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.

Today I heard the most exciting paper at the conference so far, from Klaas Spronk. He produced a number of different yet converging lines of evidence which convincingly made the case that the book of Judges was written as a post-dtr ‘link’ between Joshua and Samuel. Judges would be a substantial unity, drawing both from Samuel and Joshua in order to construct its stories about judges. His evidence included a list of toponymic correspondences, the use of שאל באלהים as a leitmotiv, a number of aspects of the Samson episode, together with a heightening of the miraculous and exaggeration of prescriptions from Samuel to Judges. He also pointed to a number of Greek elements in Judges, including the names Sisera and Yael, the ‘300′ (and he mentioned the movie), and the cutting off of thumbs, found throughout the book — which makes it comparable to the writings of Berossos and Manetho.

Tim Bulkeley gave a good paper on the coherence of David’s story, focussing on נכה as a leitmotiv for the David stories. Amongst the highlights, he described David as “a killing machine who kills on behalf of God”. The tragic downfall of David occurred when David no longer killed on behalf of God, but did so for his own purposes (against Uriah). So the rest of the story is analysable through this lens. Tim Bulkeley came out with the best metaphor to describe the ‘David cake’: smiting is the flour that holds the series of stories together; sex and love is the fruit and nuts that gives it a bit of extra spice (or something to that effect). He rightly criticised the tendency to transform the tragedy (rise and fall) into a comedy by artificially dividing it into two separate stories of rises of two separate kings (David and Solomon) — to a great extent because we moderns don’t like unhappy endings.

George Athas offered a critique of Diana Edelman’s recent redating of Zerubbabel to 460BC rather than 520BC. With some altered assumptions, he demonstrated how Zerubbabel could still be easily dated to 520BC. The remainder of his paper offered an interesting explanation both for the disappearance of Zerubbabel in Zechariah (by suggesting that he had been deposed by the Persians due to some behaviour of his considered to be questionable) and also for the crowning of Joshua (as replacement for Zerubbabel). On the way, he addressed a few possible objections to such theories as his.

It was a nice sunny winter’s day today.

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.

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.

In an article entitled “Epic and history”, Kurt A. Raaflaub makes a comparative study of Sumerian epic, Homeric epic, and the Nibelungenlied, amongst others, and arrives at some interesting conclusions. He is keenly aware of the need to examine each tradition with a thorough background knowledge, but also draws attention to the ability of comparative studies to reveal new possibilities for consideration.

So, to cut to his conclusions, how well can we reconstruct the ‘historical kernel’ of heroic epic — a genre which (if not defined too narrowly) provides most of the material for what we we find in Genesis-Kings? According to Raaflaub’s brief study, the answer is simple: we can’t.

“Despite subjective conservatism inherent in the genre that prompts singers to improve on previous versions of a given song rather than altering it, over time a number of factors cause the original story to be reinterpreted, possibly more than once, and potentially to be distorted beyond recognition. These factors include, among others, audience pressure that forces singers to adjust to changing tastes, needs, and social conditions; deeper transformations and disruptions in the world in which the singers live that cause changes in outlook and values; new events, experiences, and outstanding personalities that capture the imagination of singers and audiences and induce them to replace old songs by new ones or to reinterpret traditional themes more radically; and an inherent tendency, common to all forms of oral tradition, to suppress the individual and specific in favor of the universal. In the cases of medieval and later epics, where independent historical evidence is available, it is clear that only a minimal historical core survives in the extant poems. To reconstruct this core from the epic is impossible because the process of transformation does not follow set rules, is different in each case, and can thus not be unraveled from the end.
The situation is different when we focus on the social background or environment in which the poet places the heroic events and actions. Wherever the epic evidence is substantial enough, the depiction of social structures, conditions, and interactions proves sufficiently consistent to reflect a historical society - despite archaisms, anachronisms, exaggerations, and occasional contradictions that help create a heroic aura and are traits or remnants of composition in performance. The society portrayed is usually the poet’s own.”
- Kurt A. Raaflaub, “Epic & History”. Pages 55-70 in John Miles Foley, ed., A Companion to Ancient Epic. Malden, Blackwell & Carlton: Blackwell, 2005: 69 (emphasis added).

