Ancient Hebrew Poetry

A generation of locusts

    One of the nice things about blogging is that the genre allows one to write about anything and everything that seems important. Politics is important and, in the United States, we are in an election year. As usual, almost everything that is said for political consumption is either tasteless or tastes too good to be true. Speaking the truth is an ideal that almost no one adheres to. The lone partial exception is Ron Paul (by pointing this out, I am not thereby endorsing him). The best piece of political commentary I have read in the past year is found in a famous op-ed of less than a year ago by Nicola Rossi (b. 1951), one of the few Italian politicians worth hearing out - every country, I would hope, by the grace of God, has one or two, the rest being scoundrels, deludeds, or poppycocks.

Reflections on “God of the Living: A Biblical Theology”

    Joseph Kelly and Charles Halton are to be thanked for drawing attention to a new volume of biblical theology, Der Gott der Lebendigen: Eine biblische Gotteslehre (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011) by Hermann Spieckermann, a professor of Old Testament at the Georg-August-Universität of Göttingen, and Reinhard Feldmeier, a professor of New Testament in the same location.

A Short Introduction to the Scholarship of Daniel Bodi

    There are three principal reasons why the scholarship of Daniel Bodi deserves to be better known. First of all, Bodi is not afraid to offer bold hypotheses, plough new ground, and make fresh connections. If only more biblical scholars fit this mold. Not all of Bodi’s hypotheses are convincing, but one is always grateful for the verve with which they are presented.

Covenant Prayer in the Style of John Wesley

    A Methodist tradition I cherish is the Watch Night service. It all began, as John Wesley recounts in his Short History of the People called Methodists (1781),¹ on the evening of August 11 1755 in the French church of Spitalfields in London (that is, in the "Old French Church" on Grey Eagle Street, which, after acquisition, became the base for Wesleyan expansion in London's East End). 1,800 people were in attendance. Huguenots whose ancestors had escaped France in the wake of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (Oct 22 1685) had built the chapel. Like the Huguenots who built the chapel, the early Methodists knew themselves to be pilgrims and strangers in a strange land. They were acutely aware that we have nothing on earth to call our own except the relationship we nurture with the good, the true, and the beautiful, a relationship they cultivated in the Christ of God encountered in worship and the preaching of the Word.

The Life and Death of Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

    How shall we remember Christopher Hitchens? For his short-fused, slashing style? No one was more accomplished than he at firing rhetorical salvos at real or imaginary enemies. “Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse in every gate, if I had a rocket launcher, I would retaliate.” Whether or not Hitchens knew the lyrics of that Bruce Cockburn song, he agreed with them - more, I suspect, than Cockburn their author did. In the words of an ideology he never entirely relinquished, for Hitchens, “fascism means war” – which cuts both ways. It meant that Hitchens was anything but a pacifist.

Jews Reading the New Testament

    Is that just another way of saying, “Jews behaving badly”? Not according to Amy-Jill Levine, the co-editor, along with Marc Zvi Brettler, of The Jewish Annotated New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). “The more I study New Testament,” Dr. Levine told the New York Times, “the better Jew I become.”

Reflections on ASOR/SBL/AAR – San Francisco 2011

    I had a great time at the annual meetings this year.

Acculturation vs. internal development: framing the question with Mario Liverani

    Two poles of a false binary continue to play an inordinate role in the study of the history of ancient Israel and of Syria-Palestine. One pole attempts to explain the cultural (for example, the religious and political) history of a specific polity - for example, ancient Israel - with as little reference as possible to the impact of traits and trends that washed down the cultural slopes of contiguous societies over a same temporal frame; e.g., Iron Age Egypt, Philistia, Phoenicia, Damascus, Assyria, and Babylonia. Another pole attempts to explain the same history without remainder in terms of the features held in common with coeval contiguous polities. Nothing distinctive to see in a distinctive culture: move along. Parallelomania wins out by virtue of squatter's rights.

    A better though very partial formulation of the question: how do contiguous cultures in conflict acquire and assimilate into their own frameworks elements of another framework they dearly wish to oppose? How does that work? What if such assimilative processes are of paramount importance? Here is Liverani:

The History and Archaeology of the Ancient Levant: Formulating the Right Questions

    30 years ago, Mario Liverani delivered a lecture that outlined a research program for the disciplines of the history and archaeology of the Ancient Levant. The essay is also a masterful description of salient long-term trends that characterized Bronze and Iron Age Syria-Palestine. Published in Italian in a hard-to-find volume, it has not received the attention it deserves. Here, in translation, is how the essay begins:

Psalm 26: The Kinetic Energy of Protest before God

    The one who asks God to vindicate him in Psalm 26 is committed to "walking" in reliance on God. The alternative the psalmist rejects: that of acquiescing to evil and dishonesty. The prayer is full of controlled kinetic energy. 

According to the Bible, could you be fat and still be a priest?

    In the ancient Near East and Greek and Roman antiquity, the universal solution to the question of who could present what animal offerings to deity was the following: priests without physical imperfections presented animal offerings without physical imperfections.¹ Still, one is hard pressed to find a text which specifies that an obese individual was disbarred from presenting offerings to deity.

Why Kindness is Dangerous

    Kindness, whenever it amounts to giving someone a free pass, is dangerous. It is the door abusive people walk through when they want to abuse again. More damaging still, it puts a damper on discovery and the search for truth.

Who was Judah the Maccabee?

According to Dan Friedman:

Moshe and Akiva in TB Menachot 29b

    What reward awaits the one who makes Torah, the words of Holy Writ, the foundation of her life? Judaism has a realistic view of the matter. The reward of a chasid or faithful one is the privilege of living and dying for the sake of the truth embraced. Below the fold, text and translation of a famous passage which makes the point and turns away all questions as to why it is so.

