Blue Cord

“Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends!” — Karn Evil 9

Once again, the Biblical Studies Blog Carnival is up and running. Join us as we stroll down the midway, taking in the best that bibliobloggers had to offer in February.

We first stop at the hospitality tent, where we welcome a few newcomers to the biblioblogosphere. My colleague Jin Yang Kim at Wartburg College started a blog this month called Old Testament Story. Jin is a Ph.D. student at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. The Prime Time Jesus blog at Bible.org also added a contributor this month. Their new blogger is Bob Webb, who teaches at McMaster University and specializes in the Historical Jesus. Alan Lenzi at the University of the Pacific began blogging on the last day of January, but we can include him as a February newcomer as well. His blog is Bible and the Ancient Near East. And although he is by no means a newcomer, we want to welcome Jim West back to the blogging world. His previous blog was hacked and deleted in mid-February (the list of suspects is too long and illustrious to mention), but Jim is back up and running at his new address, jwest.wordpress.com. For those who wish to follow the conspiracy theories about the deletion of Jim’s blog, Lingamish is a good place to start.

To the right as we move down the midway is the translation booth. Zondervan posted an article by Karen H. Jobes entitled “Bible Translation as Bilingual Quotation”. They issued an open invitation to bloggers to respond to the article and several took up the challenge. Jim Getz at Kethubim criticized the article in his post “How to Lie with Statistics: Bible Translation Edition”. At Ancient Hebrew Poetry, John Hobbins wrote two pieces in response: “Karen Jobes Squares Off against the Essential Literalists” and “Defining Faithful Translation: Why Jobes is Only Half Right”. The Epistle of Thomas joined the discussion with “Verbosity in English Translations”. Wayne Leman at Better Bibles Blog has a short discussion that contains links to some additional posts on Jobes’s paper.

Next up is the Ancient Near Eastern booth. If you are interested in music, point your browser to Awilum where you can read Charles Halton’s post on musicians at Mari. Duane Smith at Abnormal Interests discusses KTU 1.48, a Ugaritic Ritual Text possibly written by a non-scribe.

Let’s head on over to the big tent, where there is action in three rings: Old Testament, New Testament, and the Bible as a whole. In the center ring is the Old Testament / Hebrew Bible.¹ Starting us off is Steve Cook at Biblische Ausbildung, who responds to a reader’s question about why Isaac took Rebekah into his mother’s tent. Here at Blue Cord, I discussed stories about the golden calf and what they suggest about the history of the priesthood. And lest we limit ourselves to the English speaking world, Jan Pieter van de Giessen had a post on gladiators in the Old Testament at Aantekeningen bij de Bijbel. Van de Giessen’s blog is in Dutch, but the Google translator does a decent job of making the text accessible to those of us who still haven’t gotten around to learning Dutch.

In another ring we have the New Testament blogs. Mike Aubrey at en epheso had several posts on linguistic questions in Greek. In his own words, he is working on “applying linguistic theory and particularly grammatical analysis to the Greek of the New Testament from a modified generative perspective”. This month he discussed the use of pas, predicative and attributive adjectives, and evidence for the Greek noun phrase. And if you are tired of reading and would prefer just to listen, Chris Christensen began a new podcast on the book of Romans at The Bible Study Podcast.

In the third ring, we encounter posts that don’t confine themselves to one testament or the other. Chris Brady (who fights crime as Targuman) has a series of devotionals for the season of Lent. There has also been a lively discussion on religious pluralism, inclusivism, and exclusivism in the Bible going on between James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix, Michael Halcomb at Pisteuomen, and Ken Brown at C.Orthodoxy. Ken Brown pulled together an index that includes links to their posts, as well as to others who have joined the conversation. The discussion includes an excursion into whether what they are doing should be call a diablogue or a bloggersation.

As we head back out to the midway, we can’t help stopping by the extra-canonical literature booth.² Jim Davila of PaleoJudaica has an excellent book review of April DeConick’s The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says. Deane at Merkavah Vision discusses a merkavah ascent in the Odes of Solomon.

After that, we drop in for a short snack at the hermeneutics booth, where we read what Esteban Vázquez has to say about apostolic exegesis at his blog Vox Stefani. Just around the corner is the tent for the guild of biblical scholars, where Alan Lenzi issues what is sure to be a controversial call for membership standards for the SBL.

There was so much to see this month at the carnival that we can’t help feeling a little tired as we head out the gate. But as we do, we notice a small booth that shows that all of our efforts do sometimes make a difference. Charles Halton at Awilum wrote a post last month pointing out that Baker Publishing had taken a negative review of a book and turned it into a positive blurb on their website through questionable use of ellipses. Charles returned to the Baker website this month and found that the blurb had been removed.

So, as the sun sets, we head back to the parking lot, our minds abuzz with the heady thoughts inspired by excellent blog posts from February (or maybe from having eaten too much cotton candy). We have our Biblical Studies Blog Carnival souvenir stadium cup and the kewpie doll we won by tossing a shekel in the sphinx’s mouth at the Ancient Near Eastern booth, but we can’t help looking forward to next month, when the carnival will once again roll into town at Thoughts on Antiquity. Be on the lookout for their call for submissions, and keep your eyes open for blog posts you want to nominate for next month’s carnival.

1. The OT is in the center ring because it’s my blog and I like the OT. So there. [back]
2. “It’s not just canonical — it’s extra-canonical. Now with 25% more canon!” [back]