Ancient Hebrew Poetry

Updating Charles Halton’s CV: his review of Carol Meyers’ Households and Holiness: The Religious Culture of Israelite Women

Charles Halton is one of my favorite bloggers. I imagine he is busy right now, and will return to blogging as the occasion permits. I’m busy, too, but I have a habit of reading JNES that spans decades – for starters, Dennis Pardee’s reviews are always worth reading. Halton, as his CV demonstrates, is an inveterate reviewer of fine scholarship. But he hasn’t updated his CV recently, so I will. It is worth reviewing his review of a volume by Carol L. Meyers, Households and Holiness: The Religious Culture of Israelite Women (Facets; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), a review found in JNES 69 (2010) 116-117.

Starting in a New Place

I have started in a new place as a pastor. It will take me a bit to catch my breath and get my blogging groove back. I read a lot of Hebrew and scholarship and much more every day, don't get me wrong. But I haven't found slots yet to reflect on what I do as I put research, writing, and pastoral responsibilities together.

In any human venue, any "family system," I'm convinced that catharsis is always needed, which means that laughter is essential. And let the tears roll like a mighty stream. I am against the current fashion of being deathly dour in our analyses, whether it be of the academe or of synagogue and church. At least we need to mix our doom and gloom with the conviction that we are called to be prisoners of hope. Why not try to get people's goat a bit more, surprise them with honesty, candor, and self-deprecation? Below the jump, an example of what I mean (a newsletter article for the church I pastor: the language used is specific to that discursive universe).

The Amarna Tablets – and Jerusalem Tablet 1 - are right after all

As Nadav Na’aman put it in a recent BAR article, “the Amarna letters . . . provide a critical corrective to the archaeological picture” excavations offer (“The Trowel vs. the Text: How the Amarna Letters Challenge Archaeology,” BAR 35/1 [Jan/Feb 2009] 52-56, 70). As Na’aman also points out, the converse is likewise true: archaeological data, soberly interpreted, allow text scholars to better understand the texts they study.

The title of this post is a take-off on a journalistic phrase – that of Werner Keller: Und die Bibel hat doch recht. “The Bible is right after all.” Keller was correct to give the ancient texts the benefit of the doubt, though not in the sense people often imagine. For example, it is not the case that the Flood Narrative in Genesis 6-9 should be read in the same way we might a news report about the flooding of New Orleans after a hurricane. Scholars who do so, or egg on those who do, are doing a disservice to the texts themselves.

Rather, ancient texts, including the Bible, are “right” almost by definition, so long as we interpret them in accordance with the genre expectations, sociolinguistic register, and rhetorical strategy they instantiate. To be sure, it’s always possible to quarrel with the ultimate truth claims of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Bible, and the Aeneid. If you quarrel with one, you will probably quarrel with all the others. The alternative: take them all seriously, on the model of Amos 9:7.

The Blog Storm on the Cuneiform Tablet Fragment Discovered in Jerusalem

The very fine editio princeps of a Late Bronze Age cuneiform tablet fragment found in Iron Age fill on Mt. Ophel in Jerusalem and published in the Israel Exploration Journal (if you wish to have a PDF of the article, email me to that effect) has touched off a blog storm of informed comment. Below the jump, a roundup and comments of my own.

A Cautionary Note on the Report of the Discovery of a Synagogue in Galilee

Why is biblical archaeology in the broad sense – W. F. Albright’s “From the Stone Age to Christianity” – alive and well? Because that curious band of highly gifted and intelligent people who choose to study theology and Bible, some of whom go on to teach Religious Studies in the world’s best universities, specialize in the archaeology of the Levant or some other part of the Ancient Near East, and/or concentrate on one or more ancient languages and literatures, continue to design and execute projects of exquisite archaeological and historical significance. An example: The Kinneret Regional Project, a joint project of the Universities of Bern, Mainz, Leiden, and Helsinki. It is staffed each excavation season by 30 volunteers, mostly students of theology, religious studies and archaeology from the Netherlands, Finland, and Switzerland, but also, Romania, Belgium, Spain, Israel, and Germany. For a photo album that puts BAR to shame, go here. Pop quiz for students of Hebrew Bible: can you pick out Martti Nissinen among the photos? That’s him in more than one picture. For a fantastic collection of aerial photos, go here.

Larry Hurtado is a now a blogger

Larry Hurtado's blog is a place to look for critical analysis and something of Hurtado's own contributions to the study of earliest Christianity. Hurtado is Professor of New Testament Language, Literature & Theology at the University of Edinburgh. I remember him as an excellent teacher who modeled the intersection of faith and reason in a challenging and constructive way. For memories, go here. I know him now as one of the leading NT scholars of this century.