Many Higgaion readers will recall (and the rest of you will now learn) that my current research project focuses on the use, influence, and impact of the book of Genesis in and on Western culture, broadly conceived. In the course of that study, I’ve encountered several scholars and sources that use the term Nachleben—roughly, “posthumous influence”—to describe biblical texts’ impact in the synagogue, church, and wider society. At least one excellent scholar, writing in English, has even used the term “afterlives” to name post-compositional uses of a biblical text.

I don’t like the term Nachleben, or the “life cycle” metaphor that controls it.

To speak of a text’s—any text’s—influence on generations after its author’s or authors’ lifetime(s) implies that texts “die” at just about the same time they are born. They gestate in the minds of their authors and “die” upon publication, just when they begin to see use. I suppose one could try to conceive of a text’s “lifetime” as the period during which it is being put to its originally intended use. Perhaps a newspaper “dies” when it is no longer read, but placed in a birdcage, for example. Then again, other copies of that same newspaper “live on” in libraries somewhere else. And we find it notoriously difficult to specify the “originally intended uses” of texts, biblical and otherwise, and certainly the early Christians put Jewish scriptures to different uses than their Jewish contemporaries. Were those scriptures “dead” by the time the gospels were written?

The construction of an automobile probably provides a better metaphor. A car’s parts may come from a wide variety of sources, all brought to a single manufacturing plant, where the car itself takes shape. The car rolls off the assembly line, someone buys it and takes delivery, and starts using it. Nobody would consider the car “dead” at that point—much less that particular model when considered in the abstract. As long as somebody’s using the car (or any instance of that model car), the car isn’t “dead.”

So I invite you to join me in preferring the word Wirkungsgeschichte—”history of effects”—to Nachleben—”posthumous influence”—when you need a German word to describe the influence and impact of a biblical text in any and all periods after its composition. Those of us who don’t feel like we need a German word can follow James Kugel’s lead and talk about the “career” of a text instead of its “afterlives.”

What do you say?

I can hardly believe that I’ve actually gone for almost two months without posting anything at all to Higgaion. I’ve not lost interest, but have simply found that my offline life—and my other online lives—have eaten up the time that I might once have used for blogging, and for reading other people’s blogs. Throughout May, I taught a Hebrew readings course, and then, immediately upon completing some committee work and a couple of long-overdue projects, I had to begin preparing for a professional conference and a family vacation. The word “busy” hardly seems adequate.

At any rate, Ron Hendel drew me out of blogging hibernation with his recent piece in Biblical Archaeology Review, “Farewell to SBL.” Actually, the ensuing kerfuffle has drawn me out more than the piece itself. I found the contents of the piece rather unsurprising, though I admit to feeling disheartened (John Anderson understands this better than anyone else) by Ron’s choice not to keep working from the inside to solve the problems Ron perceives.

If you’ve been living in a cave or, like me, out of a suitcase for the past week, you might want to read Ron’s article, the blog posts linked in James McGrath’s roundup, and the conversation on the SBL web site before proceeding to more of my own thoughts on the matter.

This post offers more content »

This post, dear reader, addresses those of you who use the iTanakh web index and find the search function useful. It costs me $249 per year (payable in one lump sum each May 15 or so) to keep a search feature on iTanakh—and this year, I don’t have it. So here’s the deal: if you think a search feature is worth having on iTanakh and you find it useful, please contribute a little funding to the cause by sending in a donation via PayPal. If you want to do this, please use the PayPal Donate button on the iTanakh site itself. When I receive enough donations that I can afford to renew the search service, I’ll do so right away. Otherwise, the search feature will go dormant on iTanakh until such time as I can either afford to pay the bill or find a new way to run searches. No other aspect of iTanakh will be affected by this.

What I really want is to convert the entire site to a PHP/SQL database. But I don’t have the know-how to do that just now, and I don’t really have time to learn at this juncture.

In my Religion 101 course (an introductory Old Testament course for first-year students, not a “how to be religious” course), students can earn credit toward their final grade in many different ways. One of the options, the Prophet achievement, invites students to write about the use of the Bible debates over abortion.

