Serving the Word

Judean Scholasticism and Religion on the Ground

2011-08-01T17:28:00.000-07:00

Should the literary nature of the Priestly corpus prevent us from connecting it to ancient Near Eastern religion on the ground? A generation ago, the sober answer would have been, "yes." Nobody had assessed the overall nature of the Hebrew epigraphic corpus, and we had made only desultory comparisons between the editorial character of P and that of other ancient Near Eastern ritual corpora. But now the answer may be different.

Scholars of ancient religion have long wriggled on the horns of a conundrum: the edited, Hellenistic manuscripts of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers provide overwhelmingly more explicit detail about ritual than any other set of texts -- or artifacts -- from the ancient Near East. For scholars of the Hebrew Bible, the temptation has been to triangulate a social location for these texts--the closest recent readers (Milgrom, Knohl, Schwartz) have tended to locate them in the later Iron Age (IIb). This fits well with the only reliable external evidence for literary activity in Classical Biblical Hebrew--the epigraphic record, which makes clear that the only time that this variety was systematically written was between the 8th and early 6th centuries BCE. Biblical texts from after this period show an increasing mix of Aramaic, Late Biblical Hebrew, and eventually, Persian and Greek features.

But this conclusion is beset by two potential problems, one which has been widely recognized and one that has not. First, the narrative frame of the ritual texts themselves locates them in a mythic period of folk migration, wilderness wandering, miraculous divine combat, and supernatural revelation. If this narrative is mapped onto the circumstances of Late Bronze Age history (as both maximalist and minimalist scholars of the last few generations did, each for their own ends), the situation of their writing becomes both implausible and unverifiable.

The second problem, which I have not seen fully recognized, is that of their historically unusual editorial character. Now, the literary distinctiveness of the Priestly corpus, by itself, is widely recognized among both European and Israeli scholars. What does not seem to have been done, except in a piecemeal (if provocative) fashion by scholars such as Cohen, Fishbane and Levine, is analysis of the editorial character of the Priestly corpus in comparison with the editorial character of Mesopotamian, Hittite/Hurrian, Ugaritic, or Egyptian texts. When this is done on a broader scale than that of isolated colophons (Fishbane), secrecy rubrics (Cohen, though see now the rich analysis of Lenzi), or comparisons of isolated biblical pericopes with individual Mesopotamian or Ugaritic ritual texts (Levine), it emerges that the Priestly rituals of the Torah represent a level of compilation, categorization, and reorganization unique in the Levant. And what is more, when it is taken into account that these texts are not merely rituals but temple rituals, catalogues of physical sacrificial acts, their level of systematization emerges as unique in the entire ancient Near East. While Mesopotamian ritual texts such as Maqlû, Šurpu, the various Namburbi series, and Utukkū Lemnūtu were also serialized and systematized, these were all exorcistic and heavily verbal rituals for court ritual experts (āšipu's); none are sacrificial rituals for temples, none designed for priests. Similarly, there appear to be no Hittite, Hurrian, or Egyptian corpora that not only edit together but also categorize and catalog multiple rituals for daily, monthly, annual, and ad hoc circumstantial situations.

The second problem strikes me as the more serious, and interesting. The location of ritual instructions in some sort of mythic narrative is one of the few editorial features of the Priestly texts that actually does have a very clear Near Eastern scholastic parallel, in the well-studied Marduk-Ea theme of the Mesopotamian incantations (see Falkenstein, Haupttypen, Cunningham Deliver Me From Evil!, and for a convenient summary Sanders, "A Historiography of Demons"). While it is plausible, though unprovable, that there was a historical figure like Moses (for the most detailed responsible reconstruction within the limits of current evidence see Na'aman JANER 2011), these literary texts' ascription of Priestly ritual to a historical Moses is in and of itself no more of a historical problem than Utukkū Lemnūtu's ascription of exorcistic ritual to a historical Ea: it is a literary and ritual claim.

Some scholars, especially in recent decades European ones, have attempted to solve the problem of the Priestly literature's complex editing with the chronological assumption that such compilation is more plausible in the Babylonian, Persian or even Hellenistic periods. But such assumptions have precisely the same problems as a priori assumptions of the texts' early date; they do not address the distinctive editorial character of the texts.

To advance on this problem, we would need two things: first, concrete evidence for the nature and cultural location of a Judean scholastic practice and second, ways of connecting specific Priestly texts with Levantine ritual and editorial practices--not just in history but in space. It is in this way that we may be closer to a plausible, three-dimensional view--though we are certainly not there yet.

Next: The Covenant Code, the Priestly Blessing, and Judean Scholasticism

Scribal Culture's Shadow Tradition

2011-06-03T12:17:00.000-07:00

Some of us grew up in schools and learned to read from school texts, studied thousands more of them, and then went on to make a living writing them and teaching them to others. In, you know, school.

Not shockingly, we tend to imagine texts as by and for school. Those of us who study ancient texts may then even offer ancient school (with or without little red shingled roof, and even with or without buildings) as the key to understanding their nature and purpose. And sometimes it is. Naturally, this solution is more attractive if your own formation and way of life is based on it.

But sometimes it isn't. For example, the alphabet led a diverse life in the Iron Age. Almost nobody who talks about the uses of literacy mentions that most alphabetic texts from archaic Greece are hardly educational or monumental. They're mainly about drinking and sex, and in Hexameter. Greek speakers adapted the Phoenician alphabet to write skillfuly but casually.

And almost nobody talks about the full range of West Semitic uses in the second half of the first millennium B.C.E., where the evidence of alphabetic writing is even more diverse! North Arabianist M.A.C. MacDonald points out that

Literacy seems to have been extraordinarily widespread, not only among the settled populations but also among the nomads. Indeed, the scores of thousands of graffiti on the rocks of the Syro-Arabian desert suggest that it must have been almost universal among the latter. By the Roman period, it is probable that a higher proportion of the population in this region was functionally literate than in any other area of the ancient world.

- "Ancient North Arabian" in Woodard, ed., Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages

The existing evidence is quite clear: North Arabian literacy was both more widespread and more casual than in the Levant.

[T]he major obstacle to a paleographical analysis of the Ancient North Arabian inscriptions is the fact that the vast majority of them are informal texts written by innumerable individuals who learned to write, not in schools, but casually from a companion, and whose letter-forms were not therefore part of a slowly evolving tradition, but represent a multiplicity of individual choices. An indication of this is provided by the four Safaitic abecedaries which have been discovered so far. Each is in a different letter-order and none of them bears any relation to the inherited orders of the Northwest and South Semitic alphabets. The letters have simply been arranged according to the writers’ differing perceptions of similarity in their shapes. By contrast, the only known
Dadanitic abecedary is in the South Semitic letter-order, while the unique Hismaic example more or less follows the Northwest Semitic order, but with significant differences which suggest that it was unfamiliar to the writer.

-- MacDonald, "Ancient North Arabian," and in greater detail, “On the uses of writing in ancient Arabia and the role of palaeography in Studying
them.” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 15 (2004).

When we think about the uses of writing in the first-millennium BCE Levant, we tend to begin with the big, famous corpora of Mesopotamian and Egyptian scholastic life. But we need to be aware that there was a widely distributed, and in some ways more important "stream of tradition" that was nothing at all like the schools of the city-states and empires. How do you do the paleography of this shadow tradition? What was its relationship to the cultures and polities of the period? And as passionately as some of us are drawn to big, strong empires, does the evidence suggest that texts like the Gezer, Zayit and Qeiyafa inscriptions are closer to this type of shadow tradition than they are to, say, the vast and carefully organized Mesopotamian compendia of omens and signs being written during the same period? I suspect these questions will only become more important and interesting in coming years.

Back to the Sources

2011-05-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

The only way to do social or cultural theory in Near Eastern Studies is to go back and read the original theorists, alongside the textual sources. There's no middle ground. A survey or summary can show you where to look, but reading one instead of Weber, Benveniste or Lacan is a waste of your time. And just as you can only catch epigraphically unsound readings and get new readings by looking at the inscriptions and manuscripts yourself, you can only avoid a cookie-cutter reading of Weber on bureaucracy and come to your own understanding by working through the whole article in Economy and Society.

"In reality getting the job is not even half the battle"

2011-04-18T07:51:00.000-07:00

Chris Brady with some sensible words on the fraught subject of tenure. Grad students: remember, these are the kind of problems we want to have.

Inauthentic Experience

2011-04-18T07:28:00.000-07:00

Scholars of early Jewish and Christian mysticism have often seen personal religious experience as a kind of gold standard for visionary texts. According to this assumption, autobiographical first person narrative would be the truest or most convincing evidence that someone really experienced a heavenly journey. Pseudonymity, by contrast, is a difficult and confusing mediating layer--a mask.

We can put the problem more rigorously: In linguistic terms, the question is how author (the person who created the text's content) and principal (the person who takes responsibility for the text) are aligned: are they the same? If not, how do they relate? In biblical scholarship, for example, the question of the authorship of Jeremiah or Ezekiel is about how and when author and principal align. But people who study autobiography and memoir have long recognized that the alignment of author and principal does not make a text less literary, or true.

And now, this interesting study of 40 people who confessed under interrogation to crimes they did not actually commit: 'Seven described their involvement in the crime as coming to them in a "dream" or "vision."' If one is cast in a certain role--say, of criminal who has not confessed, and is under great pressure to do so, one may have an "authentic" experience. But is it less mediated, or truer?

Apocalyptic Science?

2011-03-10T13:26:00.000-08:00

In his stunningly incisive and occasionally slipshod 1947 dissertation Occidental Eschatology, Jacob Taubes makes a strong case for how Hegel and Marx stand in the lineage of biblical prophecy and apocalyptic. He defines apocalypticism as the first scientific approach to history--with disturbing consequences for our histories of both science and history: "The science of apocalypticism can be defined as the exact numerical calculation of the end of time." Why?

The events of the world are written on the face of the divine clock, so the point is to follow the course of world history to determine the hour of the aeon. Apocalypticism is the foundation which makes universal history possible.*

Taubes' insights are too good to leave as provocative but unjustified claims. Since his time we've gotten an immense amount of new data; we even understand some of it. And based on my reading of biblical Priestly, early Jewish Enochic, and Babylonian scholarly literature, I am becoming convinced that Taubes was right in crucial ways. Next month I will be exploring the issue of apocalyptic science, and its connection to the biblical and Near Eastern foundations of universal history, in the company of a bunch of great scholars, including many more eminent than me. Early next month, ISAW will host a conference I am co-organizing with Jonathan Ben-Dov on Ancient Jewish Sciences and the History of Knowledge.

Take a look and please RSVP if you're interested--we'd love to see you there!

*Occidental Eschatology. tr. David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009 [1947]) 32-33

Revelation and Science in Early Judaism

2011-02-25T10:16:00.000-08:00

Thursday, March 3 at 6pm I'll be speaking at ISAW on:

Revelation and science in early Judaism: Babylonian sages, heavenly temples, and the recovery of a lost moment in the history of knowledge

Strangely, the oldest known Jewish apocalyptic work, the Astronomical Book of Enoch, also contains the first known mathematics and astronomy in a Jewish text. Did the Hellenistic period represent the dawn of a kind of scientific thought in Judaism? If so, what did it have to do with the Babylonian background of the richly mythic, and even mystical, figure of Enoch? Clearly something new was dawning, for which current historical frameworks (such as Hellenization or other sorts of assimilation) are not quite adequate. Recently, scholars have argued for integrating these texts into the history of science. But how would we decide if "science" is the the category we want? A striking problem emerges when one compares the divergent reasons scholars have given for why texts like the Astronomical Book should be called science: it seems easier to agree that it is science than to specify why. The goal of this talk is to explore analogies within biblical and early Jewish texts themselves to compare with modern characterizations of ancient science. To do this I will examine categories that can be found in the language of the Biblical Hebrew Priestly work and the Standard Literary Aramaic Books of Enoch. In particular I will sketch one major element of Enoch's conceptual background: Priestly categorizations of what we (but probably not the Priestly writers) might call the "natural world" in Genesis 1-2:4a, Exodus 25-31, and Leviticus 12-15. I will then explore an important, but previously unnoticed, way that the editors of the Astronomical Book and the Book of the Watchers framed the knowledge revealed to Enoch. A recurring Aramaic phrase in this integrative framework, "I was shown another calcluation", displays a syntax with a distinctive grammatical encoding of epistemology, a category linguists refer to as evidential. Enoch's evidentials make claims about how Enoch knew what he knew. They can therefore help us reflect on the analytical category of "science" in a way that is sensitive to the divergent ancient theories of knowledge underlying our texts, and come closer to understanding how ancient Jewish scientists understood themselves.

The talk is at the NYU Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 E. 84th St, in New York.

For much more on this, come to the Ancient Jewish Sciences and the History of Knowledge conference April 4; participants will include James VanderKam, Loren Stuckenbruck, Mladen Popovic, Jonathan Ben-Dov, Alexander Jones, Annette Yoshiko Reed, and me.

Social Theory at the Barrel of an Auto-9

2010-12-08T15:39:00.000-08:00

The moment I really got into social theory was when I realized it could kill people, at least in action movies.

In college I took classes on Greek Heroes and Oral Literature with Greg Nagy, the person who showed me that social theory could play together with ancient texts. He didn't impose theory on Classics to show he was more sophisticated than Homer, but to bring out Homer's distinctiveness and, if I can say this, blood—the disturbing, rooted vitality of an ancient document that our careful, pristine treatment can bleed dry.

For me the definitive Nagy moment was when he'd explained Performative Utterances in class, those sentences that do something precisely by talking about it, like “I now pronounce you man and wife.” He was showing Robocop, of all things, to illustrate concepts of the hero.

The background: "In a dystopian future, the city of Detroit, Michigan is on the verge of collapse due to financial ruin and unchecked crime" (you can't make this stuff up) The city has outsourced its police force to Omni Consumer Products and its corrupt president, Dick Jones, who is also on the city council. Robocop is a veteran cop killed in a drug raid and resurrected by OCP into a man-machine hybrid with a big gun. Instead of a conscience he has four rules programmed in. The first three are to serve the public trust, protect the innocent and uphold the law. And there's a classified fourth directive: he can't harm any member of OCP. But we find out that the big problems in the city are actually being caused by Jones himself, who has sent his evil all-machine robots to kill Robocop, and played him a video death sentence.

Robocop survives, and with the death sentence still implanted in his flash memory, fights his way to the top of the city council's skyscraper and plugs himself into their meeting room computer's USB to unmask Jones in wide-screen before the whole council. Jones puts a gun to the mayor's head and demands ransom and an escape route. Robocop, despite his massive artillery, is paralyzed by the fourth directive. But then he gets an idea. Turning to the mayor, he asks, “don't you have something to say to him?” The mayor turns to his captor: “Dick, you're fired!” Robocop is freed to pull the trigger, and the impact propels the villain through a huge window and 100 stories down to earth in a blizzard of glass.

And that was my first experience of blown away by a linguistic concept.

--this discussion of violent action movies and philology is an outtake from a great interview Doug Mangrum did with me; check it out!

Unpacking

2010-11-18T05:58:00.001-08:00

As a lead-up to the Society of Biblical Literature meeting, we at Serving the Word are unboxing ideas that have been rattling around our head. Up next: An interview with Douglas Mangrum at Biblia Hebraica, plus How Robocop blowing someone out a plate glass window taught me social theory!