What would be really interesting would be to get experts in everything from Homer to Monmouth and Snorri, and compare each of the epic works with history (as ascertained by modern historiography). How are the traditions transformed? How is ‘history’ invented? Why are such traditions invented? Etc, etc.

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.

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

Carleen R. Mandolfo, Daughter Zion Talks Back to the Prophets: A Dialogic Theology of the Book of Lamentations (2007)

Uses Buber, Bakhtin, feminist, postcolonial theories to address Lamentations. Who says Theory is dead? The blurb says that the book “offers a new theological reading of the book of Lamentations by putting the female voice of chapters 1–2 into dialogue with the divine voice of prophetic texts in which God represents the people Israel as his wife and indicts them/her for being unfaithful to him. In Lamentations 1–2 we hear the “wife” talk back, and from her words we get an entirely different picture of the conflict showcased through this marriage metaphor.”

Rivka Ulmer and Lieve M. Teugels, editors,
Midrash and Context: Proceedings of the 2004 and 2005 SBL Consultation on Midrash (2007)

You get seven papers for your bucks here, by Jason Kalmon, Matthew Kraus, Joshua L. Moss, Annette Yoshika Reed, Elke Tönges, W. David Nelson, Rivka Ulmer. A number of the papers draw comparisons between Rabbinic and Patristic exegesis. There’s one on orality and one on magic.

Klaus-Peter Adam, Saul und David in der judäischen Geschichtsschreibung: Studien zu 1 Samuel 16-2 Samuel 5 (2007)

The author thinks that the traditions in Samuel were not written before the seventh century, and continued to be written and developed until the Hellenistic era. The reviewer, Walter Dietrich, is dismayed at such a verdict. Dietrich thinks it must be some of that postmodernist gobbledegook. According to Dietrich, Adam must have missed “the obvious possibility that the figure of Saul is anchored in the genuine northern Israelite tradition”. Adam shows how events in Samuel were written so as to anticipate the traditions in the book of Kings. It’s all a bit speculative for Dietrich’s taste. Adam’s literary analysis is rather lost on a reviewer who probably would have preferred to see endless divisions of individual verses into speculative stages of redaction and even more speculative historical reconstructions based on those speculative stages of redaction. Adam’s book looks most worthwhile.

Ellens, J. Harold, editor,
The Destructive Power of Religion: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (2007)

J. Harold Ellens and friends (including Jack Miles and Walter Wink) provide a series of pieces dealing with the violence in the Bible and other Abrahamic religions.

Leo G. Perdue, Wisdom Literature: A Theological History (2007)

Leo Perdue presents an overview of the history of wisdom as a theological category by examining texts from the Hebrew Bible.

New Scientist No. 2658 ( May 31, 2008 ) offers what it calls an “interview” with Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein. It is much more of an article piece than a interview, though, as Israel Finkelstein’s comments are heavily edited by the article’s author, David Cohen.

The article describes Finkelstein as “something of a revolutionary” in the field of archaeology:

Over the past decade he has spearheaded a movement in biblical archaeology that flies in the face of the interpretation of the Bible as a largely historical document. He argues that the traditional dating of many archaeological finds relating to biblical events is out by up to one-and-a-half centuries. His conclusion is uncompromising: many famous biblical stories are probably pure fiction. The exodus of the Israelites from Egypt never happened, and Joshua never attacked Jericho, let alone brought its walls down. “There is no evidence that Jericho even had city walls at that time.” Finkelstein says. David and Solomon were not great kings who ruled over the ancient land of Canaan in the 10^th century BC from a palace in Jerusalem, as the Bible portrays; at best they were minor chieftains of some small-time tribe in that area. Their memory was later inflated and mythologised in the 7^th century BC to serve particular political and military agendas, he says.

