Ancient Hebrew Poetry

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:

Robert Kawashima one-ups Seth Sanders

    Robert Kawashima’s review of Seth Sanders “The Invention of Hebrew” concisely captures a central thesis of the monograph:

Why biblical literature resists translation

    My friend Wayne Leman over at Better Bibles encouraged me not long ago to describe the theoretical foundations that undergird my take on Bible translation, since I often find myself at loggerheads with the Better Bibles board of directors, to a man well-trained in linguistics, to a man enamored with translations committed to clarity and naturalness of expression, whereas I prefer translations committed above all to reproducing the wording and register of the original, translating metaphors with metaphors, and sounding strange wherever the thought and language of the source text is strange relative to our cultural matrix.

Comparative Ethnogenesis: “Ancient” Lesotho versus Ancient Israel

Ethnogenesis depends on the production of polity markers. Polity markers are invented and cultivated through a process of differentiation in which boundaries that are blurry to begin with are heightened and reinforced. Boundaries come in many flavors: political, linguistic, religious and geographical; differences in diet, dress, house plan; gender complementation, and style of burial; differences in religion, law, and the way technologies like writing are used.

Hobbes and the Authority of Scripture

One of the great strengths of Sanders’ The Invention of Hebrew is his engagement with early modern thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke. For example, it is of extraordinary interest to re-pose the question of the authority of Scripture in Hobbesian terms, read the ensuing history of the debate on the subject in that light, and tie up loose ends all over again.

Seth Sanders and the historical uniqueness of the biblical mode of address

The Bible’s mode of address, Seth Sanders emphasizes, “assumes participation in a polity that spans time and space” (2009:35). Apart from the mediation of king or priest, in the name of a deity who speaks through “his servants the prophets,” it calls into being a collective “you” and lays specific claims upon it. Arguably enough, the Bible survives to this day in an unbroken stream of authority-bearing and authority-creating tradition precisely because of its uniquely generative mode of address. On this understanding, when it comes to Hebrew, it is not at all the case, as van der Toorn suggests, that “scribes wrote for scribes” (2007:2; quoted by Sanders 2009:9). Hebrew scribes wrote not for themselves but for a polity of which they were a part. They were publicists whose writings are studded with a collective "you" addressee. As such, the writings are pregnant with a people yet unborn.

The Political Creativity of the Bible: Seth Sanders' The Invention of Hebrew

Seth Sanders’ central thesis is that the Bible, from the viewpoint of political theory and linguistic anthropology, is a powerfully innovative text. The Bible’s power resides in its mode of address, which is politically creative in the foundational sense: it calls into being an autonomous polity that spans time and space. Its law, ritual, and exhortation address a collective “you” and create that “you” in so doing. The privileging of a mode of address in which deity constitutes a “you” that spans time and space was a radically innovative act in blatant opposition to the genres of power of the empires of its day.

On this understanding, the Bible was and is a post-colonial project of massive proportions. It allowed and allows those who place themselves under its authority – I choose my words carefully; they are not identical to those of Sanders – to constitute themselves as an autonomous polity, with the wherewithal to recast, dissent from, and re-establish on new foundations the scope and limits of political actors both within and without.