Scribes and Craftsmen, Inscriptions and Audiences in the Iron Age Levant: Some Modest Proposals

2010-11-18T00:57:00.000-08:00

"All writing has the capacity to be both looked at and read, to be present as material and to function as the sign of an absent meaning." Words are never simply "ideas"; they are ideas anchored to and expressed through things in the material world. That "thing" may be the human voice, or it may be a set of stone tablets, but it is, somehow, a medium and thus, in some sense, material. ... we cannot divorce the significance of a sign from its material qualities because, as Jerome McGann stresses, "language is always materialized and embodied in one form or another."

--Matthew Engelke, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church, 10-11

For the Ugaritic god of craftsmanship and magic, Kotharu-wa-Hasisu, words were material things. Maker of bows and palaces splendid enough for gods to crave, he had impeccable credentials as an armorer. But in the Baal epic's most famous battle scene he literally bludgeons the sea-god Yammu to death with a pair of sentences. The gigantic warrior Baal stands passively as Kotharu activates the incantations with a word; they spin in his hands and slam into his enemy. The terrifying Yammu, who had intimidated all the gods, is felled by a pair of phrases— self-referential ones at that.

Today we work in the opposite way from Kotharu, treating language as basically immaterial, only accidentally borne by inscriptions and ostraca. Philologists typically publish texts without much analysis of what they look like, prying apart scribe and inscriber. When we interpret the inscriptions we separate them from the objects and contexts that bear them. We also do not go into much depth about where they are, and what that means: Geographically, we tend to give little thought to the precise distribution of texts across landscapes and regions. And no standard edition of a corpus of Iron Age linear alphabetic texts presents the words as their ancient audiences saw them: as physical, visual things in space.

Hence, a set of modest proposals, or theses nailed to the door of the internet, on the human relationships that made our inscriptions.

1. There is no history of writing, only a history of genres of writing. Because genres are the most basic way that communication is socially organized, it is difficult to make any meaningful statement about writing's use without considering its markers of relationship to human social organization.
2. The idea of a strict division of labor between literate scribes and illiterate craftsmen has little to no support in the Iron Age IIb Levant. Their relationships played out differently among different communities, and when we attend to the distinct evidence of each site we can expect to find different configurations. The people who cast texts in linguistic form and the people who chiseled them into physical forms were sometimes one and the same, sometimes worked closely together, and sometimes had nothing to do with one another.
3. The starkest example of an inscription carved for the carvers themselves is the Siloam tunnel inscription, a well-composed and beautifully incised monument to the work of anonymous stonecutters. Nobody but craftsmen and technicians would ever have seen this text, unique in the entire architectural history of the ancient Near East in being an anonymous building inscription. Beginning, “this is the tunnel, and this is the story of the tunnel,” it is quite literally a signature on a massive work of stonecutting.
4. Examples of close coordination between text-composer and image-carver might be found in the inscriptions from Zinjirli, where the same artistic techniques are used to produce both words and images in one well-organized visual space. Yet this still does not tell us whether the carvers could read, or collaborated with scribes on a carefully prepared wax tablet. Certainly the languages of Zinjrli inscriptions were not directly determined by local speech. Identified by Dennis Pardee as representing several related dialects of Ya'udic Aramaic, the history of alphabetic writing at this site points to bigger problems. Beginning with Phoenician and ending with standard Aramaic, the different texts may instead represent different choices. The variety within Ya'udic suggests not several dialects but multiple attempts at adapting one local variety to a regional Aramaic standard. Like the surprisingly varied representations of the dead, the languages of the inscriptions may also be the result of negotiations between patrons and craftsmen, and vary from instance to instance based on local desires: custom cars, not mp3s.
5. The near-total disconnect between image-maker and scribe may be found in the text wrapped around the Tel Fekheriye statue. Its two bilingual dedications to Hadad, themselves internally hybrid, seem to either enrobe or deface the ruler's image, whose presence they carefully point out in words strikingly cognate with the biblical terms for the image and likeness of God.
6. “Dialects” may be as much art objects as individual monuments and images. This does not mean that they are not vital sources of information for language, but that the grammar of an inscription is no more of a tape recording of a local dialect than the image on a monument is a snapshot of its patron. In the Iron Age Levant, despite invaluable work on dialect geography, there are disturbing ways that dialect is not geographical.
7. In a world where to read is to publish and “readers” may include anyone within earshot, the concept of “literacy” may be worse than useless. We should seriously consider abandoning it in favor of more concrete and illuminating ways to talk about how people used writing.
--more modest proposals to come--

Cuneiform Law from the Hazor Tablet Room?

2010-07-19T12:43:00.000-07:00

from Amnon Ben-Tor, Sharon Zuckerman and Wayne Horowitz:

The Selz Foundation Hazor Excavations in Memory of Yigael Yadin have recovered two fragments of a cuneiform tablet preserving portions of a law code at Hazor.

The text parallels portions of the famous Law Code of Hammurabi, and, to a certain extent even the Biblical “tooth for a tooth”. The team is presently working its way down towards a monumental structure dating to the Bronze Age, where more tablets are expected to be found.

The tablet is currently being studied at the Hebrew University. More details to follow as soon as possible...

There was always good reason to believe there was a tablet room there, and it looks like they're digging right above it now. What's at stake? Among the Late Bronze Age cuneiform texts from Israel-Palestine are several exemplars of distinctively "Western" variants of the second-millennium "stream of tradition" in which scribes were trained. Until now, every fragment unearthed has represented a local version, which diverges greatly or subtly from the standard Mesopotamian versions. Even if they, God willing, find hundreds of tablets, it still won't give us a complete picture because there are major LBA sites like Megiddo from which we have almost nothing preserved. But at a minimum, more about the relationships with mainstream Mesopotamian culture will be revealed: we may finally get a real picture of how distinctive the cuneiform culture of the Southern Levant really was! And at a maximum? Anything could happen.

Of course, if it is indeed Late Bronze Age it may not tell us anything more about whether or not the Covenant Code is really a late Iron Age subversion of the Laws of Hammurabi, as David Wright has recently argued. More on this (a good while) later.

Hebrew's Early Ancestors and the Beginnings of International Relations: A Context for the Jerusalem Fragment

2010-07-18T20:52:00.000-07:00

The Amarna letters come from a diplomatic archive dating to the mid-14th-century B.C.E. First discovered by locals in 1887 in Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, they represent the majority of 381 tablets from the royal headquarters of the Egyptian Pharaohs Amenophis III and his son Akhenaten (the famous monotheistic heretic king immortalized in Freud's brilliant fantasy, Moses and Monotheism)

The newly discovered Jerusalem fragment may be a century older or later than the Amarna letters. But because they represent such a rich body of written evidence from the Late Bronze Age Levant, they provide some context for this intriguing scrap--indeed, in addition to the tantalizing hope of more fragments, maybe the best thing this discovery can do is direct us back to these remarkable texts, which still have more to tell us.

My teacher Raymond Westbrook called them the beginnings of international relations because for the first time we see a single complex political system spanning the entire ancient Near East, from the far reaches of Anatolia through Mesopotamia and the Levant down to Egypt. Its cosmopolitanism is signaled by the fact that the system is centered on Egypt but almost all communication is written in Babylonian. We see new "superpowers" like Assyria push their way onto the stage and established ones like Babylon struggle to keep their status. We see remarkable spectacles of excess and decay: While the established powers make jaw-droppingly lavish demands for shipments of each others' gold, doctors, and daughters, the little powers of the Levant protest that the empire is slipping through the Pharoah's grasp, falling prey to conspiracies and bandits. The most abundant of this corpus of protests is the writing of Rib-Addi of Byblos, who has been called a Late Bronze Age Job for his relentless poetic outcries against injustice--though the god he addressed was the Egyptian Pharoah.

But to me as a linguist and student of Hebrew, the most interesting thing about the Amarna letters is the language of these protests. The letters from the Levant are written in a remarkable way, using Babylonian (that is, a type of Akkadian) script and vocabulary but a great deal of Canaanite word order and forms. These "Canaano-Akkadian" texts are our first documents written in a grammar ancestral to Hebrew. William Moran, the greatest American scholar of the Amarna letters, produced a complete and reliable translation which is the starting point for anyone who wants to study them for themselves.

They are also the source of an extremely interesting linguistic controversy. Scholars debate whether Canaano-Akkadian was a language anyone spoke, or whether it was even a language in the usual sense. After Anson Rainey's monumental work put the philology and grammar of the texts on a solid new footing, the most important linguistic study has been by the Israeli scholar Shlomo Izre’el. Izre'el argued that most of the letters represent a mixed language (in some ways like Haitian Creole, also based on the vocabulary from one language--French--with a different grammar). He finds evidence that it was spoken by a small group of people—the scribes of the letters. But he also pointed to remarkable diversity in the letters’ relation to language: some reflect local dialect differences, but at least a few were purely mental notes to the scribe, never intended to be spoken. I have argued that the letters’ grammar does not neatly fit the cross-linguistic profile of mixed languages, which come from situations of bilingual speech, not writing.

This debate continues as I write. Eva von Dassow established a new direction in the texts’ study by viewing them as the expression of a sharp break between writing and language. She argued that the texts were composed purely in Canaanite, but encoded in Babylonian vocabulary and writing. Rather than being read, syllable by syllable, as Babylonian words with Canaanite grammar, the Babylonian signs would be decoded and read out, entirely in Canaanite. Izre'el is currently preparing a new statement on the language of the Levantine texts, responding to the arguments that von Dassow and I have made.

For the Jerusalem fragment, the take-home point is that the Levant in the Late Bronze Age was a very cosmopolitan world. While the fragment may be a century earlier than the Amarna texts--from a time when the Levant was being (re)conquered by Egypt and Hurrian mercenaries--or a century later, at the time when the great Canaanite myths of Ugarit were being written down--this world of multiple languages and cultures will have been part of its context. My Johns Hopkins colleague Christopher Rollston has an excellent blog post that provides an overview, along with important notes on the reading of the tablet from two of the world's greatest experts on the language of this time period, John Huehnergard and Wilfred van Soldt. For what I consider to be the single reliable piece of linguistic evidence about the fragment, and the six texts that can tell us about its general political context, see my posts below.

(Relatively) Clear New Linguistic Light on the Jerusalem Fragment

2010-07-17T16:54:00.000-07:00

Grammatical analysis shows that the new fragment cannot plausibly have been written by the scribe who wrote any of the other contemporary Jerusalem letters. This is because the one clearly recognizable verb in the Jerusalem fragment is in a different dialect from that of the existing Jerusalem letters from Amarna. If this verb is any guide, the scribe of the new fragment had significantly different speech and/or schooling from the scribe of the previously known letters.

Everything posted about the text so far has pointed to the uncertain aspects of the text: genre, contents, exact dating, exact nature of the sign-forms, restoration of the few visible signs. This is absolutely right. Delbert Hillers, the man who taught me Semitic philology, warned us to start from what was most certain to avoid the trap of obscurum per obscurius, “explaining the obscure with the even more obscure.”

If so, this new discovery can't tell us anything much about the language and culture of its writer. But one crucial, and telling, grammatical point has not yet been made clear.

In his thorough study of the script and language of the Jerusalem letters, William Moran, the old master of Amarna studies, pointed out a pattern in the grammar of the letters which formed a remarkable contrast with the other letters from the region of Syria-Palestine:

“Certainly the most striking feature of the Jerusalem scribe's language, though so far it has not been recognized, is its large Assyrian component.” (2003:265) He goes on to note sporadic Assyrianisms that appear in other Amarna letters in the formation of nouns and pronouns--but not verbs, concluding that “those of the Jerusalem letters are unique.” Of these striking Assyrianisms, those in the verbal system are especially widespread and “Verbs primae aleph3-5 are consistently (13x) treated as in Assyrian.”* (267) In the case of the infinitive, in both cases where we would expect the Standard Babylonian form with e-vowels in both syllables, we instead find: erāba (EA 286:43, for Bab. erēba) and ezābi (EA 287:62, for Bab. ezēbi). Because the pattern occurs with no exceptions in all 13 cases, with every I-e verbal root being treated this way, it is far stronger than if we had only these two infinitives.

Now, it so happens that there is only one completely preserved verbal form in the Jerusalem fragment. The editors, reading a set of three very clear signs, read:

4' i-pé-ša x [ … to do . [ …

Here the editors lay out the situation well:

.“In obverse line 4', there may be a clear indication of Amarna type phraseology, which one would expect in a royal letter of the Late Bronze Age. Here one finds i-pé-ša, which appears to be a writing for the infinitive of epēšu, ‘to do’, also attested in Hazor 10:19, perhaps from the Lebanon, and in EA 79:24 and 129:27 in letters from Rib-Hadda of Gubla (Byblos). Thus, this phrase, and consequently the tablet’s scribe, just might be from what is now northern Israel or Lebanon. However, three scattered examples do not a rule make.” (Mazar, Horowitz, Oshima and Goren 2010:12)

But if this were from the writer of any of the known Jerusalem letters, the form would have been epāša, not ipēša! Instead of the expected Assyrian second vowel a, we see the standard Babylonian e. And in the first syllable what we find instead is an example of a phenomenon analyzed in detail by Shlomo Izre'el (1987), the most sophisticated student of the linguistic aspects of the letters, in which the initial e- of verbs switches to i-. Since the phenomenon is most widespread in the variety known as Amurru Akkadian, which does not always show Canaanite influence, we cannot say this is a local phenomenon—although it does also appear sporadically in the letters written in Canaan (to the editors' examples of this form, add the example Taanach 2:11, from a century earlier: “if the bow is finished being made (ipēšam)” (Horowitz, Oshima and Sanders 2006:133), as noted by Rainey 1996 I 37).

If this one verb is actually representative of the writer's language, what does it tell us? What it says is that the fragment could have been written a century before the Amarna letters, or even at the same time, but it was not by the writer of the letters we know. And so it broadens, incrementally but significantly, our picture of written culture at Jerusalem: we now know there was more than one Babylonian dialect being written here during the Late Bronze Age.

*See below for a fuller grammatical investigation.

Bibliography

Cochavi-Rainey, Zipora, and Anson Rainey. 2007. "Finite Verbal Usage in the Jerusalem Amarna Letters," Ugarit-Forschungen 39: 37-56.

Horowitz, Wayne, Takayoshi Oshima, and Seth Sanders. 2006. Cuneiform in Canaan: Cuneiform Sources from The Land of Israel in Ancient Times. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society.

Izre'el, Shlomo. 1987. "The Complementary Distribution of the Vowels e and i in the Peripheral Akkadian Dialect of Amurru – A Further Step towards Our Understanding of the Development of the Amarna Jargon." In Proceedings of the Fourth International Hamito-Semitic Congress (Marburg, 20-22 September 1983), ed. Herrmann Jungraithmayr and Walter W. Müller. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science. Series IV: Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, no. 44. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 525-541.

Knudtzon, J.A. 1915. Die el-Amarna-Tafeln. Anmerkungen und Register bearbeitet von C. Weber und E. Ebeling. (Vorderasiatische Bibliothek, 2.) 2 volumes. Leipzig.

Mazar, Eilat, Wayne Horowitz, Takayoshi Oshima, and Yuval Goren. 2010. "A Cuneiform Tablet from the Ophel in Jerusalem" IEJ 60:4-21.

