The N. T. Wrong Blog

What’s sexy in the latest Review of Biblical Literature?

Douglas R. Edwards and C. Thomas McCollough, editors, The Archaeology of Difference: Gender, Ethnicity, Class and the “Other” in Antiquity: Studies in Honor of Eric M. Meyers (2007)

The second of two Festschriften for Eric Meyers, following Religion and Society in Ancient Palestine. The first third of the collection covers the neolithic to Persian periods, while the second two-thirds covers the Hellenistic to Byzantine periods. How’s that for coverage? Amongst the 32 articles is “Ethnicity and the Archaeological Record: The Case for Early Israel” (William Dever), and in a different vein, something on linguistic variation by Raymond Person.

Avraham Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance (2007)

His theory on the ethnogenesis of Israel involves (1) settlement in the highlands versus Canaanites and Egyptians, primarily involving nomadic Shashu, (2) sharpening of ethnic identity through conflict with Philistines. Sounds familiar? Yes - it’s another Bible-paraphrase.

Jon L. Berquist, editor, Approaching Yehud: New Approaches to the Study of the Persian Period (2007)

The essays in this volume include a mixture of historiographic and literary approaches to the Persian period, now firmly established as the most productive period for the writing of texts which appear in the Hebrew Bible. Melody Knowles writes about pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Greek evidence; Richard Bautch writes about intertextuality; Donald Polaski examines inscriptions as sites of power; David Janzen examines Ezra 9-10 and mixed marriage; Christine Mitchell develops a Bakhtinian examination of the genre of historiography, with comparison to Greek historiography; Brent Strawn compares Isa 60 and the Apadana Relief from Persepolis; Jean-Pierre Ruiz makes a postcolonial reading of Ezekiel; John Kessler examines the golah in relation to demographic studies and Zech 1-8; Herbert Marbury examines Proverbs 7 in relation to Persian control; Jennifer Koosed reads Ecclesiastes via Derrida and Lacan; Jon Berquist introduces post-colonial considerations to the study of the function of the Psalms in the Second Temple period.

The first sessions of the day I went to were a bit ordinary, so I ducked unto the Book Review Session for Roland Boer’s Rescuing the Bible. This was a good move. George Aichele provided some excellent comments. He first questioned whether it is correct to say that the religious right had “stolen” the Bible (as Roland Boer had asserted), due to the fact that the very idea of a canon is intrinsically conservative. There can only be a “Bible” as long as we consider it authoritative. That is, the Bible would disappear if not considered authoritative. So, he reasoned, it is even impossible to say that the Bible can be taken “out of context”, to the contrary, the “Bible” is the context. What the Left should advocate, according to Aichele, is nothing less than the complete removal of the codex itself. And then he came out with this comment:

“The only good Bible is a dead Bible.”

George Aichele gave the example of The Brick Testament as a retelling of ‘biblical’ stories which manages to free the stories from their canonical context. The aim of the Left should be to reduce the Bible to a husk – reduce the Bible to the mere illusion of a book.

Aichele contrasted his view with those in the Left who want the Bible to act as canon, a venerated classic, to recover, as some have put it, “the dangerous memory of Jesus”. Such a view would try to rescue the radical bits, while failing to recognize the oppressive parts in which it is embedded.

George Aichele also questioned Boer’s advocation of a utopian socialist “myth” which should be aimed for, objecting that all myths are universalizing and totalitarian. Instead, with reference to Lyotard and Zipes, he advocated multiple fairy tales and fantasies rather than a single overbearing myth.

Aichele finished by pointing out that the motivation to be suspicious of the Bible’s contents is not something that derives from the Bible itself, but from outside, from a secular hermeneutical standpoint. If the motivation for suspicion were from the Bible, after all, we would have to be suspicious of that, too. Yet sometimes the Left has accepted the Right’s claim that we are not choosing our beliefs and actions, but we are “just following the Bible” (which, for the right means “just following the Bible” to oppress women, minorities, and homosexuals, encourage capitalism, etc, etc; for the Left means some illusory authentic radical core). Rather than rescuing the Bible, we therefore need to rescue people from the Bible.

