Ancient Hebrew Poetry

Key Background Information on the Kh. Qeiyafa Inscription

In a guest post over at Jim West’s place, Barnea Selevan of Foundation Stone, a financial sponsor of the ongoing excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, notes the following:

The point many miss is that the huge city itself [Khirbet Qeiyafa] is mute testament to a polity, to a government. Dating of the pottery has a huge consensus that it is the 10th century even without the olive pits [dated by C-14 to 1050-970 BCE]. Israel [Finkelstein, a famous low chronologist whose hypotheses minimalists like Jim West treat as manna from heaven] said, maybe it is Philistine? At an earlier session, excavators fresh from a summer of digging of Gath, Ashkelon, Timna; and earlier excavators of Ekron Timna and Lachish, agreed one after another, as Sy Gitin  [HUC-JIR] said, “this is not a coastal assemblage!” While Zvi [Lederman] and Shlomo [Bunimovitz] of TA  [Tel Aviv University] digging Bet Shemesh, nearby and also in Judah, said, “This is like our Level II to IV, early Iron Age.”

The above evidence is the reason the inscription is so important, regardless of what the inscription says, though the fact that it includes phrases and words like אל תעש , עבד, שפט and מלך is telling.

A Great New Blog for Students of Hebrew and Greek

Here is the link. It’s called Hebrew and Greek Reader, by two of the nicest people in the world, Daniel and Tonya. The blog radiates a love for the languages and a love for teaching. I recommend the blog to people who are learning the languages of the Bible.

For example, the discussion of the Hebrew of Psalm 136:1-3 (go here) is to the point and does not assume (as I do when I talk about things) that you already know Hebrew. The blog is meant for those who are learning Hebrew and Greek. If that is your situation, go over and ask Daniel and Tonya some pointed questions. You are likely to get some excellent feedback.

The End of Minimalism as We Know It

That’s how important the finds from Khirbet Qeiyafa appear to be: as announcing the end of minimalism as we know it. That is, the C-14 dates, pottery, inscription, and other data so far alluded to in news accounts are strong prima facie evidence in favor of the high chronology, the essential historicity of the reigns of David and Solomon, and a relatively high degree of literacy at that date.

The Joys of Being “Very Conservative”

N. T. Wrong is having a grand old time putting people on a conservative – liberal spectrum. Go here. There are some real howlers, like:

McCain versus Obama: Why the Election is so Close

The Rasmussen Daily National Tracking Poll today puts McCain within 5 percentage points of Obama. The race has tightened. This is a surprising fact.

Given eight years of a Republican presidency which has dissatisfied Republicans almost as much as Independents and Democrats, given an economy in freefall, wars in progress in Afghanistan and Iraq, and one corruption scandal after another which have featured Republicans ( - and Democrats, but they have not enjoyed power in Congress until recently, so are held to a different standard), the Democrat presidential ticket ought to be doing far better than it is.

Shouldn’t this election be a game-changer on a par with the 1980 presidential election, in which the Reagan-Bush ticket won in a landslide over the Carter-Mondale ticket? Here are two reasons why this election may turn out to be different.

NLTSB and ESVSB on Psalm 2 (Part 2)

As noted in a previous post, exegetes basically fall into two categories: (1) those who seek to elucidate the historical sense of a text based on the text itself and what is known about the putative life and times in which the text was written; (2) those who seek to elucidate the sense a text has in light of an overarching Jewish or Christian narrative formulated long a which the text itself does not presuppose.

On the part of a single scholar, an unwavering commitment to both kinds of textual elucidation is rare. In the case of Psalm 2, C. John Collins (for ESVSB) and Willem VanGemeren (for NLTSB) privilege in their notes a christological reading. Indeed, their notes seem to imply that the text makes no sense except on that reading.

On Psalm 2, Collins in the ESVSB comments as follows:

On the Importance of Taking the Bible Literally

The world created by biblical bloggers is chock full of interesting conversation. But it is too vast and variegated for any one person to keep up with. In the midst of other obligations, I sometimes find, almost by accident, a pearl of great price in the midst of much that is not. It is no different when I pick up and read a scientific journal in the field. The difference is that, in the case of more academic publications, the “much that is not” is often very long-winded and for that reason a more painful waste of time.

One example of a finely written post I just ran across is by N. T. Wrong entitled “James Barr advises Christians and Scholars to Take the Bible Literally.” He quotes Barr as follows:

The Historical Sense and Retrospective Reading of the Old Testament: Key Graphs from a Pontifical Biblical Commission Document

In the last dated post on his late, lamented and perhaps soon-to-be-resurrected blog, Iyov reproduces a translation of a recent executive summary by Cardinal Vanhoye of a document prepared in 2001 by the Pontifical Biblical Commission entitled: Le peuple Juif et ses Saintes Écritures dans la Bible Chrétienne. Vanhoye in 2001 was Secretary of the Commission. The document in its entirety is available here. In English, with the title: The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, here. However, the English contains a number of translational errors (go here for an exposé by Charles H. Miller).

The Document makes an excellent case for the view that Jewish and Christian readings of the Hebrew Bible are on a par in the sense that – as I would phrase it - each tradition retains (not without subtraction on a practical level) and transcends the biblical content by way of interpretation which is organic, deductive, and additive in terms of preservative supplementation.

Here are some key graphs from paragraph 21, which I reproduce first in French for the sake of clarity, and then in English translation (my own) – the numbering I provide is simply for convenience:

The ESV and NLT Study Bibles on Psalm 2: A Comparison (Part 1)

As I noted in my introduction to this review series, the ESV and NLT Study Bibles do not always do a credible job of distinguishing between historical exegesis and christological exegesis of the Old Testament. This is not a minor detail. In the case of Psalm 2, the distinction is maintained in NLT  (that is, a christological reading of the text does not make its appearance in translation), but not in the comment to it in NLTSB. For its part, ESV expresses a theological agenda foreign to the historical sense of Psalm 2 by capitalizing “Son” in 2:12, as Jim Getz and I have pointed out in the past. The comment in ESVSB continues on that trajectory, which would not be objectionable if the historical sense of the psalm were also explicated for its own sake.

In brief, the comment in both NLTSB and ESVSB mixes and matches the historical plain-sense and christological levels in a way I would have thought no longer acceptable in the wake of evangelical commentaries like that of Peter Craigie. I will exemplify in a future post. Below the fold, I discuss the situation in more general terms, and talk about excursuses in NLTSB and the lack thereof in ESVSB.

New Light on Ben Sira 6:14

Thanks to the discovery of four additional pages of ms C, a remix of selected contents of Hebrew Ben Sira, it is possible to explore the history of the משל בינה ‘keen saying’ preserved in Ben Sira 6:14, and reconstruct its original wording with more confidence.

My goal in this post is to show how rewarding text-critical study of ancient Hebrew poetry can be. The study of the prosodic regularities ancient Hebrew poetry instantiates is very important. That remains my research focus. But the text of a line of ancient Hebrew poetry has to be established first, down to the last yodh and heh.