In the two semesters that students have had this option, several have quoted or referenced Isaiah 46:3 in an attempt to demonstrate that God considers not-yet-born children to be fully human persons, worthy of divine care and attention. I do not wish, in this post (or the comments thread thereafter), to engage in a debate over whether viewing fetuses as fully human persons has theological or scientific validity in general. Rather, I want to think out loud about whether that claim finds exegetical support in this verse. The wider debate can wait.

At one level, one can easily dismiss this verse from consideration in the abortion debate, because the verse addresses the entire “house of Jacob//Israel” as a group, not any individual person, much less every individual person. The references to Jacob//Israel’s birth in Isaiah 46:3 refers metaphorically to the birth of the group, not to the births of individual human beings.

However, in a more sophisticated fashion, one might argue that the metaphor really works only if the ideas expressed do apply to individual humans; if what is said isn’t true of individual humans, there’s no reason to consider it true of the nation cast metaphorically as a human. Granting this point makes the question more complicated.

The Hebrew text of Isaiah 46:3c–d reads:

העמסים מני בטן
הנשאים מני רחם

The parallelism is tight and indisputable. To whatever stage in life line c refers, line d refers, and vice versa. The NRSV translation makes this clear:

who have been borne by me from your birth,
carried from the womb

The more widely circulating NIV, however, casts line c in a different temporal frame than line d:

you whom I have upheld since you were conceived,
and have carried since your birth.

NRSV and NIV agree on the sense of line d, but NIV pushes line c back before birth, to conception. If the NIV is right to do this in line c, then line d should also be rendered in the same temporal frame, given the very tight semantic and syntactic parallelism. But were the NIV translators right to give line c the spin they gave it? I don’t think so. To me, the preposition מן suggests “from the time you came out of the belly//womb,” as the NRSV translators indicate in both lines, and as the NIV translators indicate in line d. Certainly if that is the sense of מני רחם in line d, it is the sense of מני בטן in line c. Also, when you take Isaiah 46:4 into account, it becomes clear that the contrast is not between birth and death, but between infancy and old age. (Death would be highly inappropriate in this context, because the whole point is that the nation, though scarred, is not dead.)

Apparently, the translators who worked on the TNIV agreed that the NIV translation was tendentious (or just plain grammatically wrong), because they revised it to

you whom I have upheld since your birth,
and have carried since you were born.

Isaiah 46:3–4 expresses a beautiful sentiment about God’s love and care for the “house of Israel,” but it has no bearing on debates about abortion—not just because it’s about a collective instead of individuals, but also because the implied time frame begins after birth.

A couple of days ago, Mike Heiser reacted with fully appropriate underwhelmation (that’s a word now, as I just made it up) to a press release touting a newly-discovered Assyrian treaty as a possible “model for the biblical description of God’s covenant with the Israelites.” Basically, Mike attributes the formal/structural similarities between biblical covenant forms and Assyrian covenant forms to literary convention:

The fact is that biblical covenants follow known covenant patterns precisely because the biblical writers weren’t morons. Think of this sort of genre criticism/comparison this way. If you hired a lawyer who wrote up a legal brief, presented it to the court, and then the judge said, after reading it, “Is your lawyer a doofus? Doesn’t he know how these things are written?” you’d probably better fire him/her. In other words, there was a *proper* way in literary terms to write a covenant. Trained scribes know that sort of thing.

You should read the whole thing; I didn’t think it appropriate to reproduce the entire paragraph.

While I appreciate Mike’s stand against “sensationalistic paleobabble,” I think there may be more significance to the comparison. If Deuteronomy, whose basic outline or literary structure is famously similar to Assyrian treaty forms (and not just the newly-unearthed one, as Mike points out), really was written sometime during the first eighteen years of King Josiah’s reign—a claim one can defend on purely inner-biblical grounds, without reference to Assyrian treaty forms—then the use of the suzerain-vassal (or overlord-underling) treaty form to express convictions about God’s covenant with Israel may have been a deliberate decision, a rhetorical strategy with significant political and theological ramifications.

Although I don’t know of any way to prove this, I can well imagine a group of Judean priest-scribes living in the third quarter of the seventh century BCE deliberately choosing to turn a literary instrument of empire against the empire. By expressing their beliefs about their relationship with God in the form of a suzerain-vassal treaty—a form potentially learned from their imperial overlords—these Judean theologians effectively said to themselves, the Judean monarchy and polity, and perhaps to the empire itself, “Our suzerain is God, not the ‘Great King’ of Assyria.” In the seventh century BCE, the treaty form offered a unique vehicle for this rhetorical strategy, and that opportunity may have influenced the Judean theologians’ decision to use that literary form.

