Ancient Hebrew Poetry

Vigil: The Intertexts of a Poem by Jennifer Agee (Part 4)

“Vigil”

The evening and the morning are the first day. After darkness and the silence of God in the death of Jesus Christ, a new day breaks and the shadows flee away. The light shines on a great mountain that fills the new earth. The light gleams green in the garden of God and blazes on the healing leaves of the tree of life. The first Word in the new creation is a voice that speaks our own name. And all the children of God will shout for joy.

 

Canons of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament

Judaism is a religion of the book. When and where did that begin to be the case? The various historic Christian churches treasure various collections of Jewish writings. Why is that?

A collection of authoritative religious texts may have begun to be assembled early, in the 6th century BCE, among Judahite refugees in Babylon. By the 2nd century BCE, the development of a canon of authoritative texts was in full swing among those who saw themselves as heirs to the promises that are found in the Torah, the Prophets, and David. 

In the first centuries of the current era, across the lands and languages of the countries in which first Jews and then Jews and Christians resided, the inner core but not the outer edges of a canonical collection to which all might appeal was widely acknowledged.

This meant that when Jews of diverse provenance became Christians they brought with them the collection of texts their community of origin treasured.

Some collections were more extensive than others. To this day, therefore, an Old Testament canon of identical breadth is not found among Christians. At the same time, a common core is readily identifiable: the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings of rabbinic fame, identical to the Old Testament as defined by the churches of the Reformation.

For a brief introduction to the canon of the Hebrew Bible and three historic canons of the Old Testament, go here.

On the Inexorable Decline of the Study of Religion in Secular Institutions

Every individual situation is different, the solutions to many problems are complex, the responsibility for the way things are should be parceled out in several directions, and boy do things stink. 

But I am still left wondering. From the point of view of a prevailing viewpoint in academia that sees religion as a needless accessory at best and an off-putting accessory at worst - I am left wondering why religion should be studied in the first place.

Abide with Me

    The events of Holy Week sound the depths of human existence. Helplessness and sacrifice, patience in tribulation, despair and hope, sit side by side.

    One poem above all others captures the combination. Henry Francis Lyte wrote it in 1847 and set it to music while he lay dying of tuberculosis.

Vigil: The Intertexts of a Poem by Jennifer Agee (Part 3)

“Vigil”

This God loves and redeems all creation. This God says, Look, I make all things new. This God plucks us from the waters of chaos and sets us on the Living Rock.

Vigil: The Intertexts of a Poem by Jennifer Agee (Part 2)

“Vigil”

    Our God is the Living Word who calls into existence the things that are not and endows them with the joy and power and complexity of being. Nebula and neuron, quark and quasar, moon and mountain, snowflake and Serengeti, cherubim and chlorophyll: All that is, seen and unseen, known and unknowable.

Vigil: The Intertexts of a Poem by Jennifer Agee (Part 1)

“Vigil”

    We have seen the labor pains of creation. From the Spirit’s swirling storm on the face of the abyss, to the burning light of the supernovas that forge every element; from the earthquakes and volcanoes that quicken our planet, to the crashing waters that draw us down into death.                                

Martin Luther on the value of learning Hebrew and Greek

Martin Luther (1483-1546), the great reformer who helped birth a revolution of mind and heart and polity and language, set German culture on a new trajectory by translating Scripture in Hebrew and Greek into the vernacular of the people. Luther’s translation of the Bible, the classical text of Western culture, embodied and gave birth to a Schriftsprache in German—a German literary language; more essentially, a choice of word stock that ever since has seemed suited to written communication and to theological discourse in the German language. 

Luther's decision to return to the Hebrew and Greek of the Old and New Testaments redirected the church and its institutions to its primary sources of knowledge and wisdom, to Sacred Scripture in the Hebrew tongue of the prophets and in the Greek tongue of the apostles. Scripture had always been understood by the doctors of the church to be "norma normans," the norm which norms all other norms.

Scripture with the Reformation came to have a renewed influence on life and practice and the making of theology. The supportive role of Scripture in philosophy, law, literature, and sacred music was reinvigorated. Luther came to understand God as the God of grace as opposed to a God of unrelenting judgment thanks to reading the Psalms in Hebrew, and Luther counted the Hebrew language above all as worthy of praise. Some key quotes:

The Greeks express themselves with the best and most delightful words, 
but the Hebrew language shines with such simplicity and majesty 
that it cannot be imitated. 