After a bit about Finkelstein’s credentials, the article gets into the substantial content. The first shocking revelation from Israel Finkelstein is that he denies sleeping with William Dever. The article continues:

In this part of the World, where the ancient and the modem meet in everyday political discourse, his findings can be inflammatory – and, much to his annoyance, have been used by some as ammunition against the right of a Jewish state to exist in the area. Others dismiss his work as ideologically motivated. In one barbed attack, William Dever, a specialist in the region’s archaeology at the University of Arizona, accused him of being a fashion-led “Post-Zionist” who is caught up in a race to push the writing of the Bible into more recent times. This incensed Finkelstein “What does he know about me?” he says indignantly. “Is he with me and my wife in the bedroom? In the beginning I used to be furious when people made such accusations, now I’m only amused.”

Why the anger? Despite being firmly on the left of Israeli politics (“I am prepared to swap land for peace with the Palestinians”) Finkelstein considers himself to be “an oldguard, conservative Zionist, which means I strongly believe in the right of the Jewish people to have a state and homeland in the historic land of Israel”.

Mrs Humphrey Ward once wrote, “If the Gospels are not true in fact, as history, I cannot see how they are true at all, or of any value.” However, Israel Finkelstein rightly does not share her sentiment at all:

What really gets to him is the response from his own secular end of Israeli society. “It’s the beach bums in Tel Aviv who say ‘I always knew the Bible was not important, and now Finkelstein has proved it’ that make me depressed.’ As Finkelstein sees it, the Bible does not have to be a historically accurate document for its handed-down set of stories to be “the root of my identity”.

Finkelstein also notes that archaeology should be, but usually is not, done separately from one’s convictions about religion and nation. What a great idea!!

Finkelstein is about as Israeli as they come. Born in the small town of Petah Tikva dose to Tel Aviv, he can trace his family’s roots in the area back to 1850, almost a century before the foundation of the Jewish state. “My family arrived in the mid-19^th century from Grodno [in what is now Belarus] to Hebron. I don’t need any more legitimacy than that, nor does the state of Israel need the Bible to justify its right to exist,” he says. He has lived in the country all his life and counts himself a traditional Jew. “I’m not a believer, but we keep kosher at home, and I celebrate all the festivals.” Even the Passover festivaI, which celebrates the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and their journey to the promised land – biblical stories he believes are pure fiction. “Of course! Why not? This is my identity. I do it gladly.”

“Isn’t that a contradiction? “Not at all. I can separate my convictions about my culture and my identity on the one hand from my research on the other. I think this is critical for archaeology. If you cannot make this separation you are finished. Unfortunately, most people who work in biblical archaeology fail to make this separation. It’s a serious problem.”

The article ends with a few Indiana Jones-like episodes in Israel Finkelstein’s archaeological career, such as surviving bombs and mob attacks.

According to the news reports, Egyptian archaeologists have firmly identified a fort at Tell Heboua (ancient Tharu / Tjaru) as the Egyptian Army Headquarters in the Sinai from ca. 1500 BC to the Ptolemaic period. It’s 500 metres (547 yards) by 250 metres, with towers four metres high.

The identification follows last year’s announcement of the finding of the site.

“The fortress and adjoining town, which they identify with the ancient place name Tharu, lies in the Sinai peninsula about 3 km (2 miles) northeast of the modern town of Qantara, Egyptian archaeologist Mohamed Abdel Maksoud told Reuters. The town sat at the start of a military road joining the Nile Valley to the Levant, parts of which were under Egyptian control for much of the period”
- Reuters Africa

“The ancient military road, known as “Way of Horus,” once connected Egypt to Palestine and is close to present-day Rafah, which borders the Palestinian territory of Gaza.”
- Associated Press

According to the statement from the Egyptian government’s Supreme Council for Antiquities, the identification has been secured on the basis of various inscriptions found this year at Tharu. The inscriptions mention three Pharaohs—Tuthmosis II, who ruled from about 1512 BC and who built one of the military installations along the route, Seti I and Ramses II, who between them ruled Egypt from 1318 to 1237 BC. The photo is of one of these newly released inscriptions, and another photo is included below.