Moran, William. 1975. The Syrian Scribe of the Jerusalem Amarna Letters. In Unity and Diversity. Essays in History, Literature and Religion of the Ancient Near East, ed. H. Goedicke and J. J. M. Roberts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. 146-166. [=Moran 2003:249-274]

———. 2003. Amarna Studies: Collected Writings. Harvard Semitic Studies, no. 54. Edited by John Huehnergard and Shlomo Izre’el. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.

Grammatical Background

There is an essential bibliography and bare-bones but up-to-date online edition of the letters.

I am grateful to Wilfred van Soldt, an eminent scholar of cuneiform culture, for reminding me to be sure of the full range of grammatical possibilities for the form here. In particular, in the wider cuneiform world a Middle Babylonian/late Old Babylonian first- or third-person singular durative plus ventive ippeša is at least possible.

But it seems that this was not the form people used for the I-e durative in the Late Bronze Age Levant; at least in the Amarna corpus the pattern is striking. Knudtzon (1915:II 1402) registers about 45 examples of the G durative of epēšu. Of these, 37 have a theme-vowel -u-, 8 show a (presumably) Assyrian-influenced -a- vowel, and none have -e-. This means that, while such a form would be well in place in a normal OB text, it's unlikely in this place and time. The infinitive remains the only likely reading.

Cochavey-Rainey and Rainey's important article (2007) does argue for one exception to Moran's pattern of Assyrian vocalization for epēšu: the form e-pu-uš in EA 286:14, where the writing is ambiguously preterite (as Moran interprets it, fitting his pattern) or durative (as Cochavey-Rainey and Rainey argue). I am not certain about the syntax, but for forms with past/punctual reference after interrogatives in the Jerusalem corpus see the suffix form in 289:10 am-mi-nim LUGAL-ri la-a ša-al-šu “why has the king not questioned him” (as Cochavi-Rainey and Rainey 2007:51 render it) and more proximately the parallel to our verb at the beginning of 286:5 ma-an-na ep-ša-ti a-na LUGAL EN-ia “what have I done to my lord the king”? So Abdi-Heba begins his discourse on this topic with a parallel construction referring to a single past criminal act, and it is then at least possible to render 286:14 as "why would I have committed a crime against my lord the king?" While we can't rule out this one exception as possible, it would leave us with no certain counterexamples to the pattern of Assyrian vocalization of I-e verbs.

Consider Jerusalem! The Political Status of Jerusalem in the 14th Century B.C.E

2010-07-15T18:10:00.001-07:00

“Consider Jerusalem! This neither my father nor my mother gave to me. The strong hand of the king gave it to me.” – EA 287:24-28

What do the earliest texts from Jerusalem say about its political status? Our evidence consists of six letters dating from the 14th century B.C.E., written by a man named Abdi-Heba, who describes himself as a “soldier,” rather than a “king” or even a “mayor.” They describe deteriorating military conditions: Abdi-Heba begs repeatedly for a single unit of archers to defend Jerusalem, which will otherwise be lost to bandits and the treachery of other local rulers.

Abdi-Heba was sure the Pharoah was ignoring him, and he was probably right.* Like many other diplomatic letters from the region, they are addressed in a pleading tone to the Egyptian Pharoah and were found in the archive of a large imperial bureaucracy, the ancient Egyptian “Foreign Service” in the royal capital of Amarna. From the obsequious notes to the scribe found at the end of four of the five well-preserved letters, it is clear that Abdi-Heba knew the Pharoah would never read them, and would only hear of their contents if he flattered the agent in charge of the “Syria Desk,” as the great Assyriologist Leo Oppenheim described it.

William Moran noted long ago** that Abdi-Hepa describes his status as ruler in a unique way, not found in any of the 380 or so other Amarna letters. His plea to “Consider Jerusalem!” repeats a theme that appears in four of the five well-preserved letters. In the careful translation of William Moran, the other passages read:

“Behold, I am not a mayor; I am a soldier of the king, my lord. Behold, I am a friend (?) of the king and a tribute-bearer of the king. It was neither my father nor my mother, but the strong arm of the king that placed me in the house of my father.” EA 288:9-15

“I am not a [mayor]; I am a soldier [for the king, my lord.]” EA 285:5-6

Why does he keep telling the Pharoah he's not a mayor? His rhetorical purpose is clearest in this passage: “Seeing that, as far as I am concerned, neither my father nor my mother put me in this place, but the strong arm of the king brought me into my father's house, why should I of all people commit a crime against the king, my lord?” 286:9-15. His peers, the mayors, have been accusing him to the Pharoah.

To defend himself against charges of treason, and quite unlike a typical king, Abdi-Heba insists repeatedly that he did not inherit his position! His rhetorical point is this: it is precisely because of his lack of conventional legitimacy that he is the king's man in a way that none of the other local rulers all. Rather, he owes his power not to inheritance but gained it entirely through the Pharoah's military force: Jerusalem was either conquered by Egyptian forces or mercenaries in Egyptian employ. Abdi-Heba may have been a local mercenary leader (the goddess in his name is Hurrian) or from a local family with a claim—or aspiration-- to power: it depends on how literally one takes his reference to the king putting him in his father's house (not “returning” him, as Mari letters refer to the restoration of a dynasty).

Whom does the ruler of Jerusalem consider his peers? The only people to whom he compares himself are the haziannu, a term Moran translates “mayor.” The term is well-known and its translation is uncontroversial: here is how the major dictionaries render it:
Concise Dictionary of Akkadian “mayor, village headman”
CAD “chief magistrate of a town, of a quarter of a larger city, a village or large estate—mayor, burgomaster, headman”
AhW “Bürgermeister”

Is it possible that there is a split in political designations—that Abdi-Heba's self-designation is merely self-abnegating rhetoric, and that he was called a king at home? After all, in the 9th-century Assyrian-Aramaic bilingual from Tel Fekheriye, the ruler calls himself “governor” in the cuneiform portion but “king” in the Aramaic version. Fortunately we can have good evidence for at least one local ruler: Ugarit was a major city-state of the Late Bronze Age, from which both substantial native archives and diplomatic letters to Egypt were preserved. We know that the king of Ugarit was called a king in native documents but was politically subservient to both Hatti and Egypt during this period. Did he deny his native kingship to the Pharoah?

No: in EA 47:14-19 Ammishtamru or Niqmaddu complains that “[to a]ll the messengers of [other?] kings [you gi]ve your tablet...to me, however, [and to] my messengers [you have not giv]en your tablet...” Similarly, in EA 49, Niqmaddu of Ugarit demands that the king give him as a gift two Cushite palace attendants and a physician: a move that clearly assumes a level of reciprocity Abdi-Heba wouldn't dream of.

Thus, on current evidence, the only known ruler of Jerusalem in the 14th century B.C.E. considered himself a military commander, on par with mayors and village headmen.

In the exemplary publication of the new Jerusalem fragment by Eilat Mazar, Yuval Goren, and my colleagues Wayne Horowitz and Takayoshi Oshima, Mazar makes clear that no Late Bronze Age structures have been discovered yet: ““Like in the Ophel excavations, no architectural remains earlier than the Iron Age IIa were found during Mazar’s City of David excavations,” p. 5

Given that we have no idea of the extent of settlement, I concur with Christopher Rollston that the press release's claim that the letter comes from a “king” and that Jerusalem was a “major center” at the time is premature. The press release, naturally, speaks modern language and draws on modern assumptions about what constitutes political importance. People in ancient Canaan--including the writers of the Amarna letters--did not necessarily share these assumptions. And the fragment--the linguistic features of which haven't been fully discussed--and Abdi-Heba's situation are important for reasons I'll discuss in the next post.

==================
Notes:
*As Leo Oppenheim wrote, “We cannot and will not know whether the letters written in Akkadian and Hittite to the Egyptian court were ever read to the Pharoah or just filed in the archives of the Foreign Office, we cannot opt for either of the offered possibilities, both of which may in some way have corresponded to reality.”

EA 316 “seems to show that the correspondence coming from Palestine and Syria was brought not directly before the Egyptian king but rather to the 'Syrian desk' in the Foreign Office, to be referred then to the specific departments according to the content of individual letters." -"A Note on the Scribes in Mesopotamia" Assyriological Studies 16 (1965) 253-56

**Moran, William L. 1975. “The Syrian Scribe of the Jerusalem Amarna Letters,” in Unity and Diversity: Essays in the History, Literature, and Religion of the Ancient Near East (ed. H. Goedicke and J. J. M. Roberts; Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press) 146-166.

Obscene Pseudepigrapha and What Dead Sea Scrolls Scholars Could Learn from Fredric Jameson

2010-04-17T08:07:00.001-07:00

Behind [Jameson's] project lay the understanding that social life is ‘a seamless web, a single inconceivable and transindividual process, in which there is no need to invent ways of linking language events and social upheavals or economic contradictions because on that level they were never separate from one another.’

Benjamin Kunkel showcases the demand that social theory makes on philology in his lively LRB introduction to Jameson: texts are woven in a seamless web with life, and if our work doesn't register this, our work is inadequate. Scholars of ancient Judaism have begun vigorous attempts to do this, but I'm not sure it's quite happened yet. Carol Newsom's careful and pioneering Self as Symbolic Space has as its goal investigating how the Qumran community

constituted itself as a sectarian society. Key to the formation of the community was the reconstruction of the identity of individual members...Persons who came to experience themselves in light of the narratives and symbolic structures embedded in the community practices would have developed the dispositions of affinity and estrangement necessary for the constitution of a sectarian society.

It begins with a clarion call to see how the Scrolls interanimate, that is, how living human beings would have formed themselves together with the texts they read and prayed. The potential is nothing less than an empirically based view of texts in practice. A mere four hours of a life of devotion in the desert might draw on five different texts of five different genres. A devotee might arise with a particular prayer on his lips, wash himself according to specific rules, see by the sun that the year had advanced further into a period of light, know by signs on his own body that he himself had this many portions of cosmic light in him, and sing together with his fellow members a song portraying the singing and movement of angelic bodies in a heavenly temple awash in unseen light. An average snippet of a day would not just "refer to" but act out, and not just act out in isolation but enact in mutually informing practice, genres of private prayer, ritual law, calendar, physiognomy, and communal prayer.

But the rest of Newsom's book reverts to "merely" an excellent piece of scrolls scholarship: a literary reading of two big texts in succession. A column-by-column close reading of the Community Rule followed by a column-by-column close reading of the Hymns of the community. The notion of interanimation is basically dropped (I'm not sure if the word, let alone the analysis, occurs after the beginning), and the clarion call fades, though the quality of her analysis never lets us forget its promise. What remains is a model of how one might read personal experience off of the literary features of individual texts, but also the nagging question of how much further Newsom could have gone.

The tools exist for us to push responsibly further: the linguistic anthropologist Robin Shoaps, who has recently published an important study of the social life of a remarkable piece of a Guatemalan village's communally produced obscene Pseudepigrapha, The Testament of Judas, has articulated a theory of "communicative ecology" that synthesizes key insights about genre from Mikhail Bakhtin and participation from Erving Goffman. It might help us put our intuitions about interanimation to work in new ways.

Why good social theory is like Midrash

2010-04-17T07:43:00.000-07:00

One trait of postmodernism unmentioned by Jameson was the special difficulty critics and thinkers of recent generations have experienced in conveying their thoughts except through the medium of someone else’s; intellectuals today tend to offer their commentary on the world by way of comments on another’s commentary. Jameson has been unique, however, in his extremes of inclusion or ventriloquism. He seems to have detected some aspect of the truth in virtually any body of work he’s discussed, and so to have recruited more, and more various, thinkers into the march of his own thoughts than any rival theorist.

Empires and Alphabets: The Bible as Political Communication

2010-04-12T07:33:00.001-07:00

A talk I'm giving at Wellesley tonight, hosted by the estimable Ed Silver.

First Thought on The Qeiyafa Ostracon

2010-04-11T21:00:00.000-07:00

The ostracon discovered in July 2008 at Khirbet Qeiyafa hints at a new direction for cultural interaction in the early Iron Age southern Levant: not only is it the longest known Proto-Canaanite inscription and the only letter we have in that script, it also suggests a literal new direction in how its writer formed its letters, and thus about how some people at that time learned to write. The direction in which it has heretofore been taken is rather older. It quickly caught the public and scholarly imagination for reasons that may not have had much to do with what is new about the text: both newspaper reports and academic statements dated it to the tenth century B.C.E. and portrayed it as the earliest Hebrew inscription. They suggested it proved that David or Solomon's kingdom existed, the historicity of both having been hotly--and polemically--debated in recent decades.

But as the text's publishers, Misgav, Garfinkel and Ganor carefully and clearly point out, the text's script is strikingly remote from that of every known Hebrew inscription. What I do not understand is why they don't point out that each decipherable word, as well as the one discernible syntactic unit, could as well be Aramaic. The issue with the script is clear. All legible letters fit well with excavated examples of the Proto-Canaanite script from the 13th-11th centuries such as the Izbet Sartah ostracon, the Qubur-el-Walaida handle, and the Zarephath and Beth-Shemesh ostraca, and shows a glaring contrast with the new Phoenician-style script of the 10th century.

As was immediately pointed out by the most experienced scholars of Proto-Canaanite: Aaron Demsky (in the Hebrew publication of the text), Allan Millard (personal communication), and Kyle McCarter (ditto), the one thing we know about its direction is that it was not written right-to-left, the direction of every known ancient Hebrew inscription from the earliest at Kuntillet 'Ajrud to the later Qumran texts. Weirdly, and intriguingly, nobody can say with complete confidence in which direction the text *was* written, since most characters assume a left-to-right stance but a few important ones suggest the text was written top-down. While the strongest indicators--the waw of lines 1 and 2 and the kaf of line 4--point to a left-to-right orientation, like Ugaritic, much Proto-Canaanite, or modern English, the alef and bet make little sense with a left-to-right orientation, and can only be easily read if the inscription was written top-to-bottom, like other Proto-Canaanite inscriptions or many of their Egyptian prototypes. The novelty of this is that it strongly suggests that the text's writer was 1) exposed to writing with both directions and 2) had no conception of a *standard*, an idea that there was a single correct way to write. Instead, he seems to have written the earliest letters of the alphabet according to one technique, and some of the others according to a second. This suggests that the writer's learning was gathered eclectically and his training casual.

But the language of the text as so far deciphered is dialectally ambiguous--a fact that you won't necessarily get if you read the reports, since they sometimes hinge on a word that might not be there. The inscription could as easily represent 1) the earliest example of Aramaic--of the portions of the text that are agreed on by each of the experienced epigraphers who have treated it (Misgav, Yardeni, Demsky, and Ahituv) all the complete identified roots עבד, מלכ, שפט, אל are found in both ancient Aramaic and Hebrew; syntactically the verbs עבד and שפט are well in place in Aramaic. Crucially, the phrase x אלתעש ends in a smudged character that could be qof, resh or less plausibly tav, each of which results in a root present in both Aramaic and Hebrew. Given the presence of this abraded but highly probable character it is unsafe to read the distinctive Southern Levantine עשי root, attested only in Hebrew and Moabite of this period. The syntax of 'al + prefix form is the standard Northwest Semitic prohibitive in this period, equally at home in Phoenician, Aramaic and Hebrew. 2) The text could be the earliest close ancestor of the dialect which would later be labeled Judean by biblical writers, and Hebrew in the postbiblical period (each label having ideological dimensions of its own). As we'll see, its appearance in this form may be equally unsettling to our assumptions about what ancient Israelites should or should not be doing with language. 3) The text could represent a previously unattested Northwest Semitic variety, like the language of the Deir Alla inscription, the main features of which preserve a stage before the split between Aramaic and Canaanite.