In Latin:

Graeci optimis et suavissimis verbis locuti sunt, 
Hebrea autem lingua tali simplicitate et maiestate floret,
    ut imitari non possit.

- from Luther's "Table Talk," 1532, as recorded by C. Cordatus.   

Against all odds, Luther succeeded in giving Hebrew and Greek pride of place in the learned transmission of the Christian faith. Scripture came to be studied in the original languages as part of a larger "return to the sources," a feature of both the Renaissance and the Reformation.  A key quote:

The Hebrew language is held of little account because of a lack of dutifulness
or perhaps out of despair at its difficulty ... 

Without this language there can be no understanding of Scripture, 
for the selfsame New Testament, 
though written in Greek, 
is full of Hebraisms.

Therefore it has been correctly said: 

The Jews drink from springs, 
the Greeks from rivulets, 
the Romans, from puddles.

In Latin:

Ebrea lingua per impietatem tota contemnitur 
aut forte desperatione artis … 
Sine hac lingua nulla potest esse cognitio Scripturae, nam et novum testamentum, quantumvis sit Graece scriptum, tamen plenum est hebraismis.
ideo recte dixerunt, 
Ebreos ex fontibus bibere, Graecos ex rivulis, Latinos autem ex lacunis.

- from Luther's "Table Talk," Aug 9 1532, as recorded by C. Cordatus. 

Luther gave much attention to language as the means by which truth is communicated. His translation of the Latin Mass into German illustrates this conviction. Key quotes:

And let us be sure of this: we shall not long preserve the Gospel without languages. Languages¹ are the sheath in which this sword of the Spirit is contained. They are the case in which we carry this jewel. They are the vessel in which we hold this wine. They are the larder in which this food is stored. And, as the Gospel itself says, they are the baskets in which we bear these loaves and fishes and fragments. 

In German:

Und laßt uns das gesagt sein, daß wir das Evangelion nicht wohl werden erhalten ohn die Sprachen. Die Sprachen sind die Scheiden, darin dies Messer des Geists stickt. Sie sind der Schrein, darinnen man dies Kleinod trägt. Sie sind das Gefäß, darinnen man diesen Trank fasset. Sie sind die Kemnot, darinnen diese Speise liegt. Und wie das Evangelion selbs zeigt: Sie sind die Körbe, darinnen man diese Brot und Fische und Brocken behält'. 

For we cannot deny that, though the Gospel has come and comes every day through the Holy Spirit alone, it is through the instrument of languages² that it has come and has increased, and must also be preserved by them.

In German:

Denn das konnen wir nicht leugen, daß, wiewohl das Evangelion allein durch den Heiligen Geist ist kommen und täglich kommt, so ist's doch durch Mittel der Sprachen kommen und hat auch dadurch zugenommen, muß auch dadurch behalten werden. 

- from Luther's "To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany, 1524.

Luther was a flawed historical figure with shortcomings that grew over the course of his life.  He was nonetheless responsible for an intellectual and spiritual revolution of the highest order the value of which transcends his limitations. 

¹ Not just Hebrew and Greek, but Latin and German and all other languages, each of which, according to Luther, is sanctified by its use in proclaiming God’s Word.
² Hebrew and Greek, but also, Latin and German and all other languages by which the Gospel is proclaimed. 

For a recent introduction to Martin Luther, see the essays on various aspects of his life and work in The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther, ed. Donald McKim, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. For a superb introduction to Luther as translator and as translator of Hebrew, see Franz Rosenzweig, “Scripture and Luther,” in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzwieg, Scripture and Translation (tr. Laurence Rosenwald with Everett Fox;  Indiana Studies in Biblical Literarure, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) 47-69; the German original of R’s essay is found together with discussion in Luther, Rosenzweig und die Schrift: Ein deutsch-jüdischer Dialog. Essays von Franz Rosenzweig »Die Schrift und Luther«: Lambert Schneider/ Berlin, 1926 (ed. Micha Brumlik; Hamburg: CEP Europäische Verlagsanstalt GmbH, ebook-Ausgabe 2017). For a clear-eyed summary of Luther’s anti-Semitic views in historical context, see the article on “Luther” by Joseph Elijah Heller and B. Mordechai Ansbacher in the second edition of Encyclopaedia Judaica (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007) 13:272-73.  

