Mesopotamia and McCain
Finally, something John McCain and I can agree on:
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College Stress
I’ve been thinking more of our countries undergrads as of late. This is undoubtedly influenced by my participation in the Mosaic Summer Institute at Temple. Along the lines of my last post on undergrad bachelors’ degrees, a piece in Slate by Anne Applebaum examines how High-school seniors are more stressed out than ever—just like the rest of us.
Applebaum looks at the data with an air of sadness. On the one hand, some kids in the States are working like crazy to get into the ivy-league schools, often with success. As Applebaum puts it:
Those who play the game most intensively are often rewarded: The child who takes 15 AP courses, plays the clarinet in three orchestras, runs a Cambodian refugee camp in the summer, and eschews lunch all winter really does have a better chance of getting into college than the child who plays kickball after school in the empty lot next door.
On some level that feels like it should be so. Such students should be rewarded. But on the other hand, there is another scenario in the States.
The demographics aren’t good for higher education. Almost half the kids graduating high school aren’t meeting a basic level on science. One in three doesn’t graduate high school “on time.” And for most, reading is confined to less than a half hour a day. What’s worse, in my opinion, is that “No Child Left Behind” won’t help half the problem. While it will address math, science and writing, it doesn’t address an understanding of literature or critical evaluation skills.
These two sides of students’ statistics play into the college stress. Applebaum sums up her piece nicely:
Thus are our kids both stupider than we were and harder working—though perhaps this makes sense. America is, after all, the industrialized country with the fewest paid vacations, as well as the only nation, as far as I know, that considers the “pursuit of happiness” a fundamental right. We invented the assembly line, and we invented the modern notion of “leisure.” So, welcome back to work today, if you even bothered to take Monday off. Spring is here, the beaches beckon—and you’ve only got a few weeks left to find an impressive summer job for your high-school junior.
This situation, the vast divide between the intellectual and motivational haves and have-nots, is what I find fascinating and infuriating. I’m finding myself with students who think texting is writing and the Metro is literature. It’s the lay of the land, by and large; and something that we as educators need to figure out how to deal with.
America’s Most Overrated Product
Marty Nemko has an article at the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled America’s Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor’s Degree. His piece addresses the plight of the university and, overall, faults the administrations and professors for students not performing well. While I think that the contemporary push for most/all young people to attain a Bachelor’s degree is problematic, I’m not keen on Nemko’s solutions.
Nemko thinks that we should have some sort of national standardization of universities — a packet of information on each institution like the data provided on the side of a tire. Beyond the obvious problem of equating education with a product and implying that a student’s mind is like the rubber that can be molded into whatever shape a university deems appropriate, there’s the issue of specialization.
To take one example from my own career: I think that Brandeis’ Ph.D.’s in Near East and Judaic Studies are top rate, but that doesn’t mean that our Ph.D’s in Neurology are (n.b. I have no idea what the Neuroscience department at Brandeis does, that’s my point). The standard university is more multivalent than any tire store your likely to enter.
Beyond specialization, there’s also the issue of students and faculty being moving targets. By the time any data can be comprised on the performance of students, it’s already out of date. With rapid movement of technology, the changing economic situation, and the seemingly constant reformulation of state primary and secondary educational goals, student data is constantly in flux. The same might be said for most universities as well — though systemic changes tend to move slower through higher ed.
All in all, I think that even providing all the data that Nemko recommends still wouldn’t change a thing. Apples-to-oranges comparisons based on bad data won’t do anything to help potential student make wise choices in higher education.
A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing
There seems to be yet another translation out on the market. However, this one is not buy a Bible scholar or group of scholars working together. Rather the Ancient Roots Translinear Bible (ARTB) is by one layperson (A. Frances Werner) and her desire to translate every word the same in every context. Proving again that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
In the press release, Werner is quoted as saying:
“If you look at the top 100 Hebrew words used in the Old Testament, you’ll find that only one or two words are used 100% consistently in the bestselling bibles. That means that when you are reading, you can never be sure that you are following the original Hebrew without consulting another reference book,” says A. Frances Werner.
On the official website Werner describes her methodology as such:
The Translinear method was born from a detailed scientific analysis of several bible versions… The light went on for me when I realized that the reason we needed things like cross-references and Interlinear bibles because none of the bibles that had been published to date were close enough to the original language. They have extra words, are missing many unique words, and were not utilizing English consistently with the original language. So all the classic bible study tools were needed to find out what the ancient text really said.
Notice the language: All translations are missing parts of the real Bible. No translation tells you what the Bible really says. Only this book will really give you the keys to the Kingdom.
This would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that honest people are going to buy this thing thinking that it’s what the Bible “really” says without realizing it’s based on a poor (or even no) understanding of how translation actually works.
(HT Claude Mariottini)
Happy Birthday to me
It’s my birthday! I won’t say how old I am; but I will say that I’m now older than Jesus lived to be.
Indiana Jones and the Perils of Tenure
As I’m working on reconstructing my laptop after a complete system failure and frantically preparing for a faculty lecture on Gilgamesh, I got a chuckle from this little piece on why Indiana Jones didn’t get tenure.
(HT: Kevin Wilson)
Gilgamesh Movie Project
A colleague at Temple sent around the following video adaptation of Gilgamesh. While it has some obvious flaws, it could make a fun little writing prompt for students: Where does this video adequately portray the text? Where has the video taken liberties with the story? Why might these changes have been made?
Working through a variety of texts with students over the past year has made me appreciate the importance of an audience’s expectations when speaking of predestination, freewill, determinism and the like.