That is precisely why we should be excited about the aspects of this artifact that violate our presuppositions about early Iron Age language and culture: they tell us something genuinely new, and help free us from the anachronisms with which our interpretation of both the biblical text and Levantine history are encrusted. In the next installment: why the publishers' proposal to date this text to the 10th century is more subversive of a literate United Monarchy than the 12th-11th century range that epigraphy suggests. Then: crucial readings from Yardeni, Ahituv, Demsky, methodological points from Rollston, and insights from John Hobbins, Ed Cook and Doug Mangrum

Interviews, critiques and new thoughts on the Qeiyafa ostracon

2010-01-13T12:49:00.000-08:00

Gordon Govier, writer for Christianity Today and copublisher of The Book and the Spade, interviewed me for a short but sweet segment (click here to listen) on the Qeiyafa ostracon. Gordon listens patiently while I try to lay out a million reasons why this text is exciting even without Gershon Galil's dramatic but uncertain reconstructions. An interview with perhaps the world's expert on Iron Age Hebrew script, Christopher Rollston, should follow.

Rollston has the essential epigraphic critique of this important find, and John Hobbins has a thoughtful, challenging engagement with Rollston's and my own points.

In my new book, written before the ostracon was published, I tried to lay out an intellectual framework for dealing with precisely the phenomenon this text represents: new encounters between language and writing in the ancient Levant. In a day or two I'll have a post in which I attempt to fit what we now know about this text into the bigger picture: the culture and politics of writing in Iron Age Israel.

The Invention of Hebrew is a National Jewish Book Award Finalist

2010-01-13T12:45:00.000-08:00

I was delighted to see this announcement. It is also the only finalist in the "Scholarship" category from a press that does not begin with the word "Jewish." I don't know what that means but I thought I'd add it. Maybe it means that I am the winner in scholarship from gentile presses? I like to think everybody's a winner, in a larger sense.

"For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse:" A Postulate of Biblical Criminal Law

2009-12-15T15:05:00.000-08:00

In his classic essay, "Some Postulates of Biblical Criminal Law,"* Moshe Greenberg threw down the gauntlet at historical and comparative approaches that he saw as draining the life and meaning from our analysis of biblical law: "...until the values that the law embodies are understood, it is questionable whether any individual law can be properly appreciated, let alone profitably compared with another in a foreign system."

Greenberg then observed two crucial distinctions between "biblical" (meaning all of the legal material in the Torah, treated as a single system) and Mesopotamian law: First, Mesopotamian law is authored by the king, while biblical law is never authored by a human:

"Not only is Moses denied any part in the formation of the Pentateuchal laws, no Israelite king is said to have authored a law code, nor is any king censured for so doing. The only legislator the Bible knows is God; the only legislation is that mediated by a prophet."

Second, in biblical law human life has an absolute value: unlike supposedly more advanced Mesopotamia or supposedly more primitive bedouin cultures, you cannot pay money ("damages," in our terms) to restore a life. For these two distinctions alone his article retains enduring value.

But Greenberg then makes a move with stunning potential consequences: Offhandedly fusing historically and juridically distinct laws from Deuteronomy and the Covenant Code of Exodus with Priestly law, he concludes that "In the sphere of the criminal law, the effect of this divine authorship of all law is to make crimes sins, a violation of the will of God," citing Numbers 15:30's claim that anyone who violates the law "affronts the Lord, and will be cut off from among the people." "The way is thus prepared," writes Greenberg, "to regard offenses as absolute wrongs, transcending the power of men to pardon or expunge."

Indeed. The greatest impact of the idea that any violation of biblical law was an unforgivable offense against God came from another brilliant holistic Jewish interpreter who also treated the entire Torah as a single legal statement:

For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse: for it is written, Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them. But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident: for, The just shall live by faith. And the law is not of faith: but, The man that doeth them shall live in them. Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law...

St. Paul's audacious claim in Galatians 3:10-13 is that the law had become a curse because any violation of the law is not merely wrong--a human act that must be made right by human means, but a sin against God, a cosmic stain that human power can never wipe away. And Judeans who had experienced repeated, crushing defeats and exiles, all of which seemed predicted in just that section of Deuteronomy Paul uses, might have understood just what he was saying. We remain defeated; we must have violated some part of this sweeping law, which has cursed us; our law is a curse. Of course, there was a corresponding positive holistic reading of the text, well known and popular in Paul's time but in which he was understandably uninterested: the idea that repentance and the Day of Atonement together completely remove precisely this cosmic stain.

My argument, implied in the joke fusion of my title, is that when "holistic" reading frees scholars from historical context--the obligation to heed individual biblical voices--they may unintentionally conjure up powerful ghosts that only theology can confront. Come to think of it, speaking of powerful theological ghosts the next post should be about Jacob Taubes.

* Greenberg's "Some Postulates of Biblical Criminal Law" was originally published in Studies in Bible and Jewish Religion, the Yehezkel Kaufmann Jubilee Volume, ed. Menahem Haran (Jerusalem, 1960), and its interest in discovering a qualitatively distinctive biblical-Jewish approach to law that could not be explained by social evolution fit well with the dedicatee's brilliant nationalist project.

UCLA Talk: Epigraphy and the Invention of the Jewish People

2009-12-14T17:30:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, January 5, 2010 from 4:00pm - 7:00pm, I'll talk about what my empirical work on Iron Age Israelite writing and identity says about the historicity of Jewish peoplehood. Hint: it's real, but it was never about blood or authenticity.

Second Book - Rituals of Revelation: The Ancient Near Eastern Roots of Jewish Mysticism

2009-12-14T16:46:00.000-08:00

Because I can't stop now. I'm submitting this to Brill at the end of the summer (perhaps the De Vermis Mysteriis to The Invention of Hebrew's Necronomicon?):

The origins of Jewish mysticism are hotly contested: many of its most mysterious and compelling elements are found in Mesopotamian and early Jewish texts but not in the Hebrew Bible. How do we explain the new myths and rituals of Jewish mysticism? This project builds on recent advances in interpreting the data for connections between early Jewish and ancient Near Eastern intellectual culture. The Jewish intellectual culture of Qumran participated in
an international high culture through the medium of Aramaic, as exemplified by the astronomy of the book of Enoch, the first apocalypse and a key text in early mysticism. The project examines not only borrowing but how people experienced these myths religiously. How did the belief arise that this cosmic knowledge could be embodied by worshippers? I investigate mysticism not as an ineffable and inexplicable internal state, but as linguistic practice. Beginning with Sumerian incantations in which the exorcist claims to be Adapa, the semi divine sage who went to heaven, I will explore how the grammar and pragmatics of this ancient Near Eastern ritual tradition let practicioners adopt illuminated divine personae. The project is equally concerned with historical causation: why do these traditions only emerge in Judaism during the Hellenistic period? Here the loss of native kingship and the increasing autonomy and creativity of scribal culture are key. Myths of sovereign power are transferred from a top- down model in which the heavenly ruler empowers the earthly one to judge and militarily protect the individual to a model of audience, in which the individual appears before the heavenly throne to share liturgically in the benefits of cosmic rule and heavenly knowledge. Ritual enacts politics, as early Jewish mysticism empowers worshippers to live out Near Eastern myth under the new conditions of Hellenistic colonialism.

Me, Thomas Friedman, and Obama's mom

2009-12-14T16:24:00.000-08:00

Aside from the satisfaction of showing those people who had faith in you that they were right, you really did have it in you, one of the remarkable things about having a book out in the world is the way it starts to show up, seemingly unbidden, in places that mean a lot to you. Today that tireless and good-hearted informant, my mom, told me that my book had landed on the front table of the Seminary Co-op bookstore.

Growing up in Hyde Park, home of the University of Chicago, I got a strong minority of my education and maybe a majority of my inspiration from spending time in that comforting maze, hidden safely in the bowels of the Chicago Theological Seminary. The front table was where I, and untold numbers of the scholars and students at Chicago, found out what was happening in intellectual life outside of the neighborhood. In high school I remember the first time I wandered into the University's Regenstein library to find a book on H.P. Lovecraft. I remember being stunned, mesmerized by the fact that there were books next to this one that I'd never heard of. Some had been well-used, and some seemed not to have been touched since they first made their way to these quiet shelves. Someone could have written something amazing 50 years ago and I might open that book and discover it. Hidden, waiting for that accident to unlock the remarkable potential in it. Yes I mean the Necronomicon.

Now that my book is slowly and tentatively making its way through the academic libraries and bookshelves of the world, my book too could unlock untold eldritch horror on a helpless world. Thanks, mom.

The Invention of Hebrew Exists!

2009-11-25T08:15:00.000-08:00

15 copies of my first book were delivered to my hotel room Monday here in New Orleans: a new feeling to hold something in your hands whose every word you've gone over and over in word documents, printouts, and emails, now an object out there in the world for anyone to read. I'll be excited, and no doubt surprised, to see what happens now that it's out of my head and in other people's hands.

"I am Adapa, Sage of Eridu" How and Why did Mesopotamian Exorcists Embody their Ancestors?

2009-05-01T14:49:00.000-07:00

Rencontre Assyriologique paper, coming to Paris this summer!

The modern “Friday Apostolics” of Zimbabwe actually embody their revealers, speaking as Moses and St. Paul; by contrast, ancient Jews did not directly embody Moses in performance. But did Mesopotamian exorcists become the mythical fish-man who revealed their secrets? The semi-human sage Adapa might be considered the patron saint of Mesopotamian ritual. He also became the mediator of privileged knowledge par excellence—a culture hero for the scribes who managed writing and ritual for Mesopotamian courts. But ritual experts were not satisfied to inherit his knowledge—in certain texts they claim to not just be descended from him but to be him. Beginning with its roots in archaic Sumerian art and ritual, this paper will examine narratives, images, and ritual performances in which Mesopotamian scholars embodied their mythical ancestor. Taking a cue from linguistic anthropology, we will ask on what planes this embodiment was accomplished and what its effects were.

The "Dr. Manhattan" Theory of Jewish Mysticism

2009-03-19T18:37:00.000-07:00

If nothing else, movies are good for two things: 1) seeing things blow up 2) giving me tools to think with. The Watchmen movie wrapped one of each goodie together for me in a single scene.

On the one hand: Worst use of Dylan ever ("the times they are a' changin'" alongside shifting historical scenes is the new version of the wooden B&W movie standby where they show the pages blowing off a day calendar), worst use of Leonard Cohen ever, but that's because almost all uses of Leonard Cohen are subverted by lyrics that veer between slashing insight and intolerable schlock, and his fatal attraction to musical settings that resemble a beer commercial. There remains the undeniable ethical truth of the Cohen lines (which I thank Elliot Wolfson for quoting to me):

"Tho' your promise count for nothing
You must keep it nonetheless"

On the other: the Dr. Manhattan origin scene gives me something new: a perfect angle on the argument in early Jewish mysticism that Qumran texts like the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice do not present real mysticism because they do not depict "ontic transformation"--that is, they do not show us a dude actually turning into God.

This will be known henceforth as the "Dr. Manhattan" standard for mystical experience.

Talking at Princeton Theological Seminary on March 17

2009-03-15T19:52:00.000-07:00

I'll be talking to Chip Dobbs-Allsopp's Northwest Semitic Epigraphy class this Tuesday on my new book (copyedited proofs arrive Wednesday!), the topic will be something like "History Begins as the Voice of the King." Hit me up on facebook or send me a paper airplane if you're in the area!

Anarchist Philology?

2009-03-10T07:14:00.000-07:00

A big influence on my work on the relationship between writing and political order, David Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology asks, among other things, whether there ever was a West, and whether Athenian democracy was one of its gifts to the world or an odd repackaging of something most people normally do when nobody's pushing them around.

It was published by Prickly Paradigm, a pamphlet series designed to dispense big, relevant social theories in tasty little doses--and now the first run is available for free download. Scholars of the ancient world looking to upset their applecarts a little and have fun at the same time could do worse than play around here...

Three drowned books: Jeremiah 51 and the cultural "nature" of textuality

2009-03-06T07:39:00.000-08:00

What did Jeremiah and his school think a text was? Building on Edward Silver's reading of Jeremiah 36 as based on a trope of materialization, this paper reads Jeremiah 51's command to weight the scroll of his prophecy and sink it in the Euphrates as the key moment in the articulation of a Jeremian language ideology that runs counter to modern assumptions about textuality. At least for this Jeremiah, the word of God was something that need to be both read and destroyed to be effective. It then reads Jeremiah's destruction of the materialized word of God with two other drowned books: those of the early 17th-century Marathi poet Tukaram and the early 17th-century English playwright William Shakespeare.

The conflicting tropes of destruction and salvation, communication and incommunication, mediation and concealment (consider Darius' invisible Behistun inscription or Ezekiel's edible, unread scroll), that these accounts manifest suggest that cross-culturally, textuality may lack fundamental features, such as fixity and openness to critique, that have been attributed to it in the late 20th-century Western scholarly tradition represented by Ong, Goody et al. In conclusion, the paper will suggest a different cross-culturally emergent feature of
textuality, that of materialization, that emerges from comparison. The recommendation is then that any discussion of textuality should begin with study of the local language ideologies, production formats and participation frameworks in which a text-artifact emerged.

Possibly to be given in the 2009 SBL's Textuality section.

References:
Erving Goffman, "Footings" in Forms of Talk -- concepts of 'production format' and 'participation framework'
Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men on Tukaram
Edward Silver, "Entextualization and Prophetic Action: Jeremiah 36 as Literary Artifact" (2008 SBL paper)

The Political Theology of Leviticus 16: The People as Agents of History

2009-03-04T19:28:00.000-08:00

Scholarship has reached a consensus that the Priestly authors placed Leviticus 16, the "day of atonement" or Scapegoat ritual, at the architectural center of the Torah. As the ritual that begins the year and purifies the cosmically central sanctuary, it also lies at the center of ritual space and time. And it has been widely noted that the ritual prescribed shares essential features with other ancient Near Eastern expiation rituals.

What has not been recognized is the politics this implies. Unlike almost every other known ancient Near Eastern expiation ritual, the day of atonement is not performed on behalf of a king, country, or medical patient, but on behalf of a collective: the people of Israel. Is it an accident, then, that the one other known ritual from the entire ancient Near East done on behalf of collective population groups was KTU 1.40, the most widely-used ritual at Ugarit? For Ugarit is home, not only to the first known literary use of the alphabet, but also to the world's first vernacular literature, designed to speak to a 'people' in their own language.

If this ritual connection between the world's first and second known vernacular literatures is not an accident, then we gain here an insight into the origins and development of a previously unrecognized but powerful West Semitic political theory, one that had its greatest impact in what Foucault was to call"Biblical History."

This is: 1) the expansion of an idea I published in Maarav 2004, "What was the alphabet for?" 2) A teaser for my forthcoming book, The Invention of Hebrew (Illinois, 2009), and 3) A paper I might give at this year's Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in New Orleans.

Do we know the Hebrew alphabet? A lesson on the difference between writing and language

2009-03-02T09:12:00.000-08:00

How many consonants did Hebrew have?

This is a trick question. The answer depends on what you mean by a consonant: spoken or written. Today everybody knows we count 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. But everybody knows, and forgets, that it has 23 consonants: original Śin is still with us. Sorry.

Writing is the only way we can learn what the ancients said, but writing is not language. And as writing reveals, it always conceals something of what it transmits.