The Sense of an Ending at the Conclusion of the Book of Joshua

    According to Robert Alter, the ending of the book of Joshua preserved in the Septuagint is more compelling than the ending preserved in the Masoretic text (Ancient Israel [New York: Norton, 2013] 102 - I review the volume here). The verses in question: Josh 24:29-33.

A True Believer makes a Great Lover

    “A believer, after all, is someone in love; of all those in love, the most in love.”¹ 

A Conference on the Pentateuch in May at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

    The academic study of the Pentateuch appears to be in the throes of a losing battle with the forces of entropy. Once upon a time, there was wide agreement about JEDP. No more. Will Humpty-Dumpty ever be put back together again?

Adoration of the Magi

The artist: Dr. He Qi, a professor at the Nanjing Union Theological Seminary and a tutor for master candidate students in the Philosophy Department of Nanjing University. He is also a member of the China Art Association and a council member of the Asian Christian Art Association. The image is copied from the database of Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.

2012 Family Newsletter

Reviewing Books Online and the Need for an Industry Standard

    The paper I plan to present on Saturday at the SBL meeting in Chicago is the following: The Advantages of Reviewing Books Online and the Need for an Industry Standard. It builds on earlier blog posts and online conversations. Enjoy!

A Paper for Hebrew Grammar Geeks

    The paper I plan to present on Monday at the SBL meeting in Chicago is the following: The use of kî at the boundary between quotative frame and quotation in ancient Hebrew. It builds on earlier blog posts and online conversations. Enjoy!

Election Results: A View from Wisconsin

How last night looks to an independent in a swing state: despite herculean efforts on the part of both parties to polarize the electorate, the vote trended purple, not red, not blue. 

Most elections went to the incumbent, including the presidency. The Democrats have a couple more US senators; the Republicans retain a solid majority in the House. Republicans now occupy 30 governors' mansions across the nation, a pickup of one. 

The Democrats held on to one US Senator slot in Wisconsin, after losing the other in 2010. In the same state, the Republicans once again won 5 out of 8 contests in the US House of Representatives. At the state level, Republicans solidified their control of all three branches of government. 

My advice to Democrats: give us the same old same old, and the country may well shift decisively in the other direction in 2014, as it did in 2010. Assuming, of course, that the GOP learns to field credible candidates, rather than has-beens like Tommy Thompson and nutcases like Akin and Mourdock.

My advice to Republicans: stop believing your own sad rhetoric about the 47%. Misanthropes deserve to lose elections.

My advice to Republican friends who consider the Bible to be the quintessential rule of faith and practice: take Psalm 72 to heart, and start making a case for smart government, not: the less government, the better. 

Time to start blogging again

   As I complete work on the papers I am presenting at SBL in Chicago this month, I will post accordingly.

Sikh and You Shall Find

    Amardeep Kaleka is praying (see picture below). His father, Satwant Kaleka, the president of a Sikh temple near Milwaukee was shot by a man whose motives are not yet clear. Amardeep’s father, we now know, did not make it.

    Prayer is one of the most universal human gestures. You can even be a deist like Albert Einstein, who believed in God but not in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (a God who joins himself to a particular people), and still imagine that there is a dimension of the mind, a noosphere, which connects us all immaterially and in which change for the good or the bad is possible.

    Even if Einstein did not so imagine, but believed more modestly that sympathy is the first and most important foundation of ethical behavior, he might well have understood that prayer is an expression of sympathy, to be greatly prized even by those who cannot bring themselves to pray.

    The question worth pondering: is Spinoza's God in whom Einstein so ardently believed like a brain as Einstein was wont to think of a brain, a muscle with no personality, or is Spinoza’s God a brain as we now know it to be, a place in which beliefs, data, and emotions are processed and combined?

    Since intelligence is a place like the latter, and interactive by nature, the conclusion is inescapable: prayer is a supremely logical gesture.

Background reading from Scripture: Jonah 1 (God answers the prayers of "pagans"); Matthew 7:7-10 (the sympathy of a fatherly God). Background reading in Einstein:

I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world. [Einstein, Albert; Calaprice, Alice. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (p. 325). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.]

To [the sphere of religion] belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. [Einstein, Albert; Calaprice, Alice. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (p. 334). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.]

A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt about the significance of those super-personal objects and goals that neither require nor are capable of rational foundation. [Einstein, Albert; Calaprice, Alice. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (pp. 334-335). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.] Einstein, it is fair to say, was frum in the sense he defines.