Phew, eh?

Here’s Roland Boer in action:

Day one at the SBL International Congress produced some good papers. Here’s a few:

Jon Berquist gave a paper called ‘Identities and Empire: Historiographic Questions for the Deuteronomistic History in the Persian Period’. He made a comment about the tendency of scholars to interpret the DH ideology as future-oriented, imposing a remnant theology on the text. But such interpretations are based more on the Christian wish to identify with a messianic remnant community than with the text itself, which is more interested in present questions of identity and government.

Mark Brett (‘Identity as Commentary and Metacommentary’) emphasised the point that, while aspects of “nationalism” and “identity” are applicable to the ancient world, there are also some fundamental differences in the ways moderns and ancients view the world. He noted his upcoming book, ‘Decolonising God’, which will probably discuss this issue.

James Hoffmeier looked at 1 Samuel 17.54 (where David takes Goliath’s head to Jerusalem, then under Jebusite control, and puts Goliath’s armour in “his tent”). He interpreted the possessive in “his tent” as though the antecedent were Goliath. He then compared the desecration of the Philistine hero’s head with several late BA and early IA ancient Near Eastern accounts of people cutting off heads and carrying out other types of body desecration on defeated enemies, and displaying them sometimes at their god’s temple. It seemed that he was treating this story as though it were historical, which seems odd for a story about a giant. What’s more, almost everybody in history has desecrated their enemies’ bodies, so I very much doubt you can limit the parallels to the Bronze Age, unless you’ve already made up your mind only to select examples from this period.

David Gunn read excerpts from his favourite book from his childhood, the rip-snorting story, ‘Maori and Settler’ from the 1880s. (I don’t think David Gunn read it in the 1880s; that was just when it was published.) The children’s book alludes to Samson, and then seems to attribute a lot of Samson-like qualities to the novel’s hero, Mr Atherton. And those damn natives seem to take on the “treacherous” vixen Delilah role.

From The Skillful-and-Wise One, Mark S. Smith:

“Perhaps beause of its historical roots in theology, the field of Israelite religion (not to mention biblical studies generally) remains one that does not generate its own general theoretical contribution to the humanities or social sciences.”

- Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities in Ancient Israel. 2nd edn.; Grand Rapids & Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2002: xxx.

Is Mark S. Smith right?

“I personally wouldn’t be happy in the context of a believing community or any group that roughly knows the answers beforehand (we could parallel this sort of theology with forms of Marxism, Freudianism etc, could we not?).”
- James Crossley

Anthony Thistelton, relying on Gadamer, writes that readers must avoid “premature assimilation of perspective of text into the horizon of the reader”. The danger of such “premature assimilation” for Thistelton is that the event of interaction between reader and text might appear “uneventful, bland, routine, and entirely unremarkable”.

“Within the Christian community the reading of biblical texts often takes this uneventful and bland form. For the nature of the reading process is governed by horizons of expectation already pre-formed by the community of readers or by the individual. Preachers often draw from texts what they had already decided to say; congregations sometimes look to biblical readings only to affirm the community identity and life-style which they already enjoy.” ( p. 8 )

Thistelton then notes that this particular danger occurs, in much the same way, in radical reader-response theories — in which meaning is “wholly determined by community horizons”, inhibiting the creative dimension of the texts themselves.

Or as the late, great James Barr observed, any approach governed primarily by questions of (theological, marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, etc) utility “will inevitably corrupt its accuracy in representing the biblical material itself”.

- Anthony C. Thistelton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992: 8-10.

- James Barr, “Evaluation, Commitment, and Objectivity in Biblical Theology.” Pages 125-152 in Heikki Räisänen, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, R S Sugirtharajah, Krister Stendahl, James Barr, Reading the Bible in the Global Village: Helsinki. SBL: Atlanta, 2000.

James Crossley gives his report on The Pope and Jesus of Nazareth Conference, 19-20 June, 2008, University of Nottingham.