There's no better example of this than the way writing masks the sounds of speech even as it immortalizes them. Since the 19th century, scholars have argued that there were actually 25 sounds in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic: it has been long noted--and best argued by Joshua Blau--that the Septuagint distinguished original ǵayin and ḥa in many place names and other transliterations. During the 80's, Richard Steiner first realized that there was an entire Aramean religious liturgy--really a kind of alternate-universe Hebrew Bible, including a pagan version of Psalm 20 with Baal instead of the Lord, and mourning for an Exile (with the Assyrians around, lots of people got exiled), transcribed into Demotic in Egypt, that distinguished these two consonants.

The Hebrew and Aramaic writing systems had concealed some of the most basic facts of Hebrew and Aramaic from us for almost 2,000 years. This has to do with their own histories--they're both derived from Phoenician, which lost those two sounds, along with original śin, sometime before the first Phoenician writing (11th century B.C.E., depending on what you mean by "Phoenician").

I stole the lousy Śin joke from Richard Steiner, who published the definitive treatment of all these issues. The answer to the question of when, and how, Hebrew went from having 25 consonants to 23 holds lessons for us about the relationship between writing and language, as well as for when different parts of the Septuagint were created.

Bibliography:
Blau, Joshua, 1982. On Polyphony in Biblical Hebrew. Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities VI/2.

Steiner, Richard L. 2005. “On the dating of Hebrew Sound Changes (*ḫ>ḥ and *ǵ>ˁ) and Greek Translations (2 Esdras and Judith) JBL 124:229-67

--originally posted June 30, 2005, updated today.

The first source-critical Bible goes online

2009-03-02T08:09:00.000-08:00

This could be a watershed in the history of Bible criticism: the first online source-critical presentation of the Hebrew Bible, through II Samuel 5, went up this weekend. From now on, students and scholars looking for an accessible, well-founded treatment of the probable sources of the biblical text can start here.

The author is Tzemah Yoreh, one of Israel Knohl's star students at Hebrew University and now a professor at AJU. While Yoreh's vision is not the only plausible one, it has two big advantages: 1) A short, eloquent introduction explains Yoreh's method, which is organic. It relies on Occam's Razor, the idea that the best explanations use as few assumptions as necessary. The result is a new version of the supplementary hypothesis, the idea that the Bible comes not from an assembly of sources but a series of interpretive additions, as religious thinkers collectively wove and rewove traditional texts they considered sacred. Like the process of inner-biblical interpretation illuminated by scholars like Sarna, Fishbane, Levinson, and Sommer, each source wrote with scripture by building on the sources it found. The Bible Yoreh shows us is not just a set of fragments, obscurely cobbled together by narrow elites for ulterior motives (though his analysis raises essential questions of social location and group interest too) but coherent acts of poiesis: collective cultural world-making.

2) Yoreh's presentation is simpler and seems more coherent than the fragmentary hypothesis which has come to dominate European scholarship. Under this hypothesis--nicely summarized by Kevin Wilson-- the Priestly source wove together five fragmentary blocks of tradition, that were sometimes aware of each other and sometimes not. Yoreh's parsimony does not make him right, but he's got one big thing going for him: nobody else has put all of their results together in a useful form and published them online. This kind of public scholarship, which takes both work and courage, should become a fundamental go-to for students and a helpful tool for scholars to think with.

How to get into grad school: An anthropologist's view

2009-03-01T15:33:00.001-08:00

From my friend Rex (an anthropologist who works on Papua New Guinea and gaming and who has some excellent ideas on the relationship between the Babylonian Epic of Creation and Western Political Theory), "What we look for in applicants."

With the addition of languages (know a Semitic or at least a dead one or, for archaeology, have field experience), this is a good guide for Near Eastern and Biblical Studies too.

Acquiring a body of light through speech

2009-02-23T17:11:00.000-08:00

Here's how to do it: read Seth Sanders' essay in this collection of early Jewish and Christian Mysticism studies:

It investigates mysticism as linguistic practice by comparing Babylonian and Second Temple Jewish journeys to heaven. Previous debate focused on how the first heavenly journeys emerged and whether they were vision or fiction: did people think they could actually become angels? It contains some of the core arguments of my forthcoming Myths of Revelation (in revision for Brill) draws on linguistic anthropology to reexamines Jewish mysticism’s ancient Near Eastern roots. The experiences behind the texts are lost, but we can historically trace the possibilities they generated through verbal performance. Rather than an essence, Jewish mysticism was a constellation of new genres and ritual roles that let participants realize ancient Near Eastern myth under the imperial politics of Hellenism. And seeing mystical discourse concretely, as both textual interpretation and ritual action, raises new questions: how do changes in written participant roles affect our very idea of human nature and its limits?

Mythic and Ritual Genocides in the Bible, or, Why We Should be Afraid to Read Atrocities as Stories and Why We Need To.

2009-02-23T16:59:00.000-08:00

A talk for students of the Trinity College Religion Department on what many have seen as the most morally difficult part of the Hebrew Bible: divinely commanded genocides, and trying to figure out how we can respond to them in a way that is moral but not anachronistic.

Those who wish to remind themselves of the worst parts of the Old Testament are invited to glance at Joshua 6-8 and I Samuel 15, which look rather fictional, and compare it to the actual 9th-century BCE inscription of Mesha, king of Moab (also mentioned and fought against in the Bible), who uses precisely the Biblical vocabulary of ritual genocide to claim:

“And I killed all the people of the city as a sacrifice for Kemosh and for Moab. And I brought back the fire-hearth of his uncle from there; and I brought it before the face of Kemosh in Qerioit, and I made the men of Sharon live there, as well as the men of Maharit. And Kemosh said to me, "Go, take Nebo from Israel." And I went in the night and fought against it from the daybreak until midday, and I took it and I killed the whole population: seven thousand male subjects and aliens, and female subjects, aliens, and servant girls. For I had put it to the ban for Ashtar Kemosh.”

It will draw on the pioneering work of Lauren Monroe, "Israelite, Moabite and Sabaean War-herem Traditions and the Forging of National Identity: Reconsidering the Sabaean Text RES 3945 in Light of Biblical and Moabite Evidence," Vetus Testamentum (2007) 318-341.

As well as Bruce Lincoln's wonderfully challenging little essay, "Myth and History in the Study of Myth: An Obscure Text of Georges Dumézil, Its Context and Subtext" in his Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology & Practice (Chicago, 1991)

And perhaps Michael Taussig's wild, intelligent, loosely-argued but usefully provocative "The Language of Flowers".

The Mythic Foundations of Western Political Thought

2009-02-05T19:21:00.000-08:00

Says Seth: An argument that I started having with myself about where politics comes from. I picked it in my first book, and this semester I have the chance to share this argument with 7 intrepid students.

REL 219 MYTHIC FOUNDATIONS OF WESTERN POLITICAL THOUGHT
Course Outline

It’s often assumed that religion is just a cover for politics: having God on your side justifies anything, no matter how costly or self-serving. But what if it’s actually the other way around--what if religion is the source of politics? If not, why did ancient people treat kings like Gods, and why do we still obey rulers we've never met? We will study myths of foundation and order from the world's first states in Mesopotamia and their legacy in the Bible. In these myths God gains sovereignty by slaying Leviathan, the cosmic dragon. We will analyze some alternatives that Western political thought offers: are they more reasonable? Did the West ultimately abolish Leviathan or has it merely replaced it with its own myths?

TEXTBOOKS:
Required:
Mark Lilla The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West
David Graeber Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge textbook version)
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology
Simon Parker, Ugaritic Narrative Poetry
Benjamin Foster Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature

Recommended:
David Miller Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
Marc Van de Meiroop A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 - 323 BC
God, The Holy Bible (HarperCollins study bible or any other version)

SCHEDULE OF TOPICS, READINGS AND ASSIGNMENTS:
1. Tuesday, January 20 Introduction.

2. Thursday, January 22 Political Philosophy as a Great Separation
Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God
“The Crisis,” “The Great Separation”

3. Tuesday, January 27 Separation and its Discontents
Lilla, “The Ethical God,”
Add/Drop Period ends. Last day to declare a class Pass/Low Pass/Fail.

4. Thursday, January 29 Why The State?
David Graeber, Fragments 46-70
David Miller, Political Philosophy chapters 1 and 2

5. Tuesday, February 3 The Foundation of God’s Kingdom
from Foster, Before the Muses “The Valorous Sun; Hammurabi, King of Justice”
from van de Mieroop, the Old Babylonian Period
First 3-page paper: Examining an Argument in Political Philosophy:
From any of the readings, analyze in depth one argument about one point
First page: analyze how the argument works and what it is trying to accomplish, what is at stake in this particular debate.
Second page: go through the evidence and steps. Be precise, citing the most decisive phrases and sentences by page number (no need for block quotes) and, every time you cite, analyze what it's accomplishing in the argument.
Third page: where would you go from here? If not fully convinced what would you need to decide? If convincing what can you do with it now?

6. Thursday, February 5 The Slaying of Leviathan
from Foster, Before the Muses “The Epic of Creation”

7. Tuesday, February 10 The State’s Ancient Other: The West Semitic Ideal I
Thorkild Jakobsen, “Primitive Democracy in Mesopotamia”

Read the two very short, but important, letters from Adad (the local West Semitic version of Marduk) to Zimri-Lim in Foster 143-144.
What theory of legitimacy is implied in the second letter? How does it compare to the theory of legitimacy Hammurabi propounds in the epilogue to the laws? How does it compare to the theory of the Epic of Creation?

8. Thursday, February 12 Negotiated Sovereignty: The West Semitic Ideal II
From Parker, Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, Baal epic

9. Tuesday, February 17 Divine Myths of Justice: Yahweh Dethrones the Gods
from Parker, Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, Kirta epic
Psalm 82

10. Thursday, February 19 Human Myths of Justice: Absalom Dethrones David
II Samuel
from Herodotus, History

11. Tuesday, February 24 Human Myths of Justice: Killing a Tyrant
Judges
From Livy, Roman History
From Dumezil, “Myth into History” in Archaic Roman Religion

Thursday, February 26 No class--Trinity days

12. Tuesday, March 3 Classical vs. Biblical Political Myth
Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Critique of Political Reason"

13. Thursday, March 5 The Messiah: the death and resurrection of a political myth
Isaiah, Suffering Servant
KTU 1.161 Ugaritic funerary ceremony
Daniel 7 son of man
Gospels Son of Man passages
SECOND PAPER: The Ideals of an Ancient Myth

14. Tuesday, March 10 Is the State a Machine for Happiness?
from Aristotle, Politics

15. Thursday, March 12 Is the State a Ritual Device?
From Aristotle, Politics
Dupont, Florence (1989) ‘The Emperor-God's Other Body', in Michel Feher et al. ( eds) Zone 5: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 3

Tuesday, March 17 SPRING VACATION

Thursday, March 19 SPRING VACATION

16. Tuesday, March 24 Religion as a Tool for Politics
Machiavelli, from Discourses on Livy

17. Thursday, March 26 Politics as a Tool for Religion
Hocart, from Kings and Councilors

18. Tuesday, March 31 Politics as Cosmology
Geertz, from Negara
Quentin Skinner, review of Geertz

19. Thursday, April Jurisprudence as Myth and Ritual: The Medieval King’s Two Bodies
Kantorowicz, from The King’s Two Bodies: An Essay in Medieval Political Theology
THIRD PAPER: A Medieval Political Myth

20. Tuesday, April 7 The Return of Leviathan
Hobbes, from Leviathan

21. Thursday, April 9
Hobbes, from Leviathan

22. Tuesday, April 14
Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”

23. Thursday, April 16
Lincoln, Religion, Empire and Torture

24. Tuesday, April 21
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology

25. Thursday, April 23
Lilla, Stillborn God
FOURTH PAPER: Modern Political Myth

26 Tuesday, April 28
Simon Critchley, “Crypto-Schmittianism”
http://www.stateofnature.org/crypto-schmit.html

Take-home exam.

Why you can't Dig up a Nation-State

2005-06-20T18:25:00.000-07:00

Jacob Taubes used to say that there were some books whose essence was conveyed in the title. I recall that among them was Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: the great point of the book was that Geist (which means more than "spirit"--it includes thought, so it's the thing that stands behind both intellectual and spiritual things) has a phenomenology, that you can learn what you need to know about it by thinking about what it does. Up til then it had seemed to be graspable only by either art or metaphysics--Hegel argued that its mechanisms were traceable in history. What's so wonderful about that wasn't that he was right but that he made Fredric Jameson possible. I know that sounds silly. What I intend to convey by that is that he laid the philolosophical foundation for a view of history in which the material and spiritual, technology and culture, are understood to be legible as a whole. And if you can possibly do it right (it's HARD) this is the best (only) way to do history and culture--heck, to do anthropology, literature and--yes--philology.

There are other books, less important but also interesting, that give away their main point on the first page. Ian Hodder's Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture, is one. (BTW anyone who dismisses, out of hand, the intellectual breadth of Evangelical educational institutions should ponder the fact that the University of Chicago's mighty Regenstein library had to Inter-Library-Loan me this baby from Wheaton College).

On the first page, Hodder describes those similar clusters of objects people dig up out of the ground ("Israelite," "Mongol," "Chinese") as "material 'cultures.'" This is a rare case where the scare quotes pack a punch, rather than suck the air out of the room: you look at the typography, wonder why he's put it in quotes, and then you think: "Ah, he's asking how we know they're cultures at all--precisely how do we get from clusters of pottery styles to structures of thought and action?" Once you question the assumption that artifact types directly correlate with culture--like ethnic boundaries and self-identification, let alone language or "race" (can't possibly type out enough scare quotes to deflate that one) you're left with a gaping hole at the center of your method: you dig up a pattern and call it a culture, while knowing nothing at all about what the people who made it thought about it.

Hodder, being a professional archaeologist, has to build around this gaping hole, but I don't know how successfully he plugs it. I ponder the consequences for Biblical Studies here

Where Do Empires Come From? Israel, Assyria, and the Question of U.S. Imperialism

2005-05-12T09:27:00.000-07:00

Why is God supposed to be a universal political ruler, and why do people think America wants to conquer the world? The two questions are related, and perhaps they're also inseparable from what we study as Biblicists: what the Israelites learned from Assyria.

One of the most interesting recent doctoral theses I've heard about is Cyntha Chapman's The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter, which was done at Harvard with Peter Machinist and is now published. She makes clear that those famous Assyrian royal inscriptions and reliefs, showing the king as a decisive and utterly dominating force, whose enemies are described as soiling themselves in fear and depicted as cringing, kowtowing or mounted on stakes, is what you'd call a performance of masculinity. That is, he didn't just kill lots of people, he did it in style, and talked about it relentlessly. Her second point is that, in Biblical literature of the 7th century B.C.E. and later, Jerusalem is depicted overwhelmingly as a woman, the violated and forlorn "daughter Zion" of Lamentations. But if the Assyrian king is a masculine dominator and Jerusalem is a female victim, what does that make God? Chapman's book works out the prophetic answer.

The consequences of this go far beyond poetry: Israelite writers thought a lot about empire, comparing Israel to the succession of men who, in trampling through their small country, claimed to be carrying a mission to rule the world. They thought about how they were and weren't like their imperial rulers. Empire was imprinted on their consciousness.

