Blue Cord

At the SBL meeting in 2006 I picked up Alice Hunt’s book Missing Priests: The Zadokites in Tradition and History. I wrote a review of it on this blog a couple of months later. While the book does make some good points, I ultimately did not agree with the conclusions. Hunt argues that there are no Zadokites until the Hasmonean period because she sees no stress on Zadokites prior to that, while I would say they were around in the preexilic period, but because of their position of power they did not need to justify their position.

This month’s Review of Biblical Literature has a review of Missing Priests by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer. Tiemeyer has a slightly more positive view of the book, so if you are looking for a review with a different take on the book, check it out.

This month’s Review of Biblical Literature contains a review of Calum Carmichael’s book Illuminating Leviticus: A Study of Its Laws and Institutions in the Light of Biblical Narratives. I had not heard of this book, but the blurb in the RBL (presumably taken from the publisher’s description) states:

The origin of law in the Hebrew Bible has long been the subject of scholarly debate. Until recently, the historico-critical methodologies [sic] of the academy have yielded unsatisfactory conclusions concerning the source of these laws which are woven through biblical narratives. In this original and provocative study, Calum Carmichael — a leading scholar of biblical law and rhetoric — suggests that Hebrew law was inspired by the study of the narratives in Genesis through 2 Kings. Discussing particular laws found in the book of Leviticus — addressing issues such as the Day of Atonement, consumption of meat that still has blood, the Jubilee year, sexual and bodily contamination, and the treatment of slaves — Carmichael links each to a narrative. He contends that biblical laws did not emerge from social imperatives in ancient Israel, but instead from the careful, retrospective study of the nation’s history and identity.

While I would not say that historical-critical methods (not “methodologies”!) have yielded unsatisfactory results, I am always open to a new theory. But just on the basis of this blurb, the theory sounds highly implausible. I didn’t have time to read Reinhard Achenbach’s entire review (which is in German), but the concluding paragraph is rather scathing. He states in one place that “in the entire book, there is not one philological or literary-historical proof to convince one of the position put forth.” Not exactly high praise.

Although I am usually glad to see a new book on Leviticus come out, I think I will have to pass on this one.

A new book out by Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell entitled A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels’ Impact Event claims that an Assyrian tablet from around 700 BCE is a copy of a Sumerian tablet that recorded a sighting of the impact of a asteroid [sic, not “meteor”] that hit in the Alps on June 29, 3123 BCE. The story has been reported in several news outlets, including a piece at Fox News.

In and of itself, the claim is not surprising. Mesopotamian astronomers kept excellent records and very detailed notes on astronomical events. The Ammisaduqa Venus tablets, for instance, contain notes on the appearance of Venus in the morning and evening skies in the Old Babylonian Period (around the 17th century BCE). These observations are precise enough to be correlated with calculations of planetary positions during that time, which makes them one of the lynch pins in chronology for that period.¹

I find three problems with Bond and Hempsell’s claims. One is that they try to connect this asteroid with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and a number of other cataclysmic events recorded in ancient documents. According to the Fox News story:

[Hempsell] said the size and route of the asteroid meant that it was likely to have crashed into the Austrian Alps at Köfels. As it traveled close to the ground it would have left a trail of destruction from supersonic shock waves and then slammed into the Earth with a cataclysmic impact.

Debris consisting of up to two-thirds of the asteroid would have been hurled back along its route and a flash reaching temperatures of 400 Centigrade (752 Fahrenheit) would have been created, killing anyone in its path.

Even if we assume for the moment that Sodom and Gomorrah were real cities that actually were destroyed at some point (a rather large assumption), a number of details from the Sodom and Gomorrah story don’t match with the Köfels event. First, this event happened in 3123 BCE, whereas the Sodom and Gomorrah story in the Bible is placed somewhere in the early 2nd millennium BCE. Second, the path of destruction would have taken out a lot more than just five cities around the Dead Sea. If the conditions were as Hempsell described them, then the path of destruction would have run across the Karak Plateau in Moab, over the Jordan valley, and up across the Central Hill Country of Palestine. This is a much larger area than was covered in the Sodom and Gomorrah story.