After hobnobbing with the overtly theological crowd, James made this surprising summary about their application of historical criticism:

“Many theologians wanted historical criticism to give them the answers they wanted for theology and discard views that were not helpful.”

(What surprises me is that it’s only “Many”…)

Update: See the comments of Mystical Seeker on theologians diverting historical criticism.

There’s some interesting reviews in the latest Review of Biblical Literature:

Andreas Wagner, editor, Primäre und sekundäre Religion als Kategorie der Religionsgeschichte des Alten Testaments
(2007)

There are 20 articles in what the reviewer calls an “unusually well coordinated collection of essays”. The authors examine whether the categories of “Primary and secondary religion” developed by T. Sundermeier and J. Assmann can be usefully used to describe the change in Jewish religion occuring in the post-exilic period. Contributors and respondents include Sigrun Welke-Holtmann, Pierre Bordreuil, Bernhard Lang, Marttii Nissinen, Paolo Xella, Walter Berkert (on Greek religion) and Gerd Thiessen (on Christianity). There are replies by Sundermeier and Assmann themselves.

Jim W. Adams, The Performative Nature and Function of Isaiah 40-55 (2006)

Speech-Act theory applied to Deutero-Isaiah - a revision of the author’s doctoral thesis. According to the review, it provides a good introduction to Speech-Act theory, including JL Austin and JR Searle.

David T. Runia and Gregory E. Sterling, editors, The Studia Philonica Annual: Studies in Hellenistic Judaism: Volume XIX, 2007 (2007)

The latest Studia Philonica Annual takes a special look at the Dead Sea Scrolls (and Philo, naturally), with an intro by the ubiquitous J. J. Collins, and articles by both the usual suspects and the unusual suspects: García Martínez, Stuckenbruck, Hindy Najman, Katell Berthelot, and Joan E. Taylor.

For Kristeva, anyway, the idea of intertextuality replaces anthropomorphizing approaches to text (as intersubjective communication) with the idea that every text is at the same time an intertext.

“[A]ny text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; and text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double” (Kristeva 1980: 66).

So, for Kristeva, intertextuality is nothing less than a reconception of what text is. Even though the practicalities of textual criticism limit discussion of intertextuality to those intertexts of which we are aware, the wider implications of intertextuality must be borne in mind if we are employing the term. And if not, saying ‘intertextuality’ is useless monkey-chatter, jargon, a buzzword–when what you’re actually talking about is old-fashioned source criticism.

Kristeva dismisses such a banal approach to ‘intertextuality’ as:

“le sens banal de ‘critique des sources’ d’un texte”
(1974: 59)

Some scholars have observed the tendency in others to dress up source criticism in the trendy clothes of ‘intertextuality’. Interestingly, many have recourse to the same hypotext (”old wine in new bottles”) …

“One may well ask whether intertextuality in its restricted sense presents us with an approach to literature that is really new. Is it not in effect a specious term for a well-known practice–old wine in a new bottle?“
- A. Maria Van Enp Taalman Kip, “Intertextuality and Theocritus 13.” Pages 153-169 in Irene JF de Jong & JP Sullivan, Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature (Leiden, New York & Köln: Brill, 1994).

“The midrash realizes its goal via a hermeneutic of recombining pieces of the canonized exemplar into a new discourse. We thus see how its intertextuality served both the revolutionary and conservative needs of the midrash and its authors, preserving the old wine by pouring it into new bottles.”
- Daniel Boyarin, “Old Wine in New Bottles: Intertextuality and Midrash.” Poetics Today 8.3/4 (1987): 539-556, 555.

Plett notes two complaints about intertextuality. The first is against progressive formulations, and criticises it as “incomprehensible” and “irrational”. The second is against traditionalist formulations, which are equivalent to the old source criticism, and thus represents “old wine in new bottles”.
- Heinrich F. Plett, “Intertextualities,” in Intertextuality, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), p. 5

… Now, I wonder, are you asking yourself, ‘Were Plett and Kip dependent on Boyarin for their formulation?” …