Though its core is older, Psalm 89 became an icon of this:

21) I found David my servant, with my holy oil I anoint him.
22) Who my hand shall accompany and make firm,
indeed my arm will make him strong
23) No enemy shall oppose him, no lowly one afflict him.
24) And I crush his enemies before him,
I will strike down his haters
25) And my faithfulness and steadfastness will be with him,
and in my name shall his horn be raised.
26) And I place his hand on the sea, and his right on the rivers.
27) He shall declare to me,
“You are my father, my God and the Rock of my victory!”
28) Indeed, I will appoint him firstborn,
highest of the kings of the world
29) I will maintain my steadfastness with him forever,
and my covenant will faithfully endure…

But the rest of the prayer reverses this triumph, mourning how God has let David's dominance be shattered--God's covenant, it seems, did not faithfully endure. The psalm is almost an incantation, summoning God to pony up, demonstrate his vaunted faith, and restore his side of the bargain. The prayer dares God to be a real imperial ruler.

I would argue that what we see here, in the precise imprint left by an empire on a subject people, is nothing less than the secret of empire itself: that people learn from it, imitate it, and use these lessons to form new empires. The Bible carries the marks of Assyria and Persia and was used as a model for new empires after Rome.

This point was originally made by Sheldon Pollock, a scholar of Sanskrit, who pointed out that since imperialism is not a natural phenomenon, but must be learned in every detail from others, we would do well to think about how this learning takes place. He first made it at this soon-to-be-published conference on the Lessons of Empire, along with John Kelly, who asked if the U.S. is really an empire today (if it is, how are corporations that can take money and deploy military force not? or is the term blinding us to what's really going on?) and Iraq scholar and Jonah Goldberg golf buddy Juan Cole. The book should be a doozy.

Pollock and Kelly first asked these questions of the Ancient Near East at our conference in February, and I'm editing their contributions right now. This book should be a doozy too.

Models in Biblical Studies

2005-04-28T18:33:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking recently about the models we use in Biblical Studies.

The twentieth century opened with Hermann Gunkel's use of an oral-poetic model, influenced by the brilliant studies of folklore that his philological and Romantic predecessors such as the brothers Grimm and Herder had pioneered. The most interesting study of this work, and its legacy for the study of difference and modernity itself, is Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman's Voices of Modernity, which despite a bit of Latour damage, I cannot recommend highly enough.

But we stuck with the folk model throughout the whole 20th century, even when we knew better. From Albright to Cross to Niditch, studies of Israelite orality have continued to posit relatively pristine societies that lived by the magical spoken word and mystified writing as well.

In addition to stuff that's closer geographically (Moab, Carchemish, Assyria), I am looking for material that provokes me to think more useful thoughts. And one of the main places I turn is Medieval and early Modern India. Unlike the pristine folk cultures imagined by Gunkel, South Asia represents a radically polyglot milieu which had had multiple high languages and writing systems (think Babylonian, Egyptian and Assyrian dominance) as well as a variety of vernaculars (think of the spectrum of Aramean, Edomite, Greek, Phoenician, Philistine, Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian, as well as the Judean/Israelite splits, which fracture culture in Israel). So when Sumit Guha suggests historical studies charting "the co-evolution of language and identity," I'm right there with him.

The point is most emphatically not that India under the Raj was somehow "more like" Israel under Assyria than a group of German peasants in the Schwarzwald (or, more to the point, Francophone housekeepers), though that may be true--the point is that, among many productive ways of seeing the interplay of tradition, difference and change in history, South Asian studies has access to a number of privileged examples and is using them in ways that might help all of us think.

Why Study the Hebrew Bible?

2005-04-28T12:40:00.000-07:00

And here's my pitch for what I do with my life, in the form of another course writeup:

This course introduces the most popular book in history, and the main thing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have in common. The Hebrew Bible’s determining force in Western culture is connected to its remarkable political and theological claim that it contains commands by the ruler of the universe to his subjects. Yet this book appears, on closer inspection, to be no book at all but a collection of disparate documents put together by an imperial subject people. Through careful reading of the text in translation, we will explore the Bible as both a marginal ancient literature and a voice of supreme power. We will direct our readings and questions with key texts in the history of modern Bible criticism and the ancient Near East.

We'll be using:
Adele Berlin, ed. The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford U P, 2003)
John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Augsburg Fortress, 2004)
Richard Elliott Freedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997)
Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil (Princeton U P, 1994)
Martti Nissinen, Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East (Society of Biblical Literature, 2003)

Why Study Women in the Hebrew Bible?

2005-04-28T12:34:00.000-07:00

This is my attempt to answer that question, in the form of a course description for a Fall Semester class at Cornell.

Women in the Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible commands laws and tells stories about women as war leaders, lovers, prophetesses and prostitutes, as well as ordinary daughters and goddesses (possibly including God’s wife!). Formed in an ancient Near Eastern society, these laws and stories are still drawn on today to make religious rules, social roles and art. We will read these texts as factors in history: Who wrote them? What did these stories and laws say and do? What roles do they carve out and what realities do they reflect and create? The texts will be read in English translation, drawing on cultural anthropology, feminist theory, linguistics and archaeology to provide critical perspectives on ancient patriarchy and the state as well as modern secular-liberal notions of freedom and self.

We'll draw from:
Adele Berlin, ed. The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford U P, 2003)
Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible (Schocken, 2004)
Alice Bach, Women in the Hebrew Bible: A Reader (Routledge, 1998)
Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible (Harvard University Press, 1993)
Mishael Maswari Caspi and Rachel Havrelock, Women on the Biblical Road (University Press of America, 1997)

And I'm actively seeking other suggestions and wisdom...

A Better Memory: The Peculiar Persistence of Israel in Texts and DNA

2005-04-27T18:14:00.000-07:00

Why did the Bible outlast Babylon? Millions of people, over and over, from the returning Judean exiles to the early Church to people of faith today, claim to be the "real Israel." Many acquire a new past, others actively choose to invoke and remember an old one, others forget. Is conversion a form of recovered memory, a kind of identity fraud? What do different people who claim to be part of the "real Israel" have in common? Scholars of religion and anthropology, as well as Biblical historians, struggle over what it means to convert and what kind of pasts are authentic.

What fascinates me is when it turns out that the early history of something--let's say, the invention of the memory of Israel--can shed light on its subsequent history, not because the origins tell you everything, but because a kind of internal logic might be revealed that is played out over and over again, different and the same in different ways each time.

This sometimes requires going back in time to before we even realize something was invented. My colleague and namesake Seth Richardson studies Babylonian history. I popped into his office today to say hi and talk about ancient political theory, as is my wont. Spying a book on his desk, we launched into a short talk on a crucial event in ancient Near Eastern history: the meeting of the (semi)nomadic concept of "the people" as the protagonist of politics and ritual with the technology of writing. The book that sparked it was Daniel Fleming's fantastic Democracy's Ancient Ancestors , a close look at the first time nomadic politics encountered writing, in the Old Babylonian city-state of Mari. Here politics wasn't defined by borders in space (the matum "land" or alum "settlement") but by kinship. The political relationships this system creates between people could persist across space and, once imagined in writing, across time as well. The written image of a "people" created an amazingly powerful model for emulation. Why?

Seth's one-liner: "it makes for a better memory."

I thought this was a beautiful way to get at the power of the concept of Israel as an imagined--and real--community that flows around the borders of states and persists across space and time. The people as fact and symbol, legal fiction and memory. And I'm not the first to be enchanted by it. Indians and British, South African Lemba and Nigerian Igbo have all imagined themselves to be lost tribes of Israel. What's stunning is when genetic evidence shows that some of them actually are.

The crucial thing about the genetic evidence is that, while it's hard science, it instantly becomes culture as soon as people think about it and do anything with it. While such proof changes everything, in other ways it changes nothing. The struggles over identity and meaning--encapsulated in the way that DNA itself becomes a symbol--continue. In this article, Invisible Races, written for the African/American race and culture journal Transition, I investigate how the Bantu-speaking Lemba, who have an unquestionable DNA link to the ancient Israelite priesthood, complicate the already dizzying "who is a Jew" argument.

An Exile from the Republic of Letters Returns

2005-04-25T18:51:00.000-07:00

I am happy to report that, with little or no help from the Persian Empire, I have ended my exile from the Republic of Letters, that is, the web.

And I am positively delighted to report that my sojourn--to help start some new scholarly conversations, to work on some books, and to find a job for next year--has been successful.

I ran the first conference on the political history of writing in the ancient Near East. It was held at the end of February at the University of Chicago Oriental Institute. Jim Davila, with typically wide-ranging interest, asked if anyone would be blogging it. The answer, of course, is, "yes, Jim, me--just two months late!" Fellow Biblicists participating were Bill Schniedewind, whose presentation on the death of written Hebrew and Jewish nationalism was as genial as it was provocative, and Peter Machinist, who placed the conference in the context of the past century of ancient Near Eastern studies' moves to a broader intellectual public. I felt honored to be involved in the lineage of Henri Frankfort's Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man and Robert McCormick Adams' City Invincible. It's true these were ambitious comparative projects done at the Oriental Institute, featuring a wide range of scholars of great intellectual firepower. I can certainly vouch for our intellectual ambitions and the stunning depth of knowledge and ideas the participants brought--now I just have to turn it into a book! What's best is that this is going to be an annual tradition at the Oriental Institute.

But this only scratches the surface of the people and ideas, not to mention the food (the caterers began life catering for Aerosmith, and they did not disappoint). The U of Chicago Chronicle did a nice piece on it, and this will have to do for tonight.

This week, look for more on the conference: intellectual sparks between philology and anthropology! Did the Hittites speak Hittite, was Sumerian a sham perpetrated by Amorite intellectuals, or does it even make sense to talk about languages living and dying? Plus, what I've been thinking about ancient Israel as a public, the native Jews of South Africa, and the courses I'll be teaching at Cornell next year.

Cuneiform in Canaan

2005-01-26T18:55:00.000-08:00

I have been ferociously busy, researching the poetics and pragmatics of combat myths in the Hebrew Bible (much more of that later), teaching some class sessions at UIC (if anyone proclaims to you that you can't use Jonas Greenfield's "The Zakir Inscription and the Danklied" to help teach Pentecostals and Muslims about what Biblical and Near Eastern prophecy might have in common through a close look at the occasion, themes and poetics of prophecy in Hebrew and Aramaic, they are falsely prophesying and cannot be believed), rooting around in the historical grammar of West Semitic, and of course cross-country skiing with my dog.

Most importantly, I am just putting the very final touches on my edition of three very short but very difficult texts. These are the three alphabetic cuneiform inscriptions found in the land of Israel, which are to be published in Wayne Horowitz, Takayoshi Oshima and Seth L. Sanders, eds., Cuneiform in Canaan and the Land of Israel (Israel Exploration Society?, 2006?). It sounds better in Hebrew as Ketav Yetidot beKanaan.

Though all three were first published decades ago, their real significance has only begun to unfold recently. Among the new things we find in these texts, which I date to the 13th and 12th centuries B.C.E., are: an abecedary that isn't in alphabetical order--that is, it's not in the alef-bet-gimel order from which we get our ABC's, but the halham order known from Epigraphic South Arabian (Beth Shemesh), and an inscribed knife which, I believe, displays a dialect feature known only from the oldest variety of Phoenician (Nahal Tabor). Just by themselves, these texts open up new views on language and culture in the southern Levant because they are some of the earliest examples of people representing their "own" languages (that is, a local and distinctive linguistic tradition, whether exactly identical with the ones they speak or not) over against the international cosmopolitan lingua franca of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, and they show a variety of phonemes and writing styles that nobody had quite expected. In fact I think these texts go some way toward disproving some of the theories of linear development of script and language propounded by my revered teacher Frank Moore Cross.

The most interesting question for me when it comes to epigraphy, is: what do you do when the hard facts knock cracks in the clean, straightforward theories of unilinear progress? The easy way out is to go wild in the other direction, to decompose everything into increasingly narrow, local details: "in general, everything is specific," no more big narratives, etc.

But the real quest, I think, is to discover how it all hangs together without moving in a straight line.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE

Appreciation for my prececessors, who have already done a great deal of the thinking and work, compels me to review some earlier treatments. In two of three cases I believe I have been able to add something to the understanding of the originals, either because of recently discovered parallels (the Beth Shemesh abecedary was illuminated by a better preserved parallel from Ugarit itself, which received an excellent treatment by Dennis Pardee and Pierre Bordreuill, (“RS 8.2215. Abécédaire,” in M. Yon and D. Arnaud, eds., Études Ougaritiques 1: Travaux 1985-1993 RSO XIV [Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 2001] 341-48) or because I asked a different question of the text (the phonology of the Nahal Tabor inscription).

All three of these texts were treated as part of larger studies of the early alphabet by E. Puech, “Origine de L’Alphabet,” RB 93 (1986) 161-213, which contains good handcopies and careful paleographic readings, and M. Dietrich and O. Loretz, Die Keilalphabete, (Ugarit-Verlag, Muenster, 1988), which sets them in the context of a larger theory of the development of the alphabet at the end of the bronze age (a theory I think is wrong, but which is well documented and argued there).

Three areas where my reeditions might most obviously be useful are 1) they are done as part of a comprehensive study of cuneiform writing in Israel, 2) they draw on new discoveries at Ugarit and elsewhere and 3) they are in English, which could make them more convenient for some.

Biblical Hebrew II: C'est de l'Hébreu pour moi!

2005-01-16T21:51:00.000-08:00

What kind of a linguistic record is the Hebrew Bible? More--was it meant to record a language?

The sociolinguist Sarah Roberts comments, apropos of my previous post, that, in trying to see how complete a picture your written sources give you of a language's lexicon, looking for spoons is not a bad way to go. That is, the method Ullendorff uses (seeing how well those pedestrian, daily-life words are covered; interestingly, this is not at all the same as making a Swadesh list) proves useful, but "Another approach is to calculate the proportion of hapax legomena in the corpus; the higher the proportion, the less representative the corpus usually is. It is also important to pay attention to the kinds of literary genres that comprise your sources..."

Ullendorff is way ahead of me here as well: he cites the great (greatest?) Semitist Noeldeke who had already, in the classic "Semitic Languages" article in the classic 13th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (from 1912, if memory serves, but still unequalled*) noted that the numerous hapaxes are "a sufficient proof that many more words existed than appear in the O.T." Ullendorff goes on to cite a list of these hapaxes which, at 2,440, would constitute about a third of the vocabulary of the Bible! Others have produced somewhat lower numbers but the point is made.

He also notes words that we would have expected to find in Biblical times, for example the Mishnah's massu'ot "fire signals," (as opposed to the Tanakh's semantically diffuse mas'et, which can be anything from "portion of food" to "tax" to "pillar of smoke"; see discussion in comments below) which we then dug up out of the ground, on an ostracon at Lachish (4:10). His conclusion is that Biblical Hebrew is more of a "linguistic fragment," "To be sure, a very important and indeed far-reaching fragment, but scarcely a fully integrated language which in this form...could ever have been spoken and have satisfied the needs of its speakers. The evidence presented by the epigraphical material contemporary with the OT and by the Mishna, its immediate successor, underlines the essentially fragmentary character of the language of the Hebrew Bible. And there is a strong case, in my submission, for looking upon the language of the Mishna as the developed colloquial--otherwise so largely, though by no means wholly, repressed and curbed--of the predominantly formal and elevated diction of the OT."

