Ancient Hebrew Poetry

Biblical Studies Carnival XXXII Part One

Captain’s Log. Stardate 8.01.08. Starship Enterprise. Cyberspace - the Final Frontier. A remote corner of the universe, thought by previous explorers to be virtually uninhabited, turns out to be teeming with life and energy. Biblical blogdom, as Lieutenant Commander Spock notes, contains its fair share of lower life forms. On rare occasions, the curve of his eyebrow has nevertheless suggested that intelligent forms of life may also be sighted, or at least cited, on roads less traveled by.

The biblical blogosphere now functions as a conveyor belt of top shelf information, and serves a purpose to which it is ideally suited whenever it highlights and reviews the growing number of online resources to which all future scholars will turn. It has become a place of great fun, where satire and humor raise hackles and deflate pretensions. It is an echo chamber of controversies that challenge the field of biblical studies and related disciplines, and beyond that, of synagogue and church. It is fast becoming a public record of controversies, a resource to which scholars will turn in the future when they write the history of these days. The number of excellent biblical blogs keeps on growing, as I pointed out a short while ago. Below the fold, I back up the above statements with copious examples from the past 31 days of biblical cyberspace, and, where necessary, from precedent months.

History isn’t bunk: it’s worse than bunk: Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus

No, it’s not all good. Good is born of evil; there are some goods that cannot be had except in the presence of evil: courage, patience, and sacrifice on behalf of another. But that does not make evil good.

Henry Ford observed, “History is bunk.” No, Mr. Ford, it’s worse than bunk. It is an ever-growing heap of wreckage piled up by an implacable wind, as the philosopher Walter Benjamin imagined. Benjamin begins by quoting a poem by Gershom Scholem in which a painting by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, is the focus:

A Libelous Truth

Peter Kirk is all upset because Doug Chaplin deleted a comment in which Peter said something that was nasty – and true – about a bishop of the communion to which they both belong: the Anglican communion. Peter seems to think that it is all right to defame a person so long as the defamation corresponds to fact. I disagree, but admit that it is a difficult topic.

Blogging about English Translations of the Bible

The Bible Translation Section of the Society of Biblical Literature is but one of a 100+ to schedule sessions at the Society’s Annual Meeting. The papers read, furthermore, often discuss non-English translations of the Bible, and/or delve into matters that require a thorough knowledge of the original language texts. It cannot be said that English translations of the Bible are the central research focus of the majority of SBL members.

The pros and cons of English translations of the Bible, on the other hand, is the favorite topic of a number of Bible bloggers. The single best post I have read on the Great Translation Circus was penned by a blogger who ranges widely, the inestimable iMonk (go here). He defends them all, from the Message to the NLT to the ESV. His defense of each of the three named translations is eloquent; that he has the ESV Study Bible on pre-order is indicative.

The forthcoming ESV Study Bible: An Interview with Contributor David Reimer

In a delightful interview courtesy of Andy Naselli over at Between Two Worlds, David Reimer explains his working method in writing the notes for ESVSB Ezekiel (scheduled to appear in October 2008) (go here). As does David, I remember the experience of sitting at Prof. John Wm Wevers' feet in his office in Toronto with some nostalgia, though I don’t remember the slippers. Since David notes that he composed his mini-commentary on Ezekiel on the basis of a triglot of Ezekiel (MT – ESV – LXX) and by working through the most important secondary literature, it will be interesting to see how he handles the text-critical issues Ezekiel poses.

Acting President Barack Obama and the Irony of History

Have we already elected Obama as President? Sometimes it seems that way. But let us not be fooled, Proverbs 21:1 expresses an incontrovertible truth:

פַּלְגֵי־מַיִם לֶב־מֶלֶךְ בְּיַד־יְהוָה

עַל־כָּל־אֲשֶׁר יַחְפֹּץ יַטֶּנּוּ

Channeled water is the mind of the king in the hand of יהוה ;
    he directs it wherever he will.

Whoever becomes President, Barack Obama or John McCain, he will not be the captain of his own destiny. The actions he takes, the adjustments he will make along the way, will be touched by irony over and over again. For a first list of such ironies by Walter Russell Mead, an excellent political historian, go here. For an account of a newly discovered Messianic oracle which suggests that this post of mine is totally off-base, go here.

For an excerpt from Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, and a Barack Obama quote referring to him as “one of my favorite philosophers,” go here. For a discussion of Tolstoy’s deployment of Proverbs 21:1 in the context of his philosophy of history, go here.

 

Christians and Jews in Late Roman Antiquity

The last one hundred years of human history have to count as the bloodiest and most hateful the world has ever seen. The horrors and holocausts of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot, the live-and-let-die complicities that allow the likes of Radovan Karadzic, Charles Taylor, and Robert Mugabe to perpetrate their deeds of darkness, the mass resentments each of these figures stoked and leveraged for their own ends, the apparently inescapable moral reasoning that justified retaliatory violence in response, from the fire-bombing of Dresden to the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the religio-ethnic cleansings that continue to uproot and destroy house and home of hundreds of thousands of people on an almost annual basis – all of these things make the practice of sitting in judgment of the hate-spewing ancients ludicrous and hypocritical. If only our culture was marked by the same restraint as ancient culture was.  

Codex Sinaiticus Online: A Review

Happy the one who has discovered Codex Sinaiticus online (HT James Davila: as often, James provides background links of interest)! To be sure, thanks to James Adair, reliable images of the pseudofacsimile of this very important manuscript of the Bible in Greek have long been available. But the website in development, thanks to a ground-breaking partnership between The British Library, UK, Leipzig University Library, Germany, St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai, and The National Library of Russia, St Petersburg, takes the cake. It sets a new standard of excellence. Below the fold, I describe its features and offer suggestions for improvement.

Scripture Memorization in the Original Languages

Discussion of translation issues continues to heat up the biblical blogosphere. As it should be. Most everyone I know, if they know the Bible at all, know it in the wording of the translation of their choice. Even if they studied the biblical languages, they cannot recall the text in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek, only in translation.

Psalm 8:6a in Hebrew and Greek: An Introduction

In the comment thread to a post by Suzanne, a number of people ask about the sense of the Hebrew idiom in Psalm 8:6a, and the sense of the corresponding idiom in the oldest translation of it, the Old Greek or Septuagint.

The Hebrew isn’t terribly difficult so long as one parses the syntax correctly. Compare the following texts and phrases, which I translate in concordant fashion for ease of comparison: