Welcome one and all to Biblical Studies Carnival XXXI. It feels a little weird to be posting this month’s carnival so soon after Tyler Williams posted Carnival XXX and in light of the various misdirections about where this month’s Carnival would appear, but no matter. Here is a look at some of the best posts for the month of June 2008.

This month’s carnival begins with the ancient Near East, where many bloggers posted insights this months. Duane Smith has a work in progress on a purported Gilagmesh Letter (here. here, here, and here). Alan Lenski is making steady progress on his Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi project (with Amar Annus) and wrote on the meaning of the word rāšilūtu. Along the same Assyriological lines, Pete Bekins at בלשנת posted his thoughts on N.J.C. Kouwenberg’s paper “Gemination in the Akkadian Verb;” and C. Jay Crisostomo at mu-pàd-da reviewed Walter Bodine’s “Linguistics and Philology in the Study of Ancient Near Eastern Languages” from the Lambdin festschrift Working With No Data. Finally, I posted on a new translation of “Adapa and the South Wind” that I’ll be using in class later this summer.

A nice transition from the ancient Near East generally to the Hebrew Bible more specifically might be found in Charles Halton’s assessment of Karl van der Toorn’s “library hypothesis” of canonical composition. Another review by Pete Bekins focuses on Mark Smith’s classic The Origins and Development of the Waw-consecutive. Such constructive grammatical work comes in handy when addressing the barrage of translation posts this month between David Ker (here and here) and Jim West (here and here) on one side and John F Hobbins (here and here) and Richard A Rhodes (here) on another. This high spirited discussion meant that the usually incendiary inerrancy debate simmered down, even with posts by Michael S. Eiser (here, here, here and here ) and Peter Enns (here, here, here and here).

Moving into New Testament studies, James Gregory shared his thoughts on Ephesians 4:7 & 8 in a series that has been going through that whole letter, sentence by sentence. Kevin Edgecomb posted a five part series on the Gospel of the Pharisees (parts one, two, three, four and five) in an impressive blogging tour de force. James Crossley discussed the Nottingham conference on the Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth, which led Doug Chaplin to ruminate on issues of history, theology and the historical Jesus.

Finally, perhaps the best news of the month for biblical studies has been the return in earnest of DailyHebrew.com.

Beyond the canon comes word from the technologically hip. First off, J. P. van de Giessen created a biblioblogger search pluggin for Firefox 3 (the list of blogs it searches is here). Additionally, the Oriental Institute has an update on its digitized books project, which is a big help for those of us who haven’t been able to grab the funds for the last few volumes of the CAD. And perhaps most interestingly, the word came forth from many places this month that Society of Biblical Literature, in partnership with the Centro de Estudios de Historia del Antiguo Oriente, Universidad Católica Argentina (CEHAO/UCA), have established a new online, open-access monograph series of which Alan Lenski is one of the editors.

On a lighter note, John Hobbins is encouraging bibliobloggers to post on their favourite children’s books. So far Phil Sumpter has written on Piers Anthony’s Xanth series; Ros Clarke on Philip Pullman; Iyov has an introduction on Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; and Chris Brady just published his thoughts on The Chronicles of Prydain (which he posted on July 1st, but I’m throwing it in anyway).

Finally, both Ed Cook and Charles Halton landed new teaching gigs. Congrats to you both!

The next Biblical Studies Carnival will be at Ancient Hebrew Poetry. For more information on the Carnival, including where to submit pieces and where it’ll be next, go here.

For those of us teaching the Bible, I recently ran across a great tool: Bible Geocoding. I’m sure there are some bibliobloggers out there more familiar with this than I, but it is basically Google Earth with an overlay of every identifiable place in the Bible. You can even search by chapter and verse. (Though apparently the Deutero-canonical books aren’t cool enough for inclussion…)

There are of course many possible applications for this website. I might point students here this summer when we’re reading Genesis. It would be helpful to conceptualize how so much of the early chapters focus on Mesopotamia. I also really wish I’d had this when I was teaching Acts. It would have made for an interactive assignment that would have freed up valuable class time.

(HT: metallurge)

There’s been a bit of confussion about the Biblical Studies Carnivals (BSC). At the moment, we’re still waiting for BSC 30 from Tyler Williams at Codex. At some point in the last two months or so Tyler asked both Doug Chaplin at MetaCatholic and me to host Carnival 31. After some confussing emails, it appears that I will indeed be hosting BSC 31, since Doug is now saying that I’m doing so.

All this to say, any submissions should be sent my way: jimgetz at gmail

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been trying to get a translation of “Adapa and the South Wind” together to use this summer. I finished a draft earlier today, and the translation is here (updated 6/30/08).

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts but keep a couple things in mind:

1. This translation is for use with folks who have probably never read a Mesopotamian myth before.
2. This translation is for undergrads in a general humanities seminar.
3. This translation is the first reading in the class and will be later followed by “Inanna’s Descent” and The Gilgamesh Epic. Hence, the notes trying to help introduce deities to the students.
4. I’m not an Assyriologist. I’m just a Northwest Semiticist with an inferiority complex.