Ullendorff's article is a shrewd, and remarkably fun piece of work (see the second essay in the volume, "C'est de l'Hébreu pour moi!" a delightful study springing from his discovery that the French expression for the (Shakespearean) "It's Greek to me!" is "It's Hebrew to me!") , but it only scratches the surface. For one thing, he leaves out much of what makes language work: the verbal and deictic systems, the inventory of registers, speech genres, ways of indicating person, status and relationship. In this he is not alone: read some of William Safire's "On Language" columns for a weekly dose of the folk-theory that language is just a bag of words.

In the case of Biblical Hebrew, casting a wider grammatical net may catch only an even greater sense of vertigo, because while translations generally render the Bible into one type of English, Biblical Hebrew itself is not linguistically uniform. Ullendorff could as well have spoken of "shards" as of a "fragment." Reading along one encounters not just different sets of vocabulary and spellings, but even different verbal systems that appear to handle tense, mood and aspect in at least three different ways. Scholars have therefore long argued for at least three types of Hebrew: Archaic (usually said to be exemplified by Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32, and Judges 5, the "Song of the Sea," the "Song of Moses," and the "Song of Deborah," each marked as poetry (Hebrew uses related terms for these, different derivatives of the root sh-y-r), Standard (usually taken as the bulk of the Torah plus Joshua through II Kings), and Late (Chronicles, Ester, Ezra-Nehemiah).

Yet though composed of shards, Biblical Hebrew is not broken. This is because the language was integrated by a group of Jewish Aramaic (not Hebrew!)-speaking scholars near the coast of Palestine, in Tiberias, who provided it with vocalization and speech melody based on ancient traditions of their own around the 7th and 8th centuries C.E., somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 years after the first texts were probably written down in Standard Biblical Hebrew. What is remarkable about this system of vocalization and cantillation is that it gives far more information than necessary for verbal understanding: one of the things that makes the Tiberian vowel system confusing is that, while it almost always gives enough information to tell different words with identical consonants apart, it is obviously not designed to do that; rather, it's designed to record the exact sounds produced by a tradtionally correct liturgical reader in the synagogue. In other words, it's more like Sanskrit, with its elaborate notation of strictly phonetic phenomena, than it is like the more matter-of-fact Greek or Arabic.

This linguistic fact has interesting consequences for popular things like the study of Midrash and the always blossoming fields of Biblical interpretation. This is because the cantillation marks, rarely taught in Biblical Hebrew class, in fact seem to set forth a set of very precise instructions for prosody; that is, they tell you how to intone and express the content of the text. In an environment where the significance of the text was, to put it mildly, disputed, the Tiberians produced a text that not only could only be read one way, but that tried to turn its readers into human tape recorders, playback machines that ventriloquized God's word.

If this is true, could it tell us new things about what the people behind the Masoretic tradition thought Scripture was? One of the great frustrations in reading a wonderful book like Michael Fishbane's Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel is that he never renders explicit what he thinks the scribes' precise notion of the text was--what gave them the right to do the things they did to it? What constraints were they under and how did they conceive of what they were doing? His student Bernard Levinson has taken some major, equally wonderful steps towards figuring out a scribal view of the text in Deuteronomy. But what about the people who put the end result together?

That's for a future time. Now, as I promised, we go back to the Iron Age.

*A rare personal note: the memory in question dates years back, to a cherished moment at the Albright Institute in Jerusalem, sleeping on the floor of the library after reading late into the night and all the buses had stopped running.

ARAMAIC ADDENDUM: Ed Cook quite rightly asks where the curious btdwd' kitchen text can be found. My revered teacher Delbert Roy Hillers edited it with Eleonora Cussini as PAT 2743:8, and they cite an original publication in Syria 1926; it was conveniently republished in Rosenthal's Aramaic Handbook, entry 13 under Palmyrene. Curious readers who examine the original will see that something is indeed being cooked up here, but it is not food :-).

Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?

2005-01-13T18:58:00.000-08:00

I have been reflecting on the linguistic status of ancient Hebrew, in both the Bible and inscriptions, for a while now.

"Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?" was the title of a book and essay of many years ago by the great Ethiopicist and Semitist Edward Ullendorff (for this bibliography, and much more besides, see the treasure trove assembled by Mark S. Smith), and it's a nice way into the question. Rather than arguing that Biblical Hebrew was a priestly hoax on the part of Moses or Ezra (see previous post), he asked a more straightforward question:

Does the vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible give us a full picture of how people spoke in ancient Israel? The lexicon is something around 7,000-8,000 words (in the estimation of the Israeli philologist Hayim Rabin, who should know). Compare the combined vocabulary of Rabbinic and modern Hebrew, closer to 22,000 in a compact dictionary, or the small Penguin English dictionary (40,000).

More strikingly, Ullendorff points out, we have Biblical words for "fork" (mazleg) and "knife" (ma'akhelet), but not "spoon" (kaf today, for which the earliest instance he can find is Mishnaic, despite that spoons turn up in the archaeological record quite early).

In a way, it's even worse than he thinks: the world of ancient West Semitic kitchen terms is a shadowy realm, which one enters at one's own peril. I have no confidence that mazleg, which came to mean "fork," was used that way in Biblical times: it only appears as a priestly tool to move sacrificial meat around, and I Samuel 2:13 specifies that the one in question has "three prongs," which means we can't assume it usually did. Similarly, we find the ma'akhelet doing its horribly gruesome work on the body of a concubine in Judges 19:29, and Abraham takes one to sacrifice his son Isaac in Genesis 22, but we never see it used for food! While not a military implement, the only uses of the ma'akhelet in the Bible are to cut people. And while Ezekiel features a "kitchen" (bet hammevashlim in Ezk 46:24), it is a dark secret of the whole "House of David" inscription controversy that the Palmyrene Aramaic word for "kitchen" is none other than btdwd'!

Not only that, but as Ullendorff (and he is not the first) points out, there isn't even a word for the Hebrew language! Ivrit doesn't turn up til the Wisdom of Ben Sira, and Yehudit "Judean" and sefat Kena'an "the language of Canaan" are rather more specific: they point to dialects and identities below and above the scale of the nation.

So what kind of linguistic picture does Biblical Hebrew form? In the next post, I'll weave together some reflections on the latest critique of Biblical Hebrew's linguistic status as it appears in the work of Ian Young, together with a helpful introduction from Sue Groom and some straightforward wisdom from Jonas Greenfield and Josef Naveh...

Ezra, the Exile, and the Invention of Modern Biblical Criticism

2005-01-10T17:28:00.000-08:00

Where did we get the idea that Ezra wrote the Torah, and thus in some way "invented" Israel during the exile? Michael Green, a Chicago philosopher who I have praised for the ways he uses the web to teach, steered me here, where Noel Malcolm describes this idea passing through the head of an 18th-century freethinker:

Also composing a radical critique of Christianity in the 1720s...was the prominent scholar Nicolas Fréret, Secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris. His 'Lettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe' (a survey of paganism, Judaism and Christianity, written as if by a learned Greek in the first century ad) raises some standard objections to the theory of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch: those books of the Bible contain things that 'can only have been written a long time after the Law-giver', a fact which 'greatly diminishes their authority'. The prophetic books, too, may have been put together only after the events referred to in their so-called prophecies. But Fréret goes further. Cleverly, he turns the tables on the traditional claim that divine revelation was authenticated by prophecies and miracles: he remarks that the Jews were more obedient to God after the return from the Babylonian captivity, despite the lack of miracles, whereas their worst disobedience to God had come in earlier times, when miracles were (allegedly) in plentiful supply. His conclusion is that the miracles had never happened, and that the significant new factor here was that after the captivity the Jewish people had, for the first time, come under the spell of a Scripture which claimed that they had. 'Those miracles . . . were inserted after the event into a history which, as they admit, was compiled by the person—Ezra—who led them back from Babylon, who established their new government, rebuilt their city with the temple of their God, and determined the form of their religion, which had been entirely abolished.'

But who first proposed the idea that "ancient Israel" was the exilic invention of a scribal elite? In a wonderful article, Malcolm explains how the usual idea among radicals, through the 18th century, was that the great manipulator was Moses, who had invented the Israelite religion for political purposes (for the concept of the manipulative elite invention of religion, the great source is of course Machiavelli). But "it took some time, apparently, for writers in the radical tradition to recognize that with the Ezran theory they could have the best of both worlds: they could discredit the authority of Revelation all the more thoroughly, while still retaining the basic idea of politically motivated imposture, merely reassigning it from Moses to Ezra himself"!

Malcolm, a really interesting Hobbes scholar, writes that "while the title of 'founder of modern biblical criticism' is nowadays given sometimes to La Peyrère, sometimes to Spinoza, and sometimes to Simon, it is hardly ever awarded to Hobbes," despite the fact that he seems to have been the first to mention the idea of exilic authorship in print. He argues that the idea was in the air at the middle of the 17th century--

--but the first person to write it down was a Muslim anti-Jewish polemicist named Ibn Hazm in the 11th century! It is in response to this polemica tradition that much early Jewish Bible criticism, such as that of Ibn Ezra, may initially have arisen. The whole article is a revelation, as it were, and anyone interested in what Bible criticism is, and how it got the way it is, will want to read it.

Genesis: Logos or Agon?

2005-01-07T16:03:00.000-08:00

One of the best things that can happen in Biblical studies (or anywhere) is when a thoughtful scholar says something weird. By weird, I mean new, something that has not been tested or assimilated into business as usual and that we haven't worked with before. Sometimes this is because they have made a mistake or have a fixed idea, a cookie-cutter methodology or a goofy obsession.

But sometimes, this is because they have a new vision, seeing ancient realities that were shaped differently from the way we envisioned them before. This is when the rest of us have to scramble to decide what we think, whether to accept, reject or rethink this vision, and what the consequences would be.

Based on the books I've read (and I can never read enough in this field!), I would submit that in 2003, the book that did this best in Hebrew Bible was Michael Fishbane's Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (look around on the link for the book at a decent price), and in 2004 that book was Bill Schniedewind's How the Bible Became a Book. If you want to get a sense of the most interesting stuff that might happen in Biblical studies in the next few years you could do worse than to look at these two.

I've been thinking about both of these books lately (one of the reasons I got Bill Schniedewind to speak at my conference), but Fishbane's book in particular raises a crucial problem I want to try and solve. Fishbane's book begins with an analysis of scholarly attempts to explain away mythic imagery in the Bible and Jewish tradition. In a comprehensive and convincing polemic, Fishbane argues that these denials come from a case of denial: that they are apologetic attempts to sanitize a religion--and what's worse, in trying to save ancient Judaism from itself they miss out on much of its true religious vitality and maybe even its theological core.

A case in point, he says, is God's creation of the universe. Since the discovery of the most elaborate Babylonian creation myth, Enuma Elish, scholars have read Genesis 1 alongside it, noting the parallels in theme and organization. But a stark contrast was pointed out: unlike Enuma Elish, which culminates in a dramatic and gory battle between the supreme god and a cosmic monster, there is no battle in Genesis 1: the universe obeys him completely. Scholars highlighted this difference, using it to show that Israel's strict monotheism had expunged (or, in Jacob Milgrom's rather mythic language, "eviscerated") myth.

But it's not that simple, writes Fishbane:

"it bears recalling that the creation account in Genesis 1 was not always the opening or foundational narrative of a 'Bible.' In fact, many other accounts and apostrophes of the creation circulated in ancient Israel, and some of them were even recited in prayers preserved in the book of Psalms. Among these, there are several examples in which a divine combat against the sea is featured..."

Among the texts Fishbane is thinking of here are the alternative creation accounts, both violent and nonviolent, of Psalms 74, 89 and 104, Job 37:14-27 and 38:2-18, and Proverbs 8.

Accordingly, the complete biblical evidence seems rather to indicate two different models of the creation. One of these we shall designate the 'logos model', since it particularly or primarily emphasizes a verbal creation...Genesis 1 is the pre-eminent example of this mythic type, with its theology of an absolutely sovereign creator who speaks and shapes dormant or unresistant matter into effective (viable) existence and order. Over against this type we may place the 'agon model', which gives dominant emphasis to acts of strife and subjugation at the beginning of the world; and particularly since it is God's victory over antagonistic creatures of the sea that marks His great sovereignty and might."

But what if you need logos to have an agon? The problem is this: given that Fishbane has seen something new, and true, in Biblical myth that is expressed in his logos/agon opposition, what does it mean that the two most famous Ancient Near Easten combat myths, Enuma Elish's Marduk v. Tiamat and the Ugaritic Baal epic's Baal v. Yam, are actually examples of both models at once? Does this fusion extend to the Bible too? If the two ideal types Fishbane proposes are, in reality, a good deal more mixed, is there any other way of seeing the common features of the diverse creation accounts?

Of course, as a humble Semitic philologist, rather than theology I'm just going to look at the grammar. My hope is, building on Fishbane's insight, to discover something neither he nor I have quite seen yet.

Biblical Archaeology from Scratch III: How It Got Like This

2005-01-04T17:05:00.000-08:00

And now, what I see as the modern side of the underlying problem. This is that, to put it bluntly, you can dig up all the artifacts you want, even finding something that looks to you very much like an ancient Israelite state, with scribes, monotheism, and so on, and you may find that you have not really proven what you want to prove. The Bible may be authentic (and here I think the "minimalists" who want to falsify it are still buying into the same assumptions as their opposite numbers), but is that enough to make it Scripture? Does that help us decide if it's the authoritative word of God?

It never fails to amaze me, the incisiveness with which Thomas Hobbes, who helped inaugurate both modern Biblical Studies and modern political theory, already saw the limits of both:

It is a question much disputed between the divers sects of Christian religion: From whence the Scriptures derive their authority? Which question is also propounded sometimes in other terms, as, How we know them to be the word of God? or, Why we believe them to be so? And the difficulty of resolving it ariseth chiefly from the improperness of the words wherein the question itself is couched. For it is believed on all hands that the first and original author of them is God; and consequently the question disputed is not that. Again, it is manifest that none can know they are God's word (though all true Christians believe it) but those to whom God himself hath revealed it supernaturally; and therefore, the question is not rightly moved of our knowledge of it. Lastly, when the question is propounded of our belief, because some are moved to believe for one, and others for other reasons, there can be rendered no one general answer for them all. The question truly stated is: By what authority they are made law?
Leviathan 33.21

What Hobbes seems to me to be arguing is that the question of the authority of the Bible is the wrong one: when you think it through, he says, it doesn't matter whether it is the word of God. He comes to this rather counterintuitive conclusion by breaking down the question of the authority of Scripture into two things people actually mean when they say this: 1) How we know the scriptures to be the word of God? And 2), Why we believe them to be so? He says these are the wrong questions: "For it is believed on all hands that the first and original author of them is God," so everybody believes it. Again, "it is manifest that none can know they are God's word (though all true Christians believe it) but those to whom God himself hath revealed it supernaturally;” so nobody knows it. “The question truly stated is: By what authority they are made law?” The question is why—or if—anyone obeys it. That is, the fact that they may come from God is irrelevant: as humanly promulgated documents, texts are all alike: the scriptures can have no power to compel assent; it takes a state to make them law. So there is nothing inherent in scripture that makes it scripture: the state’s decision to compel obedience is the only difference that matters.

At the point commonly recognized as one of the founding moments of Biblical studies, Hobbes makes a series of deft moves to shut it down, to prove the debate would be fruitless. He argues that all the philology in the world won’t change the essential fact that the text is just a text. Nothing in the text, says Hobbes, can prove it’s the word of God. No matter what history lies behind the Bible, the end result, the document it produced, is just like any other document.

