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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

"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--