Blue Cord

I have just come across a review of my book, The Campaign of Pharaoh Shoshenq I into Palestine, in JSOT 30.5 (2006): 51-52. The review is written by Diane Edelman. It is just a one paragraph review, and she mostly just summarizes what I have to say. At the end of the review, however, she says:

His analysis leaves unexplained three points: (1) why a pharaoh would establish a political alliance with a foreign commoner, marrying one of his daughters to him, (2) why the geographical scope of the list is limited to Cisjordan, unlike the wider range found in other such lists; and (3) why there are so many unique sites here that are not attested earlier or later.

I wanted to point out that I did, in fact, discuss all three of these points. In the conclusion on pp.98-99, I discuss the campaign from a foreign policy standpoint, suggesting that Shoshenq established a political alliance with Jeroboam in order to weaken Solomon’s kingdom. This policy changed the situation in Palestine. Egypt went from being faced with a relatively strong nation under Solomon, a nation that controlled the others in the region, to being faced with numerous weak nations, one of whom was in alliance with Egypt. This would have been a much more favorable situation as far as Egypt was concerned.

I addressed her third point on pp.44-46, where I discussed possible sources for the topographical list in Shoshenq’s relief. I think onomastic lists are a strong candidate for the source of the topographical list. Onomastic lists were kept up to date by the scribes so that they had an accurate catalog of cities. Since the other examples of topographic lists are from the Late Bronze Age, we should not be surprised that the Shoshenq list is different. It comes from several centuries after the lists of Thutmose III, Seti I, Ramses II, and Ramses III. The cities in Canaan had changed greatly during that those centuries, and the onomastic lists would have reflected those changes.

As for the list being limited to the Cisjordan, there are some sites, such as #22 (Mahanaim), which are located in the Transjordan. Given how incomplete the list is and the fact that we are unable to identify a large number of the sites, I don’t think we can say that the list is limited to the Cisjordan. I doubt the we have sites outside of Palestine (with the exception of ##1-9, which include Egypt, Nubia, and Libya), but the presence of Mahanaim means that we cannot rule out sites in the Transjordan.

If anyone is interested in reading a short summary of my dissertation, Bible and Interpretation has an on-line version of a paper I gave on the topic at the SBL meeting in 2000.

The final day of the SBL began with me at the Pentateuch section. This was the second Pentateuch section that was held together with the Deuteronomistic History session. Although four presenters were scheduled, Mark Zvi Brettler and Albert De Pury were not able to attend.  So, we only heard two papers, but fortunately they were both very good.

Thomas B. Dozeman’s paper “The Golden Calf in the Enneateuch” was first.  The is probably the best paper I heard at the conference, mostly because he combined excellent scholarship and new interpretive approaches in a paper that was logically organized and easy to follow. He discussed the passages that discuss the Golden Calf: Exodus 32, Deuteronomy 9-10, and 1 Kings 12.  He argues that Exodus 32 is the latest of these and is engaged in innerbiblical exegesis on the other two texts.

This has implications for some of the work I am doing.  Obviously, Exodus 32, which is non-P, is pro-Levite and anti-Aaronid.  This would suggest that it was composed around the same time as texts such as Ezekiel 44 and the reworking of Numbers 16-18 by HS. It seems a part of a larger dialog taking place in the post-exilic period about the place of the Levites.

The second paper was “The Envisioning of the Land in the Priestly Material: Fulfilled Promise or Future Hope?” by Suzanne Boorer.  She argued that Priestly material does not continue into the book of Joshua, which leaves the promise of the land unfulfilled in the Priestly document. Although it was a good paper, I disagree with her. As I argued in a paper last year at the EABS, I think there is a good deal of P in Joshua 13-21. But I do agree with Boorer that at some point the promise of land was broken off when Joshua was removed in the process that created the Pentateuch out of the Hexateuch.

Some of the discussion surrounding the papers was helpful for my own thought process.  One idea that came to me is that the Priestly layers in Joshua might have been added by HS in the post-exilic period in order to encourage people to return to Judah/Yehud from Babylon. A focus on the land would make sense at that point.

After a quick run through the book sale, I headed to the Kansas City Barbecue place across from the Hyatt.  Some scenes from the movie Top Gun were filmed there, and being an aficionado of  barbecue I thought I should give it a try.  The barbecue was OK, but not quite up to the standards of North Carolina, although the sweet potato pie I had for desert was excellent.

I will be heading to the airport this afternoon.  I have a red-eye flight back tonight at 11:00 pm.

Next year in Jerusalem Boston!

One of the interesting problems in source criticism is the fact that the P material as it now stands in Exodus has so little to say about Sinai and no mention of a covenant there. This troubles scholars, since the covenant at Sinai is supposed to be such a central idea in Israelite religion.

In their book Sources of the Pentateuch (p.43, n.55), Campbell and O’Brien list the three ways scholars have tried to explain this:

• Scholars who see P as the final redaction of the Pentateuch say that P didn’t need to have a section covering the covenant, since it was provided by JE.
• Some who see P as an independent source say P’s version of the covenant was suppressed in favor of the one from JE.
• Others who see P as an independent source argue that P focused more on the unconditional covenant with Abraham instead of the conditional covenant with Moses in order to provide comfort in the troubling times of the exile.

