The N. T. Wrong Blog

Philip Culbertson received the prize for the best title to a paper at the International Congress:

“Bobbitizing God: On the Importance of the Divine Genitals Remaining Un-Manageable”

Philip Culbertson examined the third gender fa’afafine from Samoa (a male who takes on feminine gender roles and dress). After some discussion of fa’afafines, and the cultural construction of gender in general, he suggested that God’s gender be thought of as something that he performs on certain occasions rather than as something essential to God. That is, sometimes God acts in a masculine way, sometimes in a feminine way.

George Aichele discussed the different Jesuses in the four Gospels and the manner by which the canon serves to control diversity by subsuming them under a single voice. He provided a great set of examples of how each of the Gospels portrays a different Jesus. Apparently the paper will be published in the The Bible and Critical Theory. It’s an absolute blast – look out for it.

And then we went to the pub. We spotted this blackboard on the wall, advertising a beer called “Petrus”:

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:

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.

Knohl’s interprets lines 80-81 of Hazon Gabriel (”The Vision of Gabriel”) as saying:

“by three days live/be resurrected, I Gabriel command you, prince of the princes”

Here are the two key two excerpts from his article, in which he argues for this meaning. From “By Three Days, Live”: Messiahs, Resurrection, and Ascent to Heaven in Hazon Gabriel.” The Journal of Religion 88 (Apr 2008):147–158, Appendix, 150):

The New York Times has picked up on the Hazon Gabriel (”Vision of Gabriel”) tablet, and in particular the interpretation being offered by Israel Knohl in “By Three Days, Live”: Messiahs, Resurrection, and Ascent to Heaven in Hazon Gabriel.” The Journal of Religion 88 (Apr 2008):147–158).

“A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.”
- New York Times

The writer of the article is quite aware that the interpretation of the tablet as concerning a messiah who would resurrect after three days is still some way from being affirmed. In particular, the gaps in the text require readers of the tablet to reconstruct the missing words, as discussed in my previous post. Moreover, because of the broken and uncertain context, it is uncertain who is saying “live!” to who, even if “live” can be properly restored in the gaps. So, even in the long term, the measured conclusion may be that we just cannot tell what the tablet originally said. Time will tell.

Still, if the tablet does talk about an anointed one (messiah) who will rise from the dead, it is very significant for our interpretation of beliefs in Jesus in the first century AD. The tablet is dated before Jesus’ birth, in the late 1st century BC.

“Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the stone was part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the Jewish history of his day.

“Some Christians will find it shocking — a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology — while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism,” [Dr]. Boyarin said.”
- New York Times

“”This should shake our basic view of Christianity,” [Israel Knohl] said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. “Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.”
- New York Times

Although, the idea of an anointed king who serves at the side of the High God and returns from the dead after three days is one that can be traced back at least to 1200 BC in Syria-Palestine.

Future developments are afoot:

“A conference marking 60 years since the discovery of the scrolls will begin on Sunday at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where the stone, and the debate over whether it speaks of a resurrected messiah, as one iconoclastic scholar believes, also will be discussed.”
- New York Times

“There is now a spate of scholarly articles on the stone, with several due to be published in the coming months.”
- New York Times

“A chemical examination by Yuval Goren, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University who specializes in the verification of ancient artifacts, has been submitted to a peer-review journal. He declined to give details of his analysis until publication, but he said that he knew of no reason to doubt the stone’s authenticity.”
- New York Times

Fresh from his starring role as Reepacheep in the movie Prince Caspian, the versatile Eddie Izzard delivers an exegesis on Paul’s letters to the Corinthians.

(Contains British Comedian language.)

On May 5, 2008, Khaled Abou El Fadl examined how preconceptions of the ‘oriental’ Islamic have determined the way in which invading American soldiers have abused, tortured and raped Iraqi civilians. He delivers the 2008 Burke Lecture, provided here on YouTube by the video’s rightful owners, University of California Television (58:30):

Happy 4th of July! Remember, do what we say, or we’ll bring democracy to your country.

Mrs Wrong kindly snapped a photo of me, as I was pretending to board the plane at Raleigh-Durham International. That’s me, partially obscured by the man in the red shirt.

Whose idea was it to have a July conference in the Southern Hemisphere? Don’t they realize that it’s midwinter down there? And is New Zealand a real place? I thought it was just some fictional land made up by JRR Tolkien.

Anyway … while at the SBL International Conference, I promise to share digital photos from my new camera. And, I’ll provide passing comments on any papers of interest that I attend.

It’s like all our Christmases have come at once.

James R. Getz hosts Biblical Studies Carnival XXXI at Ketuvim, providing a roundup of biblioblog discussions for the month of June 2008. And so prompt. He must be a god …