“”The archaeological features of this fort confirm the inscriptions on ancient Egyptian temples showing the shape of the city of Tharu, which lay at the start of the Horus military road,” the statement added. The statement said the site contains the first New Kingdom temple ever found in northern Sinai, and warehouses where the ancient Egyptian army stored grain and weapons, as well as ovens, seals and earthenware vessels.”
- Reuters Africa

“A collection of reliefs belonging to King Ramses II and King Seti I (1314-1304 B.C.) were also unearthed with rows of warehouses used by the ancient Egyptian army during the New Kingdom era to store wheat and weapons, he [Archaeologist Mohammed Abdel-Maqsoud, chief of the excavation team] said. Abdel-Maqsoud said the new discoveries corresponded to the inscriptions of the Way of Horus found on the walls of the Karnak Temple in Luxor which illustrated the features of 11 military fortresses that protected Egypt’s eastern borders. Only five of them have been discovered to date.”
- Associated Press

Apparently the inscriptions mention Tharu. See:

Tharu has sometimes been identified with biblical Succoth (the setting for the legendary first stop by the ‘Children of Israel’ after leaving Rameses). This depends on the particular reconstruction of the route from the books of Exodus and Numbers. The news stories haven’t got onto this angle, yet. They will, though …

“Over a century ago, Max Müller recognized the importance of Tjaru [Tharu] in ancient Egypt and realized that it must have played a role in the movement of the Israelites; he declared that “no town of the eastern Delta frontier has a greater importance than Tharu [i.e. Tjaru], which was not only its largest town, but also the principle point for the defense of the entrance to Egypt, therefore also for the military and mercantile roads to the East.” He also felt that the route of the exodus could not be fixed with any certainty until Tjaru was positively located.”
- James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition, 1997: 184.

Albright–and latterly, Finkelstein and Silberman–attempted an uncomplicated and simple correlation of archaeological destruction (in places such as Lachish) with biblical stories of destruction (the story of the religious holy war against Canaan in Joshua, the story of the religious purges of Hezekiah and Josiah in Kings).

In an article in the June 2008 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament (subscription required), Diana Edelman outlines a much superior approach. With a focus on the legend of Hezekiah’s cultic purge and centralization, Edelman’s approach involves: 
* examining the relevant biblical passages in their own right;
*  examining evidence (incl. archaeological evidence) from the historical period which corresponds to the setting of the Hezekiah legend (721-701 BC);
* examining evidence from the historical period which corresponds to the time in which the Hezekiah legend was plausibly originally created and later redacted, and which is the relevant historical setting for understanding the ideology of the story (post-701 BC).

Here’s one of her key conclusions:

“… Sennacherib mounted an extensive attack against Judah. It is likely that after 701 BCE the territory of the kingdom of Judah was probably limited to the immediate environs of Jerusalem. This situation, which resulted in the temporary ‘centralization’ of the cult of Yahweh in Jerusalem, is most likely what prompted the author or a subsequent editor of Kings to credit Hezekiah with a voluntary cultic centralization that followed the call in Torah for a single place where Yahweh would cause to place his name to dwell. He was more interested in Jerusalem’s central role during the latter part of Hezekiah’s reign than in how or why it had gained that status. He had a preconceived theological answer for the latter and so had no need to concern himself with the historical details.” (425)

The article provides full and extensively reasoned support for this conclusion. The alternative, of a historical Hezekian religious purge, is unlikely:

“From a religious perspective, cult centralization would not have made sense under the monarchy … To deprive the national god of his outlying sanctuaries would have been tantamount to eliminating his claims to those lands, which his physical presence in sacred spaces would have symbolized … Yahweh Sabaoth [Yahweh of Hosts, Yahweh of Armies] was conceived of as a national deity, not a universal deity; it was only with the emergence of Yahweh Elohim, after the loss of the monarchy, that Yahweh lost his specific ties to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah; it is at this time that the Deuteronomistic legislation envisaging a single temple would make ideological sense.” (429)

Diana Edelman, “Hezekiah’s Alleged Cultic Centralization,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 32.4 (2008):395-434.