Jerome to Paula and Eustochium (394): Text and Translation

    The text of Jerome’s letter of dedication to Paula and Eustochium of his translation from the Hebrew of 1 Samuel – 2 Kings presented here is from the Biblia Sacra Vulgata (Robert Weber, ed.; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1984) 364-66. I collated the translations of W. H. Freemantle (see Michael Marlowe’s note 2) and Kevin Edgecomb, to which I am indebted, but the translation I present is my own. My goal throughout has been to bring Jerome’s wit back to life, however imperfectly, through a close translation of his words, with transliterated Hebrew and Greek, Greek in Greek script, and the Wortlaut of the Latin names of biblical books accurately preserved. For an introductory discussion, go here; for Jerome’s grasp of Hebrew, go here.

Jerome’s Twenty Two Books: The Alphabet of the Doctrine of God

    Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus (347-420), referred to as Jerome in English, is one of the most significant figures in the history of the reception of the Bible. In an age not known for polyglots, Jerome was a vir trilinguis who translated from Greek to Latin and, his crowning achievement, from Hebrew to Latin. The Christian movement of the first centuries was gifted with no greater scholar of Hebrew. 

World Youth Day in Madrid

    World Christianity is a complex animal. So, of course, is world Judaism. Liberal formations matter less and less whereas evangelical Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism and even evangelical Judaism are surging. In order to understand why that is, it is essential to grasp something of the social and spiritual dynamics of events such as World Youth Day, which took place in Madrid this summer and counted 2 million participants. A Catholic event of the first order, it is a “We are the World” event. And who can say, with more authority than the Catholic Church, that “we are the world”? How does World Youth day “feel” in western Europe, a secularized region in the throes of re-enchantment?

Bertold Brecht’s Solution to the Current Crisis

    One of the things I miss at the moment is not having among my current face friends someone who is head over heels for Brecht. You have to be seriously messed up in a deep and ultimately positive way to appreciate Brecht. I cannot remember a time in which trust in government has been so low. Brecht’s famous poem, the allusions of which are obscure and somehow palpable at the same time 60 years later, is worth quoting and re-translating in our context. Suffice it to say that Brecht alludes to the Uprising of_1953_in_East_Germany.

Remembering Eugene Nida (1914-2011)

    Eugene Nida is a towering figure in the history of Bible translation. In good ways and bad, few people more than Nida impacted the way the Bible is “received” in the modern world – in what guise and in what form. Scholars of biblical literature are ignorant at their own peril of the contribution of Nida to the history of reception of the literature they study. After all, people read the Bible in translation. Biblical scholars do too, I’ve noticed, though they prefer literal translations, because they are “transparent to” the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek - i.e., said translations serve as crutches for those whose command of the biblical languages is weak.

Chris Heard’s Million-Dollar Questions

    Chris Heard asks a number of excellent questions, not just of those of us who teach introductory classes in biblical literature to university students, but of anyone inclined to read the Bible as a corpus crisscrossed by common themes and recurrent answers to life’s fundamental questions - even if some of the answers come in the form of questions left open with great stubbornness. Here is Chris Heard’s first question: What are the seven most important Old Testament events/characters about which undergraduates (mostly first-year students) should learn in an introductory class? Below the fold, an off-the-cuff answer. I limit myself to three persons of interest.

Why they teach biblical literature at MIT and Yale

    Courses in biblical literature are increasingly available at community, technical, liberal arts colleges, and state universities across the English-speaking world. It is understood that the ability to interpret and interact with biblical literature and the history of its reception are essential skills of the well-equipped mind. Why? The Bible, whether or not one thinks of it as a resource for life today, is one of the main sources of our civilization. If you don’t know your way around the Bible, you don’t know your way around a perennial wellspring of your own culture.

Anna’s vacation: “I have everything I need”

    Ben Myers (of “Read more Barth, you b*****s!” fame) has a new set of online digs: the link. His inaugural post: reflections of his son James’ fear of rats. The post made me think of the very different words of my daughter Anna, now 8, on vacation on the Italian Riviera, at la casa valdese in Vallecrosia to be exact. She is there with her mamma helping her nonni move from Genova to their new home. Over two hundred boxes of books to move! Anna hasn't watched television, answered a phone, spoken in English, or eaten fast food or junk food for 14 days now. But she is happy and serene, with new found friends her age from France and Italy. “I have everything I need,” she says. Salt, sun, and sand. Slow food over thanksgiving. Family and friends. Yes, Anna, you have everything you need.

the wounds of the past that never heal

    Another great Italian film is about to come out: Ruggine. A great sound track, too. It’s not only because Valeria Solarino stars in it, though that doesn’t hurt. It’s the subject matter: the wounds of the past that never heal. They are so important because they are so determining.

    The most salient passage in the Bible evokes the Tree of Life of the Garden of Eden, re-situates it in the new heavens and the new earth, and says, “the leaves of the Tree are for the healing of the nations … nothing accursed will be there anymore” (Rev 22:2-3). The burden of apocalyptic literature is that of providing an alternative to the reflex of returning to the scene of the crime. Better said, the scene of the crime is evoked in the most universal of terms, and then transcended in the most universal of terms.

Free Porn brought to you by PETA

    Lindsay Beyerstein just wrote a post entitled: I’ve always said that PETA should be called “Pornographers for the ethical treatment of animals”. Is PETA really into porn?

Will the real N T Wrong please stand up?

    I noticed this morning that someone accessed a post on this blog from a blog I thought was no longer available: Emerging from Babel. Its successor blog, to my surprise, is also (again?) available, now titled: all songs lead back t’ the sea. Imagine my surprise to discover that the author of these blogs now is: ntWrong. The man gets around.