Thoughts on the Enns agreement
The news of the WTS-Enns split yesterday has left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
It’s not that I have a problem with WTS firing Enns for denominational or confessional reasons. Div schools and seminaries have every right to terminate the contracts of those who disagree with the school’s charter. The issue isn’t simply one of academic freedom. If you want to be a “free thinker” without any boundaries, perhaps a confessional school that has you sign a confession of faith when you enter isn’t the place for you.
Nor is it that I’m upset that Enns was fired for what really amounts to a milquetoast, run-of-the-mill view of inspiration. What one school calls passe, another calls cutting-edge. That’s nothing new.
It’s not even that I’m alarmed by the fact that the joint statement made by Enns and WTS affirms that his thought is comfortably within the bounds of the larger evangelical movement. (“Hey, he’s not a heretic or anything!”) From personal experience at WTS I’m not too sure that election extends much beyond the PCA and OPC. What matters at WTS is not that one is evangelical or even “Reform” but that one is WTS Reform™.
What bothers me about the WTS-Enns affair is that this split was pushed through by the trustees, not the faculty. After the faculty declared Enns’ positions fine, the president and trustees moved in and suspended Enns. The faculty at a theological seminary was not considered theologically savvy enough to make the decision of what constituted the theological boundaries of the institution for which they teach, of the discipline in which they are experts. Technically, I get the impression that this is also a violation of the seminary’s procedure, but WTS’s president and trustees got away with it.
Faculty treated like children while the administration run amock — leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Ugaritic Texts as Ritual Event
I’ve been thinking a lot about Ugaritic ritual texts. The Ugaritic corpus provides us with a number of ritual texts. Given the nature of the destruction of the ancient city, these texts give us a freeze-frame of the ritual life of the cult.
As best as can be discerned, the ritual texts at Ugarit are not canonical. There was no extensive editorial process of native self-selection that brought these texts together into an authoritative corpus of ancient Ugaritic life. Rather, these are simply the texts that have survived.
From an anthropological perspective this a very good thing. It allows us to speak in terms of the reality of the cult rather than simply the canonical tradition remembering that historical reality. It allows us to speak of the ritual event.
When I write “ritual event” it should be noted that the texts do not provide us with all the details. We don’t know the exact mechanics of a šlm or šrp sacrifice. However, we aren’t exactly sure of many of these details of these sacrifices in the biblical corpus either. The reason I can write about a ritual event is that these Ugaritic texts, as best we can tell, were meant to and were actually used in the cult.
There are several pieces of data that point to the actual use of the Ugaritic ritual texts being used in the cult. Some texts have little “check marks” next to line items of sacrificial victims and recipients. Even apparently “duplicate” ritual texts bare uniqueness that point to an ad hoc usage. Etc.
If these texts were actual performance lists for various cultic occasions, I think that it opens up new avenues for our research. Inclussion and exclussion of details indicate what was important from an emic perspective. For example, there are repeated apparently identical lists of deities receiving sacrifices. Were these written down because they were some “canonical series” that everyone knew, or where they written down specifically because they weren’t known or remembered? Or perhaps because there is always the danger of performing an infilicitous ritual?
I’m still working through the implications of such a methodology, but it sure beats arguing about whether P was utopian or not.
Noah’s Blog
The Wittenburg Door has posted something of interest to every biblical scholar: Noah’s long lost blog.
(HT: Think Christian)
A Night at the Mann
Last night we took the boys to the Mann Center for the Performing Arts here in Philadelphia. There running open air concerts performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. We heard a Ginastera suite from Estancia, Mendelssohn’s “Violin Concerto in E Minor (Op. 64)” and Mursorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
I’m a huge fan of Mendelssohn. His music is wonderful and his revival of Schubert in particular should be enough to warrant high praise. The violinist (Leila Josefowicz I believe) brought through the piece with feeling and beauty.
The high point of the night for the boys was Mursorgshy’s symphony. My older son (age 11) had been reading through the shorter pieces, but the darkening skies and sheer power of the music brought his full attention to the event. My younger son (age 9) spent the entire time simply transfixed by the music. He’s been studying cello this year, and so we sat where he could get a good view of the cellists. The piece is quite fun and watching Giancarlo Guerrero conduct is always entertaining.
Good times. Now back to writing and teaching….
Goat Demons and the Power of Chaos
I was recently reading “A Note on the Azazel-goat Ritual” by Dominic Rudman (ZAW 116. Bd., S. 396–401; available here). The article has an interesting discussion of biblical understandings of mythic geography — the ways that biblical writers conceptualize the center vs. the periphery, linking the periphery with chaos not simply in a political and spiritual sense but in a cultic sense as well.