The second issue stems from the claim that the planisphere is a copy of a text from 3123 BCE. Sumerian writing is in its earliest stage in 3100 BCE. I find it hard to believe that we have such a detailed text from this time period. We don’t start getting numerous text in Sumerian until later centuries, and true astronomical observations don’t really begin until the 2nd millennium BCE. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that this text records the Köfels impact, but it seems highly unlikely to me.²

Third, the tablet notes that the Sumerian astronomer says the object looked like “a white stone bowl approaching.” If the asteroid’s path took it on a low trajectory over the Dead Sea area on its way toward the Alps, an observer in Sumeria would not have seen it “approaching.” Instead, it would have moved low across the southwestern horizon and would not have appeared to approach. The description of object as a bowl also does not match the trail of smoke and debris that would have been left by an 1 km wide asteroid.

Obviously I cannot give a complete critique of their work until I read the book, but I find their theories to be highly suspect. Both Bond and Hempsell are scientists, not Assyriologists, and their lack of training in the ANE shows through. I suspect they would have similar critiques of my work if I ever chose to publish a book on physics, which is why I don’t publish academic books outside my field. Although their theories may be given credibility by those who are eager to latch on to any evidence that suggests the Bible is historically accurate, I doubt they will be accepted by most scholars.

Hat tip: Claude Mariottini.

1. Because of my interest in astronomy, I did some work with these tablets when I was a grad student at Johns Hopkins. [back]
2. Someone who is a specialist in Sumerian could speak to this better than I could. [back]

While I was on Spring Break last week, I rented two movies that I thought might be good ones to use in an introduction to Bible class. I wanted to offer reviews of each here. This post will discuss the first movie, The Ten, while a subsequent post will review the other movie, The Final Inquiry.

The Ten is a rather quirky film. It is a set of ten short pieces, each of which is introduced by a narrator who is having some personal problems of his own. Each piece is related in some way to one of the Ten Commandments, and the narrator does his work with two huge stone tablets sitting behind him. I rented it because I thought it might be a good film to show to get some discussion going when I cover Exodus. Having watched the film, I don’t think I will be showing it in class.

The pieces turn out to be only vaguely related to the Ten Commandments. For example, “Thou shalt not kill” is a piece about a woman who falls in love with a ventriloquist puppet and steals him from his owner. “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain” is about a virgin librarian who takes a trip to Mexico and falls in love with a man who she later discovers to be Jesus Christ, who has returned to bring about the end of the world but keeps putting it off because he is having a good time down on earth. The only part connected to taking the Lord’s name in vain is when she calls out his name during sex. The “Thou shalt not covet” scene involved two neighbors in a battle to see who could purchase more cat scan machines, while “Honor the sabbath” centered on a guy who liked to skip church and spend Sunday mornings hanging out with a bunch of naked guys while listening to Roberta Flack music.

The short stories are not really an attempt to explore the Ten Commandments. Instead, the Ten Commandments are little more than a gimmick to tie the stories together. Because of this, I doubt the film would provoke much discussion in a class room, or if it did I doubt the discussion would center on the Ten Commandments. And given the crude language and situations, I am not sure it would be entirely appropriate to show this in a classroom anyway. For instance, even though there is no frontal nudity, there are sixteen different men who appear in the credits only as “Naked Guy.”

The movie has a number of actors that are recognizable. Paul Rudd plays the narrator, while Winona Ryder is the woman who falls in love with the puppet. Other actors include Jessica Alba, Famke Janssen, Rob Corddry (from The Daily Show), Janeane Garofalo, Gretchen Mol, Oliver Platt, Jason Sudeikis (from SNL), Robert Ben Garant and Kerri Kenney (both from Reno 911).

The DVD cover has a quote from the Chicago Sun Times that called the film “Uproariously Funny!” That is apparently a Chicago idiom that means “mildly amusing in a crass sort of way.” I can forgive the film for not inspiring deep thoughts about the Ten Commandments, but the least they could have done is make me laugh. Instead, while I found myself vaguely interested in some of the skits, for most of the film I just sat there wondering how such good actors could have let themselves be attracted to such a bad script.

Calvin Park at Random Bloggings has a review of my book, The Campaign of Pharaoh Shoshenq I into Palestine. I met Calvin and his wife last December when I found out they lived close to me in Massachusetts. Calvin provides a very positive review of my book, which I am sure has nothing to do with the fact that I gave him a copy when we met for lunch.

As an aside, when I first met my new roommate Jin Yang, he said he thought my name sounded familiar. We chatted for a bit, and he happened to ask what my dissertation topic was. When I said it was Shoshenq, he said he knew why my name was familiar. Apparently Ralph Klein assigned my book for a seminar in Israelite history at Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. Jin had read my book for that class. It’s a small world, or at least a small academic field.