I have recently been rereading a forthcoming paper by Steve Cook that deals with the division of P into PT and HS (suggested by Israel Knohl). Steve argues that one of the differences between the theology of PT and HS is that PT focused on the covenant with Abraham while HS focused on Moses.

Knohl (and others such as Jacob Milgrom) argue that both PT and HS are pre-exilic. If I am reading him correctly (and remembering previous conversations accurately), Steve sees both as post-exilic. As I have argued before, I think PT is pre-exilic while HS is post-exilic. If this is the case, then it suggests a different answer to why P has no covenant at Sinai.

We need to find a reason for the lack of a P version of the covenant at Sinai if and only if we assume that PT thought the covenant at Sinai was important. But if PT is pre-exilic and focuses more on the covenant with Abraham than the one at Sinai, this could lead us to conclude that the covenant at Sinai was not very important to priestly circles in Jerusalem prior to the exile.

It is within the Deuteronomistic documents of the pre-exilic period that we have a focus on the covenant at Sinai. J also calls what happened at Sinai a covenant (Exod.19:5), but van Seters has argued that J is influenced by D. Other pre-exilic works from Judah, such as Amos and Isaiah, don’t refer to the covenant or to Sinai. HS could have picked up on the covenant at Sinai in the post-exilic period as the Deuteronomistic literature was becoming accepted in priestly circles. HS would not have needed its own version of Sinai, since it certainly had JE in hand.

While PT does not mention the covenant at Sinai, it does describe some events at Sinai. But instead of a covenant or law, Moses goes up to the mountain to receive the plans for the tabernacle in Exodus 24:15-18 (which introduces Exod.25-31, all from PT). This is exactly what we would expect priests to be interested in. The tabernacle either stands as a cipher for the temple or as a reference to a structure that actually existed inside the temple (as Richard Elliot Friedman has argued). According to PT, what the Israelites received at Sinai was not a covenant, but a cultus.

This would also explain why PT wrote the P narrative in Genesis. If PT was focused on the Abrahamic covenant as Steve argues, it makes perfect sense for it to have written a document that covered creation through Abraham.

Although I am coming in rather late on this topic, I thought I would post a quick note on the recent discussion about the so-called “Jezebel Seal.”

In a forthcoming article in BAR, Marjo Korpel argues that a seal in the Israel Museum (IDAM 65-321) belongs to the infamous Jezebel, wife of King Ahab of Israel. Nahman Avigad had first published this seal in 1964, but noted that there is no solid basis for ascribing it to Jezebel. The story of Korpel’s identification was first reported in Ha’aretz. Several blogs have discussed this seal over the past week, and Chris Heard at Higgaion has a good summary of the debate and links to other biblioblogs that have touched on the subject.

Jim West has a guest blog about the seal by Chris Rollston of Johnson Bible College Emmanuel School of Religion. Chris and I were students together at Johns Hopkins, so I can attest that he is well-versed in epigraphy. His thoughts on an inscription such as this are always worth noting.

One of the more damaging critiques that Chris notes is that the writing on the seal is later than the 9th century (the date of the biblical Jezebel). If this is the case, then there is no possibility that the seal belonged to her. Avigad dated the seal to the 9th-8th century, but our knowledge of scripts has increased greatly since that time. Zbl is a common root in Northwest Semitic, so it would not be surprising to find other people with that element in their name.

All in all, there seems little reason to ascribe this seal to the Jezebel of biblical fame.

Follow up: Amihai Mazar has posted a short paragraph about the seal on the American Schools of Oriental Research website.

Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Proper 12 (series reading)

The OT reading from the Revised Common Lectionary for this Sunday is Hosea 1:2-10. This is the theme reading, although the connection between this passage and the NT readings is not immediately clear (assuming there is one).

The Hosea is passage is well-known to most preachers. It would be hard to imagine a seminary class on the OT that didn’t deal with this text when covering Hosea. The danger with such familiar passages, of course, is that we allow our prior understanding of the text to take the place of doing the exegesis again. Because of that, I wanted to point out something that seems to me to be a surprising element in the text that a preacher might not have noticed in previous readings.

The first of these is the fact that Hosea names his first child Jezreel, because God is going to punish the Jehu Dynasty for the coup in Jezreel that brought them to power. This is an interesting statement, because the coup in Jezreel was originally done at the command of God through the prophet Elisha. A common way of dealing with this is by saying that Jehu went overboard when he killed everyone in the Omrid Dynasty, but this is not supported by the texts we have. In 2 Kings 9:7, Jehu is told specifically that he is to destroy the house of Ahab. It is hard to go overboard when you are told to destroy something, as destruction involves wiping something out completely.

It seems to me that the direction of theological reflection on this text seems to me to be the multiple voices that the Bible is presenting concerning Jehu’s coup. Hosea views the coup negatively, at least in the way it was carried out. The DtrH, on the other hand, views it positively. The question for preachers is how to hear both voices and allow each to have its say without privileging one text over the other. The canon does not set the texts at odds with each other, but neither does it resolve the tension. Preachers can draw on that tension to provide energy to their sermons.