Other than that, have at it.

Update (6/30/08): Thanks for all your suggestions folks. I’ve encorporated improvements into the recently updated translation.

Amidst a flurry of writing I need to get done by month’s end, I’m pulling together materials for a class I’m teaching next month. The first week of the six-week summer session will be on small ancient Near East myths. After my earlier discussion of Adapa and the Hymn to Demeter, I’ve decided to throw both of these myths into the mix, as well as Inanna’s Descent to the Netherworld. Each myth is from a different culture, but each will mutually inform the discussion of the other two (and, the Mesopotamian texts will hopefully whet students’ appetites for Gilgamesh the following week).

Yet, all is not well in Eridu! In looking at all the available translations of the myth I like Shlomo Izre’el’s translation in Adapa and the South Wind: Language Has the Power of Life and Death (Eisenbrauns, 2001). However, his presentation of the text is not very user friendly (and, of course, I’ve got some problems with even his excellent translation). So, I find myself preparing a new translation of the text in a format that I’ve found works best with my students — in all my spare time.

And people wonder why I don’t have more hobbies…

As I mentioned before, I’ve been working through Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond, ed Nicole Brisch (available here). There are some serious implication for divine kingship at Ugarit posed by Irene Winter’s arguments in “Touched by the Gods: Visual Evidence for the Divine Status of Rulers in the Ancient Near East.”

Winter works through images of kings and gods from the entire history on Mesopotamia. Her basic proposition is that

even when not explicitly accorded divinity per se, rulers nevertheless could be represented verbally and visually as if they occupied a place in society that merited divine attributes, qualities, and status… (p. 75).

A fine example of such a visual representation is the depiction of Hammurapi on his law stele (image from here). While Hammurapi is not being depicted in the blatantly divine manner that we find in the victory stele of Naram-Sin, Winter argues that there are subtle indication that Hammurapi still is being accorded divine status. Note that Hammurapi is on eye level with Shamash. Indeed, he stands slightly taller than Shamash in this depiction. While scholars have tended to see here the aspects of the king’s subservience to the deity, Winter thinks that the stele actually portrays parity.

This called to mind the quite different depiction of divine relations with the king one finds at Ugarit. On the Baʿlu Stele (image found here) the deity is depicted as gigantic as opposed to the tiny human to the right. Conventional exegesis hold that this figure is in fact the king. The mighty god standing behind (literally) the earthly monarch.

This representation has been marshaled as proof of the divinity of the king at Ugarit; but in light of Winter’s argument, I find this interpretation unconvincing. Granting that the king is the most likely candidate for the figure, I don’t see divinity at play. Yes, the king rules by divine rite, but that does not indicate that he is, himself, divine. Using Winter’s methodology from this article, it would seem that the visual representation in now way implies that the king holds “divine attributes, qualities, and status.”

The king is to be feared and followed (least the wrath of Baʿlu be unleashed), but he’s still a mere mortal.

I’m working through Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond, ed Nicole Brisch (available here). While my purpose for reading the conference volume relates to my dissertation, I found some interesting insights into Gilgamesh in Piotr Michalowski’s paper “The Mortal Kings of Ur: A Short Century of Divine Rule in Ancient Mesopotamia.”

Reflecting on the divine kinship of Shulgi, Michalowski holds that the claim to deity was in reaction to the death of his father, Ur-Nammu. Apparently, Ur-Nammu is one of only two kings to have died in battle in Mesopotamia’s three millennial history (the other being Sargon II of Assyria). Ur-Nammu’s death caused a crisis in Ur III that Michalowski believes precipitated the unification under the deity of Shulgi.

Michalowski notes that the first twenty odd years of Shulgi’s reign was spent consolidating the homeland before attempts at military expansion. He correlates this with the time that Shulgi first claims deity for himself. Further, this transition also tracts with a new scribal curriculum focusing on hymns to Shulgi and — guess who? — Sumerian tales of Gilgamesh (or to be pedantic: Bilgames).

While Gilgamesh was important as an ancestor and a bridge between the human and divine, he also served an even more important function: he dies. Michalowski states:

The unique symbolic status of Gilgamesh provided the answer as an ancestor who embodied the central paradox of divine kinship: the inevitable death of the king. (p. 37)

Hence, the myths of Gilgamesh helped to cement the new mythos necessary to keep Ur III together after the cosmic tragedy of Ur-Nammu’s inauspicious death.

What effect, if any, this has on how I teach Gilgamesh is immediately clear. However, those of us who teach Gilgamesh in an historical rather than literary context might find the paper quite useful.

more cat pictures

Shawn Flynn (formerly of Palimpsest) sent me a link to this video exploring the trials and tribulations surrounding the end of the neolithic period. Enjoy.

Partick House has a cute little article over at Slate on How To Win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. The article, while somewhat droll, does contain some useful tidbits for anyone who has looked at the caption winner and thought that their submission was funnier.