Deserts, wilderness areas, and ruins, precisely because they are uninhabited (and/or uninhabitable to most animal life), are understood as being places of non-creation, or of uncreation …. That is to say, deserts and wildernesses are viewed as chaotic areas. One could imagine them as places which God’s creative power has failed to penetrate. (399)
However, Rudman overstates his chaos on the rational of the scapegoat’s exile. He wants to link the scapegoat rite in Lev 16 to the desert as place of chaos.
In Leviticus 16, the purpose of the goat designated as being »for Azazel« is to bear »all the iniquity of the Israelites, all their rebellion, and all their sin« ( את כל עונת בני ישראל ואת כל פשעיהם לכל חטאתם) . In doing so, chaos in all its forms is removed from Israel. (398-99)
This understanding is predicated upon an equivalence between “chaos” and sin. However, we’re not even sure from the text that the scapegoat rite is to be equated with the previous purification of the adytum, let alone that this sin and rebellion can be chalked up to the forces of chaos.
It feels to Augustinian to define “sin” as the uncreative powers of chaos. The priestly writers (PT and HS) seem more concerned with purity and sin than with the uncreative powers of chaos. The mention of “rebellion” in 16:21 might find a link with the rebellion of chaotic forces (a la Enuma Elish), but I’m not convinced (cf. my earlier thoughts on the Enuma Elish).
Teh Ten Commanments of Ceiling Cat
more cat pictures
Phaistos Disc, a fake?
News is coming from the Times Online that the Phaistos Disc is a fake:
Jerome Eisenberg, a specialist in faked ancient art, is claiming that the disc and its indecipherable text is not a relic dating from 1,700BC, but a forgery that has duped scholars since Luigi Pernier, an Italian archaeologist, “discovered” it in 1908 in the Minoan palace of Phaistos on Crete.
A fuller description of Eisenberg’s findings can be found in the most recent issue of Minerva Magazine.
I wonder what this news means for Cyrus Gordon’s Minoan hypothesis (see a recent article here).
(HT: Dr. Claude Mariottini)
The Changing Look of Dorian Gray
The most recent JBL 127 (Summer ’08 ) contains the latest round of disagreement between Roy Gane and Jacob Milgrom concerning the preposition מן, the understanding of Yom Kippur, and the way sacrifice works in Leviticus (pp. 209-22). This discussion has been going on for some time and doesn’t show signs of ending any time soon.
Gane’s 2005 book Cult and Character sets forth some interesting ideas on purification offerings and Yom Kippur in relation to theodicy. In JBL 126 (2007):161-63, Milgrom responds to a very small point of Gane’s discussion: the translation of מן in Lev 16. Gane always translates the term in a privative sense (i.e. the ablative) when used in כפר clauses. Milgrom’s 2007 response took issue with this understanding. The latest article by Gane is a rejoinder that explains more fully his understanding of the preposition and implications for the cult generally and Yom Kippur specifically.
On the immediate issue of the privative use of מן, Gane seems spot on. However, I’m still trying to work out some of the implications of his theory. For example, he states “blood is only a cultic carrier of
defilement that is downgraded by preliminary purification.” (pp. 220) Gane holds that the blood acts as a carrier of impurities away from sinners during normal חטאת sacrifices and then away from the altar on Yom Kippur.
However, I’m not sure to what extent we have enough contact for blood to act as a means of transfer during the Day of Atonement. We can see such a mechanism in play in the use of blood during the Akitu festival, but such an interpretation seems forced in Lev 16.
In vv. 14-19 the high priest sprinkles blood on cover of the Ark and the adytum. He does apply the blood through contact with the altar (v. 18), but this is between the sprinkling before and after. It seems that if the blood were carrying the impurity from the altar in v.18, it would be then sticking it to the sanctuary more generally in v.19!
If vv. 18 and 19 were flipped, one could argue that the blood is still on the high priest’s hands when the impurity is then transferred to the goat in vv.20-22, but the text as it stands doesn’t seem to support Gane’s understanding.
All this leaves me in quite a quandry. I need to reread Gane’s book now to discover if I can take his interpretation of מן while leaving his understanding of blood or if the substance of his argument too sticky to come off.
Biblical Studies Carnival XXXI
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 Lenzi 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.
Bible Geocoding
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)
Ketuvim: the Writings of James R. Getz Jr. 