college I read through the Bible in a year and kept a journal of the experience. After seminary, I decided to move through a bit faster. I was working at the seminary while my wife finished her degree, but I had the whole week off between Christmas and New Years. During that week, I managed to get through the entire OT (in English). I thought about going on and finishing the NT in three days, but I was so exhausted by that point that I didn’t do it.

A few months ago, I moved to Lawrence, MA. Lawrence is one of the poorest cities in the country. It was a thriving mill town from the 1860s to 1950s, but when the textile industry headed overseas, the city took a turn for the worse. Twenty–one percent of families currently live at or below the poverty level. Although the city is better now that it was in the 1970s and 1980s, it still has a long way to go.

I got a call this afternoon telling me that there has now been a huge fire in Lawrence. About 2:30 am a fire broke out in a building that was being renovated to be a night club. The fire spread quickly in frigid winds. Fourteen different fire companies rushed to the scene, but the cold conditions hampered their efforts. By the time the blaze was over, between nine and sixteen buildings had been destroyed (estimates vary in the news reports) and 150–200 people had been left homeless. Three of the building destroyed were homes that Habitat for Humanity was building, and another was an Arc community for the mentally handicapped. The night club owner had done about $300,000 in renovation, but did not have insurance on the building.

Fortunately, only one person was injured in the blaze and there were no fatalities.

Due to the number of empty buildings in Lawrence, it has had a high arson rate for many years. Investigators suspect arson may have been involved in this case as well.

It would be hard for most cities to recover from a fire this size, but for a city as poor as Lawrence it will be even more difficult. Many of the people displaced were struggling to get by before they lost everything, and the city’s shelters were already overflowing because of the cold temperature. Please keep Lawrence in your prayers as they try to make their way through this tragedy.

For news stories covering the fire, you can read Boston.com or the Eagle Tribune (our local newspaper).