Blue Cord

Since many of my readers will be traveling to Boston this weekend for the Society of Biblical Literature Conference, I thought I would draw your attention to an exhibit that is at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

composite triple beat“Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum”online casino is currently on display. As the title suggests, these are all artifacts that are housed in the British Museum. They are on loan to the Boston Museum of Fine arts from September 2008 to January 2009.

I have not seen the exhibit yet, but a colleague of mine at Merrimack College said it was very well done. She is not a biblical scholar, but by her description of one of the reliefs, I believe the scene depicting Sennacherib’s siege of Lachish is one of the pieces on display. I have not been able to find an official list of the artifacts in the exhibit, so I cannot confirm this.

If you want to attend, please keep in mind that tickets are required. You can purchase tickets for specific times of entry on the MFA web site, and the ticket is only good for that time slot. The exhibit tickets are $25 (plus “convenience fee”), and that is on top of the general admission of $17 (plus “convenience fee”).

You can visit the exhibit’s web siteмебели пловдив for more details.

I am pleased to announce that my son and I have been cast as roles in an upcoming production of Oliver! The production is being staged by the Pentucket Players. I will be playing Bill Sikes, while my son will be an orphan at the workhouse and one of Fagin’s boys.

I am excited about doing the play and even more excited that my son will be doing it as well. Oliver! holds a special place in my heart. The movie version came out the year I was born and won five Oscars, including best picture. Oliver! was also the first play I ever did. At age twelve, I played a workhouse boy and pickpocket, just as my son will. My parents and brother were both in the play as well; my father played the police officer who shoots and kills Bill Sikes, the character I am now playing. The story is a compelling one, the characters are rich, and the songs are some of the best from any musical.

I did a lot of theater from grade school all the way through college. I have been in productions of The Sound of Music (3 times), South Pacific (twice), The Music Man, Carousel, Guys and Dolls, The Wiz, Camelot, Shadow Box, and several others. I consider the time I spent on stage some of the best training I ever had for teaching and preaching. I am thrilled that my son is going to get the same experience of being on stage.

The one downside is that the performances are the same weekend as the SBL meeting this November. I will have to miss Saturday and Sunday at the SBL, although I can make it to Sunday night receptions because our performance that day is a matinee. On the other hand, if anyone at the SBL wants to come north of Boston to see a performance, it is just a short train ride up. You can hear me sing and see me get shot, all for the price of admission. Conveniently, the performances are done at the Rogers Center for Performing Arts, which is on the campus of Merrimack College where I teach.

I received word this morning that my proposal for a paper at this year’s SBL meeting has been accepted for the Pentateuch section. The paper is on the demotion of the Levites in PT and HS. It builds on some of the work that Steve Cook has done on interbiblical exegesis between the Torah and Ezekiel. I wrote about half this paper in the summer of 2006. Unfortunately, I got busy with other things and never got around to finishing it. It will be interesting to dive back into the topic at some point this summer.

Last week while at the SBL, I wrote on things to avoid in a scholarly paper. It has generated some nice comments and has floated around the biblioblogosphere. Chris Heard at Higgaion and Charles Halton at Awilum picked up on the idea and added some points.

My favorite piece of advice is Chris Heard’s dictum that presenters should bring enough copies of handouts. More than half the papers that used handouts had to apologize for not bringing enough. This happens every year. It is not that expensive to print copies, especially since most of us can just slap it on the department copier and hit the copy button. Even if your department doesn’t cover the cost, do us all a favor and spring for the extra couple of dollars. Here is the breakdown of your expenses:

• Flight to the conference – $400
• Hotel room – $550
• Annual meeting registration – $135
• Having enough copies for your presentation – Priceless (or $2.25)

I hate it when we are told we have to share sheets with another scholar. After all, you don’t know where some of these guys have been (I mean, some of them could have gone to safety schools). So, I am always stuck in a pickle: do I let the other guy have the handout and risk not understanding the paper (thereby wasting a trip to San Diego) or do I keep the paper and risk the irony of being selfish at a biblical studies conference.

By the way, I am watching the Baltimore vs. San Diego game, and they just showed a shot of the city that showed my hotel and the convention center. I’m still enough of a hick that I find things like that cool, but I’m still rooting for Baltimore.

Duane Smith at Abnormal Interests also posted on the topic. He argues that scholars should present their papers instead of reading them. I’m not sure I agree with him. His point that we don’t read from lectures in class is well taken, but in those cases we are talking about things that we know very well and have spoken about many times. In papers, however, we are presenting new information and we are usually giving rather detailed arguments. In class we can gloss over those details, but not at conferences. I think the nature of the paper is different enough that they need to be read in most cases.

Of course, part of my hesitation to endorse this idea stems from my suspicion that there are very few scholars out there who could give a paper well without reading it. Papers can be boring when read, but the alternative could be much worse.

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.