Now, Hobbes' political theory also assumes a theory of language, which is that all texts do by themselves is communicate information.* In this theory, all laws have the same status vis a vis the state: they need someone with control over violence to enforce them. So the question of authorship is moot: it’s very interesting, but it doesn’t change anything.

This, Hobbes would say, is the boat that Biblical studies missed: once church and state are separated, the Bible is de facto not authoritative any more, and de facto is all that matters. Once we accept the theory that all texts are the same—that communication through writing is necessary, but invisible and functionally uniform, the question of what the Bible did and does is off the table.

Interestingly, there is a thread in Weber’s theory of the state that casts a radically different light on the whole thing. But I'll leave that for my book.

*That is, if I understand it correctly. Today John Kelly pointed me to some work by Quentin Skinner which argues that Hobbes actually has a whole semiotic theory that's different from the two early Modern poles usually posited, at least in anthropological linguistics, of Locke and Herder. We shall see!

Biblical Archaeology from Scratch II: The Real Problem

2005-01-04T16:23:00.000-08:00

We are finally talking about the plague of forged Israelite documents, and we should be. Sunlight is a powerful disinfectant.

But I think the real problem might go deeper. Because there is a fundamental difficulty in the way we imagine, and thereby attempt to dig up, ancient Israel. Because of both historical facts and inherent conceptual problems, this enterprise might be doomed to fail in the terms it has set itself. As long as the burning desire to authenticate or falsify Biblical documents exists, as long as the debate is cast in these terms, problems like this will continue to come up. So another question we could ask is, why is the debate cast in these terms, of maximalism vs. minimalism, history vs. ideology, authenticity vs. forgery? Why is the question we're so fixated on--how did it get to be this way--and is this quest somehow already set up for failure?

First of all, the ancient side of the problem: archaeology has not recovered the stark opposition between Israelites and others that the Biblical text proclaims. Excavations show that Syro-Palestinian material culture varied mainly by region and not ethnicity: Indeed, scholarship now views ethnic group membership as a result of deliberate choice and reflection by the members themselves, as well as others who recognize them. This is the crucial methodological contribution of Ian Hodder’s Symbols in Action, a series of studies in which archaeologists interpreted the recent material remains of a culture while the natives were still around to talk to. Able to ask what the excavated objects actually meant to their users, Hodder found that the ethnic significance of objects was determined in conversation and interaction, not set in stone, nor inherent in the things themselves. In other words, the bare physical forms of the artifacts were not as important as the ethnic interpretation their users gave them through language.

This goes against the long-standing “Culture Area” assumption that ethnic and linguistic divisions should line up with material culture--that we could dig up Israel as a tight, coherent national unit, which would correspond with people who, uniformly, spoke Hebrew, were members of an Israelite religion, believed in Davidic monarchy, and thought their ancestors came from Egypt. But Hodder’s theory has been borne out in Syro-Palestinian archaeology by studies of the distribution of items that were once thought to be taxonomically Israelite, such as the legendary four-room house and collar-rim jar. The spread of these items into places like Jordan correlates with geography and economy, not political or ethnic boundaries.

In a crucial recent article, Elizabeth Bloch-Smith points out that “not a single ‘Israelite’ trait identified by proponents of the Culture Area approach—pillared houses, collar-rim store jars, or pig abstinence--was exclusive to a conservatively delimited Iron I highland Israel…In general, Iron I highland architecture, diet, material culture, subsistence adaptation, language, and even cultic features continued Late Bronze Age practices or were attested in neighboring regions.”

The issue is not that the Culture Area approach did not produce the expected result here; the issue is that the result it expects is the excavation of a nation. Both rooted in and working to reinforce a distinctly modern concept--a tightly defined, homogenous nation-state, this archaeology’s “methods appeared to enable a clear-cut territorial boundary to be drawn around discrete culture assemblages, thereby delimiting the object of study as that of a distinct ethnic culture.” As the scholar of Nationalism Anthony Smith writes, this “presentation of a highly concrete and bounded territorial, archaeological culture seemed destined to clinch the nationalist image of a world of discrete and unique nations, each occupying an historic homeland, and each possessing its own shared memories and public culture, single economy and common laws.”

I should be clear: I don't see much purpose in asking whether an ancient Israel (as well as an ancient Judah, and an ancient Ephriam, which is what ancient Judeans like to call those northerners presumptuous enough to claim to be "Israel"!) existed. The question I'm excited about pursuing is whether it existed on our terms, and, especially, how you could recover the way it existed on their terms. The point of my book is to explore this through ancient writing. Provenanced ancient writing!

Last installment: the modern side of the problem, or, how it got this way.

Further Reading

Bloch-Smith, “Israelite Ethnicity in Iron I: Archaeology Preserves what is Remembered and what is Forgotten in Israel’s History” JBL 122 (2003) 401-25. The quote comes from p. 411

John S. Holladay, “Four-Room House” in Eric M. Meyers, ed. The Oxford Encylopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press; 1997) 337-342

Hodder, Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)

A.D. Smith, “Authenticity, Antiquity and Archaeology” in Nations and Nationalism 7 (2002). The the quote comes from p. 442

The Passion of the Christ, or, Mechanical Reproduction Speaks in Tongues

2005-01-03T11:13:00.000-08:00

Just finished my paper for the Interdisciplinary Christianities Workshop. If you're around the U of Chicago and have any kind of serious academic interest in these things, we're discussing it Friday, January 7th, at 3:30 in Haskell 101.

The paper connects one of my strict professional areas, the structure and relationship of ancient Aramaic and Hebrew, with some of what you could call my hobbies: semiotics, political theology, and the sparks that fly from their alchemy with media forms. If that sounds too abstruse for you, ask why the Hebrew Bible is in Hebrew, or why the Passion might as well have been in Chinese: what are the properties of a revealed text? Is it written differently? In a specific language? Is it still revealed when it is translated or paraphrased? Does it have any inherent properties at all, or does it, or someone else, just say it was revealed?

I'll post one of the fun parts (from part 2, "The Hermeneutic Wars"):

But [The Passion of the Christ] and its response can also be placed in a more specifically American history of concern over Bible reading in the context of mass media. Peter Gutjahr’s An American Bible describes a decline in Biblical literacy that concerned Protestants during the 19th century, when,

“a number of authors, publishers and clergymen turned to transforming the Bible’s story into less sacred forms of print to turn American readers once again to the Bible. As narrative forms such as the novel became more popular with the American reading public, American Protestants decided to commingle scriptural truth and fictional fancy in order to attract their countrymen to the Bible's message. Perhaps the most popular manifestation of this mixture was the nineteenth-century genre of the lives of Christ, a genre that included titles such as The Book of Mormon, The Prince of the House of David and Ben-Hur. As Americans were introduced to increasingly fictionalized lives of Christ, they were given both a new way to imagine themselves as characters in the Bible's story, as well as a means to avoid the density and complexity of that story. Consequently, an attempt to emphasize the Bible's story resulted in de-emphasizing the Bible itself.”

David Lyle Jeffrey, Provost of the Baptist university Baylor, describes the further, equally market-driven fragmentation of the Biblical text in the late 20th century. Citing the statistic that there are now 450 different translations or paraphrases of the Bible available, Jeffery explored the implications for Church communities no longer having a unitary text:

“It makes collective Bible study a very difficult task: ‘That’s not what my translation says.’ The authority of the Bible is being complicated if not compromised for readers—whose Bible? Which version? How do I know mine is accurate? It raises a series of questions that the church is not well disposed to solve because of our monolingual culture, resulting in a diminishment of authority of text.

One used to say that American Christians ‘knew the Bible by heart.’ The memorization of the text is now made more difficult by the variety of translations used, sometimes within the same sermon. What it does is diffuse in some fundamental way the power of the text to shape culture”.

One of the most popular, and problematic, solutions to the decline in textual knowledge among American Protestants, many of whom can no longer understand the King James Version, is to produce paraphrases.

“You get Bibles for teenagers that are paraphrases rather than translations, they may highlight certain passages by paraphrasing them in such a way to make them seem ‘cool,’” the result being “a Bible adequated so much in the direction of the reader that it may actually not resemble under any kind of linguistic scrutiny…the text that is being translated.”

Thus, even as some express concern, and others enthusiasm, about a culture war, the stakes are changing: evangelicals worry about a way to gain direct contact with the original Word of God, as the text that conveys it is fragmented by the marketing that promotes it.

The conversation between Jeffery and Gutjahr, which I heard on Chicago's WBEZ, was excellent, and anyone interested in how the Bible is read in America today would enjoy listening to it here .

Biblical Archaeology from Scratch I: Fake Epigraphy

2004-12-30T08:47:00.000-08:00

In the wake of the epidemic of forgeries that have made their way into our database about ancient Israel, Ed Cook puts it well: "It is not an overstatement to say that biblical archaeology may require a generation of disciplined, rigorous re-examination of all unprovenanced epigraphic material in order to be regarded again as a scientific discipline."

The basic problem is 1) it is not hard to forge ancient inscriptions. Some knowledge of ancient languages and a half-decent forgery lab, of which there are apparently several, is enough. 2) There are massive (6 or 7 figures) rewards for doing it. 3) It is very hard to conclusively prove forgery, partly because of the way that media and scholarly debates work. They form around an adversarial, "on the one hand, on the other hand" approach. As the "debates" around the health effects of smoking and the certaintly of global warming show, it is always possible to get an expert to argue your point of view. Authority in the modern media environment can be very diffuse.

This is something that my fellow Hopkins grad Christopher Rollston, one of the most skilled and thoughtful epigraphers around, has been thinking about for some time. He's come up with the best methodology I've seen for dealing with it.

One take-home point: always, always say whether your text was excavated or not, and always ask. It can be pretty disturbing to read stuff by good scholars where they don't, or where they shrug their shoulders.

For more, see his “Non-Provenanced Epigraphs I: Pillaged Antiquities, Northwest Semitic Forgeries, and Protocols for Laboratory Tests” in Maarav 10, and “Non-Provenanced Epigraphs II: The Status of Non-Provenanced Epigraphs within the Broader Corpus” (forthcoming in Maarav 11).

Next: why this may not really be the problem at all.

Serving the Word

2004-12-28T15:44:00.000-08:00

This blog gets its title from a heartfelt and illuminating ethnography by the anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano, Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench. It's a study of two flavors of literalist exegesis: Fundamentalist Christian biblical interpretation and "strict constructionist" Constitutional law (think Anthony Scalia and Robert Bork).

I'm writing a critique of it for the University of Chicago's Interdisciplinary Christianities workshop. Here are some notes on what sounds like a riveting paper that was delivered there last year by my friend Alex Golub who is now suffering the slings and arrows of lubricious Hawaii).

The beginning of my critique: Crapanzano's book is basically about hermeneutics on the ground. A hermeneutic is a way people get meaning from language. The book gets its kick from the conflict between two kinds of hermeneutics: his (secular, academic) and theirs (Fundamentalist or merely Conservative, but always literalist). His account of hermeneutics begins with Schleiermacher , a 19th-century German philosopher. But what if you began it with the kind of texts Crapanzano's Fundamentalist Christian subjects actually read and think about? What if you began hermeneutics with the book of John? The formation "literalism" might crack under the weight of this wilder semiotics.

As a philologist, I'm committed to paying a great deal of attention to ancient texts and the ways they tell you to read them. I'm planning to argue that if you look at the accounts of language implied in some ancient (John, as well as the first Jewish mystical treatise, Sefer Yesirah) and early modern (Reformation, esp. the Sacred Panegyrics of the Jesuit scholar Emanuele Tesauro) texts, Crapanzano's hermeneutics may come to seem too narrow and brittle to encompass the things modern Fundamentalists do with sacred language.

The bulk of the paper explores this with a look at the Aramaic language, and non-language, of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. Can we call a religious artifact like this an "interpretation"? It's certainly literalist. Where did it come from historically, what does the viewer participate in by watching it, and what kinds of problems does this raise, both for literalism and literalism's critics?

A fine can of worms. This is what I do to relax from editing alphabetic cuneiform texts and reading Isaiah? Anyhow, time to go read some Schliermacher.

Vernacular Revelation

2004-12-28T15:23:00.000-08:00

These are the lines along which I am planning my book, which is mostly done.

In the Renaissance, the translation of the Bible from the sacred Latin into the common tongues of the day was politically explosive: divine revelation now spoke directly to the people. Vernacular Revelation will argue that this is how the Hebrew Bible itself was created, as the first vernacular literature designed for wide distribution. Thousands of years before the first national languages were written down in Europe, a common language was forged by Israelite scribes in order to create a new audience—the people of Israel. This book expands on the past 20 years of research in anthropology, political science and history to show the invention of Hebrew language and literature not as a socially constructed fiction but as a cultural achievement that produced new political possibilities.

Vernacular Revelation attempts to rethink the Bible in light of recent findings in the history of writing. Discoveries in the 1980’s and 90’s demonstrated the extreme antiquity of the alphabet and the fact that there was not originally just one alphabet, but multiple competing alphabetic systems. This means that the use of the Hebrew alphabet was a deliberate and meaningful choice. Hebrew did more than just transmit information: it was a vehicle of political symbolism and self-representation. Old and sometimes bitter debates over whether the Bible is history or ideology can give way to productive new ones over the relationship between the Bible’s written form and its political power.

Vernacular Revelation suggests new avenues for Biblical scholarship, arguing for the need to move beyond modern scholarly ambitions of “seeing through” the Bible’s conditions of production. 19th and 20th-century Biblical philology focused on reconstructing the conjectural sources behind the text, but resulted in a stalemate since the sources are neither preserved to us nor provable. I wish to find a way past that stalemate: while building on the most solid results of source criticism, the book will argue that philology is most reliable, and illuminating, when it works from actual contemporary documents. By comparing Biblical documents with related ancient texts in Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Babylonian, this book will document distinct ways in which Hebrew was a powerfully self-conscious political language. It was the first successful example of a new project: a local, culturally specific form of writing, opposed to the placeless, universal lingua franca of Babylonian cuneiform.

The book will explore the enduring political stakes of Biblical writing. Texts in Hebrew assumed, and promoted, a source of power previously unknown in written literature: “the people” as the protagonist of religion and politics. The Bible created an audience that could read about itself in its own language. By documenting how this new readership was produced, the book hopes to exemplify how philology can address vital new questions asked by scholars of history and anthropology.

Margins of Writing

2004-12-28T14:15:00.000-08:00

The margins seem like a fine place to begin. In fact, I believe that's where everyone begins, historically speaking.

If writing is the sine qua non of history, this conference is about how people gained the tools to make history. It focuses on the ancient Near East, from Israel to Babylon to Anatolia, but chews on some very broad questions, including ones posed by India and China (thanks to the University of Chicago's John Kelly and Sheldon Pollock, who will be our resident comparativists).

It's hosted by Chicago's venerable (for the US, anyway) and quasi-legendary Oriental Institute, and will feature some of my friends and neighbors from the third floor, such as the Hittitologist Theo van den Hout and the Sumerologist Chris Woods.

The conference is my main academic task this year (other than writing a book on the language of the Hebrew Bible and the politics of ancient Israel--which I'll describe later--and finding something good to do for next year) . Non-academic tasks include getting 8 hours a week of exercise (running, rock-climbing, swimming, biking, ice-climbing...I'm taking suggestions!) , taking good care of the dog, and enjoying the company and wisdom of those around me.