A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectively on sympathy, education, and social relationships. [Einstein, Albert; Calaprice, Alice. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (p. 328). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.]

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. [Einstein as quoted in Jerry Mayer's Bite-Size Einstein (p. 25). The quote is unsourced. It is consistent with other things Einstein said, but that does not mean the quote is his. I cite it with reservations. Regardless, we now know that the brain is far more than an elaborate computer. Belief and emotion, not to mention the powers of which Paul speaks – faith, hope, and love – are the fuel on which the brain runs.]

Larry Hurtado’s Groundrules

    Larry Hurtado is an eminent scholar of Christian origins. He has made a strong contribution to the world of biblical blogging in the last two years.  His recent post about groundrules for comments on his blog is spot on. He makes the following invitation to potential commenters: “if all you want to do is vent your pet view, and aren’t interested in engaging the data, learning from those with the expertise in the subject (which can certainly involve asking for the reasons for a given view), then I politely invite you to go elsewhere.”

Gender Representation in Ancient Hebrew

    David E. S. Stein is a careful researcher of gender representation in ancient Hebrew. He has published a number of ground-breaking articles in the field. He is also well-known for his  gender-sensitive adaptation of the NJPS translation of the Torah , which I discuss here, here, and note this as well. He just presented at a NAPH meeting on the subject: I link to a video slide version of the presentation below. In a series of posts, I will reproduce and interact with David's responses to a few pointed questions I threw into his lap. 

Q #1: If I boarded the elevator in the lobby of the Empire State Building, and rode to the 80th floor with a fellow Hebrew scholar who asked me to state the rules of usage that apply to the use of grammatical gender in ancient Hebrew, I would say the following in the 45 seconds at my disposal. (1) If the subject or subjects of a verb are exclusively masculine, the gender of the verb must also be masculine. (2) If the subject or subjects are feminine, the gender of the verb must also be feminine. (3) If the subject or subjects of a verb comprise masculine and feminine of a given species, the gender of the verb will be masculine, unless the verb has an explicit compound subject in which one of these subjects is to be spotlighted, in which case the gender and number of the verb will agree with the subject to be spotlighted, not the gender and number of the compound subject. (4) If the grammatical gender of a noun is feminine, but the social gender of the referent subject is masculine, the gender of the verb will be masculine. (5) I can't think of any examples offhand of the opposite, in which the gender of the noun is masculine, but the social gender of the referent subject is feminine. 

You will notice that I haven't used up my entire 45 seconds. What would you add to the above? Where do the above statements stand in need of correction? 

    Here are David’s first seven responses to this question (more to follow):

Why did James Holmes do it?

    Why did James Holmes do it? Why did he plan and execute a massacre of innocent people? 

give me that old time religion – a response to Rich Rhodes

    Richard Rhodes is a linguist who teaches at the University of California-Berkeley. He blogs at Better Bibles. His last BBB post touches on a number of great topics: representation of gender in Greek and English; differences in style across the components of the New Testament; “natural English” as the way to go if we are to have better Bibles in English. Though this post is just an excuse for me to link to Johnny Cash singing “give me that old time religion,” before I offer the link, I will take issue with some of Rich’s claims.

Innovative Methods of Teaching Hebrew

What if we were to teach ancient Hebrew according to the method explained below? I can think of many lines in the Bible that would be suitable as graffiti. I want to write a textbook of ancient Hebrew that showcases the language of politics and culture of the Bible.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/world/middleeast/learning-hebrew-on-the-streets-with-walls-as-assigned-reading.html

The Bible and the Contingencies of History: John Barton nails it

    In a recent post, Joseph Kelly cites John Barton to excellent effect: “Those who hold that nothing of religious importance can hang on the contingencies of history are supposed to be the people who are really serious about theology. Precisely the opposite is the case; for theology is not a game played among those already in a charmed circle, but a set of assertions about the way things really are.”

Voting early and often in Wisconsin

    To recall or not to recall. That is the question. A surreal calm cast its shadow over the cheesehead state this morning as crowds of people gathered at polling places at 7 am to cast a ballot. At my polling place, the only voting machine that was operational was a single infamous Diebold touch screen. Most people in my neck of the woods prefer to cast a paper ballot, but the machine into which you feed your paper ballot in order to verify that your vote has been counted was down. What chaos.