In traditional tales the audience undoubtedly knows the end before the action begins. This is as true for Hector and Achilles as it is for Moses and Pharaoh. In these scenarios, foreshadowing of events takes the form of prophecy.
Authors turn common knowledge into the inescapably inevitable and set their characters lose in a world that they cannot control. For example, everyone knows that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother; what makes Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyranus a great play is how the characters react in this unchangeable situation. Similarly, everyone knows that Moses and YHWH will free the Hebrews from slavery, what matters is the ritual retelling of events to inculcate a new generation with the full story. A modern example would be Titanic — the destruction of the ship is portrayed as inevitable, what happens to the characters in the midst of the predestine situation is what’s interesting.
Into this situation, the question that nags me is can we turn this around? Does the lack of predetermination in the plot line of an ancient text indicate that the author is taking liberties with the story? Injecting something new into the traditional material? Sophocles does this in his Theban plays. He inserts new twists in the plot, novel material that he uses to knock the audience about and dissettle them even more. Aeschylus does this as well with his play The Eumenides in The Oresteia.
Can we then infer a similar procedure in other ancient texts? What about Gilgamesh? If we look at the OB version(s) and at that of Sin-liqe-unninni, can we see places where the latter is doing something new and different with the traditional material? For example, perhaps Tzvi Abusch is right in seeing the inclusion of the journey to Uta-Napishti as a unique change to the epic; perhaps Siduri is Gilgamesh’s initial goal. Does this lack of heavy-handed predetermination indicate new material in a traditional story?
While I don’t plan any time soon on using the absence of prophetic predetermination as a metric for discovering novel elements in ancient texts, the possibilities are definitely interesting.
Falling Afoul on the Fallen Ones
Dr. Claude Mariottini has a new post on those troublesome Nephilim. Since everyone loves a good human-angel lovechild, I was interested in the post. However, I’ve got some disagreements with his conclusions.
While Mariottini’s discussion mainly deals with Bruce Waltke’s An Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), he does outline his own views near the end (his full article on the subject is here):
After the people of Israel left Egypt, they came to the borders of Canaan, the land that Yahweh their God had promised to them. Before they entered the land, Moses sent 12 spies to investigate the land and its people (Num. 13). In a later passage Moses seems to place responsibility for the spies being sent on the people of Israel (Deut. 1:22). With the exception of Joshua and Caleb, the spies brought back a pessimistic report of their survey of Canaan. To 10 of the spies, the fortified walls of the Canaanite cities were an overwhelming obstacle for their conquest of the land (13:28). The spies also were terrified by the size of the inhabitants of Canaan. “They said, ‘The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them’” (Num. 13:32-33 NIV). In their exaggeration of the situation, the spies spoke to the assembly of the leaders of Israel of the terrible predicament awaiting the people of Israel. The spies added that, in addition of being people of gigantic stature, the Anakim were the Nephilim, the dreadful people who lived on earth in the days before the flood.
This then allows Mariottini to state emphatically that “the spies did not see any Nephilim for the Nephilim had died in the flood.”
While there are many points I places I disagree with Mariottini’s discussion, the one I’d like to focus on is his off-handed dismissal of Num 13.32-33. It isn’t simply that the situation of the spies is exaggerated. The text states in a parenthetical statement that the Anakim descent from the Nephilim. Let’s look at the text of v.33:
ושם ראינו את הנפילים בני ענק מן הנפלים ונהי בעינינו כחגבים וכן היינו בעיניהם
While one could possibly argue that the initial statement by the spies was an exaggeration (ושם ראינו את הנפילים) and the statement of the their feelings would definitely appear to be so (ונהי בעינינו כחגבים וכן היינו בעיניהם), neither of these concessions deals with the root of the problem: the genealogical information that the sons of Anaq came from the Nephilim.
Even if we allow the rest of the verse to be hyperbole (which I’m disinclined to do for the initial description of the inhabitants) one still needs to wrestle with this ancestral factoid. The information is not needed if the point is merely to add to the the hysterics. That is to say, it makes little sense for the spies to throw this in. Further, the fact that intertestamental works such as 1 Enoch as well as later rabbinic commentaries wrestled with these issues points out that it cannot be simply discounted as exaggeration.
The example of Og king of Bashan might be instructive at this point. According to Deut 3, Og was the last of the Rephaim and had a bed nine cubits by 4 cubits (roughly 13’x6′). Rabbinic tradition linked Og up with the Nephilim but ran across the problem of the flood. The rabbis generally held that Og had survived the flood (Niddah 61a) and came up with several ways to explain how he survived, ranging from him holding onto the back of the ark (Pirḳe R. El. xxiii.; Gen. R. xxxi. 13) to the assertion that the flood waters only came up to his ankles (Midr. Peṭirat Mosheh, i. 128). I want to be clear: I’m not making the claim that the rabbis did — that Og was somehow a Nephilim — but rather pointing out that there are ways to get around the issue of the flood and the continued existence of the Nephilim’s descendants.
So in the end, we’ve got a parenthetic statement in Num 13.33 that links the Nephilim with the Anaqim. The text does not seem to be a deliberate exaggeration that is to be taken metaphorically nor has the history of interpretation taken it that way. This of course blows the doors wide open for interpretations of who and what the Nephilim are and how their status endured into later days. But, that’s a post for another time.
Biblical Studies Carnival XXIX is up
Jim West has posted Biblical Studies Carnival XXIX over at his site. Be sure to check it out. My eschatological musings seem to have made the list this month.
Ketuvim: the Writings of James R. Getz Jr. 