Meeting Minutes
Made with the help of Jackson Pollock by Miltos Manetas.
The Recent History of History
The March 24th New Yorker has an article on “Fake memoirs, factual fictions, and the history of history” by Jill Lepore entitled Just the Facts, Ma’Am. Lepore is an American historian Harvard and as such her piece is concerned primarily with the path of historians and novel writers in recent history. However, she has an interesting tangent on ancient historians that comes via her discussion of John Burrow’s A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century.
Invention was a hallmark of ancient history, which was filled with long, often purely fictitious speeches of great men. It was animated by rhetoric, not by evidence. Even well into the eighteenth century, not a few historians continued to understand themselves as artists, with license to invent.
While this is self-evident to anyone who has spent sometime with Thucydides or Herodotus, many students of the Bible seem to ignore such thorny issues. I might have to pick up Burrow’s book and see what else he has to say.
Happy Easter
Χριστός ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη!
SBL 2008 Paper
Like Kevin and Alan I’ve also received word that my paper has been accepted for this year’s SBL National in Boston. I’ll presenting the following in the Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy section:
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Seeing Gods in CAT 1.90, 1.164 and 1.168
Within the larger corpus of Ugaritic rituals, CAT 1.90 1.164 and 1.168 constitute a distinct group. These texts contain unique rites in which the king “sees” or “visits” (√PNY) specific deities. Scholars are divided as to what these rites entail, how they function and what purpose they serve in the Ugaritic cult. The rituals have been characterized variously as contemplation rites, visitation rites, and oracular/divination rites. The present paper posits a new way forward by examining these texts within the larger social and political world of the Late Bronze Age, in which Ugarit was a small kingdom always beholden to one of the “Great Kings.” These ritual texts, where the king sees or visits the deity, have close affinities to the covenant stipulations placed upon the Ugaritic kings by their Hittite suzerains. Additional specific ritual actions in the texts confirm this understanding by using movements and gestures elsewhere equated specifically with deference to a suzerain covenant partner rather than worship of a deity. This new understanding of these texts provides a ritual correlation to the limited kingship observed in Ugaritic mythological texts such as the Baʿlu cycle and contributes new insights into the mechanics of the cult at Ugarit.
LOLCat Bible
The LOLCat Bible translation (Teh Holiez Bibul) is almost complete. I wonder what the verbosity of this new translation will be….
Evil Zwingli Meme Continues…
Kevin Wilson has tagged me in Doug Chaplin’s Zwingli Meme. The whole point of this meme seems to get back at Jim West, who has been clogging all our RSS readers with quotes from Huldrych Zwingli for years.
The rules of this meme are simple:
- Post something rude about Zwingli. (Outrageous slander especially welcome.)
- Tag someone who is not Jim West.
While most know of Huldrych Zwingli’s theological legacy, significance in the Reformed church and role as persecutor of the Anabaptists, many are unfamiliar with his influence in cinema.
As the picture to the left clearly shows, Zwingli was the inspiration behind the wizard chess king piece in the theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
Unfortunately, the production team thought it best that a visor was added to his helm because Zwingli looked like Elmer Fudd and wore lipstick and eyeliner. While this helped to insure the PG rating that the studio sought for the movie, it nonetheless obscured the reference for all but the most die-hard Zwingli fanboys.
I tag the emminent Waldensian pastor and biblical scholar John F. Hobbins.
Journeys in Gilgamesh
Next semester I will be teaching Gilgamesh as part of the Gen Ed at Temple University in a program called Mosaic. This program consists of a two semester, sophomore level rotation that works through eight themes and sixteen texts in a seminar format.
The first theme is “Journey” and the first text is Gilgamesh. In preparation for the new program, I’ve been musing on how to teach Gilgamesh as a journey by analyzing the journeys in the text itself. The major journeys I’ve come up with so far are the following:
- Journey of Enkidu from the innocence of nature to the knowledge of human civilization.
- Journey of Gilgamesh and Enkidu to Humbaba and the cedar forest.
- Journey of Gilgamesh and Enkidu from hubris to humility in Enkidu’s death.
- Journey of Gilgamesh in search of immortality.
- Journey from adolescent bravado and childlike ignorance to the world of an adult.
Obviously, the last journey is the overall theme of the work: the movement from Gilgamesh the hero to Gilgamesh the parent, husband and king with an eye to the future. While Gilgamesh and Enkidu seek journeys of adventure and fame, they are really only attempts to escape thoughts of the future, their own mortality and what will happen after their gone.
This is just a first run at trying to conceptualize the epic in this manner. Are there any other journey elements that I’m missing?
Biblical Studies Carnival XXVII is up
Kevin Wilson has posted the latest Biblical Studies Carnival over at his blog Blue Cord.
His aggregation of February’s Bible-related blogs is filled with wit and mirth.
Check it out here.
New Look
As of this month my blog is a year old (I’m such a proud daddy!).
In celebration of the anniversary, I’ve given the space a makeover. This new look is closer to what I wanted back when I started this site: dark with a nice customizable header.
The DOE has stats that light backgrounds use up to 20% more energy than dark or black ones. So, one could look at this new theme as reducing my carbon footprint and making the world a better place. Regardless, the old gray blog wasn’t what it used to be; and I needed a change.
The view of Ras Shamra is a manipulated image nicked from a University of Leiden’s article on Wilfred van Soldt. As far as I can tell, there are no copyrights attached to it; but I want to make sure to give proper credit (and recommend the short piece as well!).
Allen Guelzo on the Daily Show
It’s nice to see a former professor on TV.
Vodpod videos no longer available. from wezlo.blogspot.com posted with vodpod
Ketuvim: the Writings of James R. Getz Jr. 