Have you heard of 2011 Trust, the organization that is “celebrating the Bible in English” by putting on various events related to the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible?

Richard Dawkins has, and he has contributed a reading—I don’t mean an interpretation, I mean a literal, out-loud reading—of one chapter from the Song of Songs to a whole collection of such readings. Watch the video below to learn why.

Most of it is fairly typical Bible-as-literature, or rather Bible-in-literature stuff, in the sense that Dawkins emphasizes the debt that English literature and colloquial English owe to the King James Bible. I particularly like Dawkins’s line, “We are a Christian culture, we come from a Christian culture, and not to know the King James Bible is to be, in some small way, barbarian.”

Scrub forward to about 2:25, though, and things go sideways. Asked for his advice to the 2011 Trust, Dawkins says,

Well, I think it is important to make the case that the Bible is part of our heritage, and it doesn’t have to be tied to religion. It is of historic interest. It is of literary interest. And it’s important that religion should not be allowed to hijack this cultural resource.

Now I am all for secular biblical studies (though not to the exclusion of confessional biblical studies), and if your interest in the Bible is primarily historical or literary, by all means have at it! But for crying out loud, let’s not pretend that we even have a Bible around to study historically or literarily for any other reason than the religious devotion of the Jews and Christians who preserved the Bible in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, Latin, and Arabic long before Wycliffe, never mind King James. If anybody has “hijacked” the Bible, it is those who approach it with a purely secular or cultural historical and literary interest, not those who grant it some measure of religious authority. Now, actually, I do not think that such individuals have “hijacked” anything; they have simply taken a certain type of interest in a certain object of study. But to speak of religion hijacking the Bible is really very silly.

I just got word a little while ago that Pepperdine’s Instructional Technology division has chosen me to be among the faculty and staff testing the first wave of iPads on campus. Aside from the obvious “Yippee!,” this news brings with it heightened responsibility to think about how to use the device in class. As Chris Brady and I have briefly discussed via Twitter, use cases for faculty differ from use cases for students. In my case, I’ll have access to both a MacBook Pro and an iPad. How shall I use each of these?

Currently, I carry my MacBook Pro (issued by Pepperdine) and my iPhone (personal purchase) to class, along with my physical Bible. I use Keynote for presentations, and like the iPhone’s Remote app for controlling Keynote slides, though it has some limitations—not least among them being the short battery life of the iPhone when you’re using WiFi constantly. Thus, I often end up using a Kensington Bluetooth Presenter Mouse instead of the iPhone app.

I’m very impressed with the Pages, Keynote, and Numbers guided tours that Apple provides, but I don’t think I want to use the iPad as a presentation-output device. To my way of thinking, you defeat the purpose of a mobile device if you tie yourself down with cables. Therefore, right now I think I will probably continue to carry my MacBook Pro to class, and I will probably run my Keynote presentations from that device.

So, what will I do with the iPad? Lots of things, I think:

• If the iPad has a Remote app for Keynote, or if the current iPhone Remote app works on the iPad, I will probably try using that to control my Keynote presentations—but only if it’s very reliable at picking up the connection again if I exit the app while the Keynote presentation is running on the MacBook Pro. The current version of Remote isn’t very good at that, in my estimation. If the iPad offers this functionality at a level that I find satisfactorily reliable, I will use it, and will enter any necessary notes as presenter notes in Keynote.
  
  
• If the bullet above doesn’t work out, I’ll still use the iPad for any notes I might need to consult during class—probably in the form of Pages documents, but perhaps in the form of PDF documents, depending on what types of PDF reader functionality exist for the iPad at and soon after launch.
• I will also be happy to access the biblical text on my iPad instead of using a paper copy, especially given the bookmarking, annotations, highlighting, and search options available in my preferred iPhone Bible reader, the aptly-named Bible Reader from Olive Tree (warning: auto-playing video on the home page).
• Having a second web-capable device in the classroom will enable me to interact with students in new ways, such as accepting questions via Twitter—currently hard to do given the way that Keynote and PowerPoint “take over” the machine in order to do what they do. I understand why Keynote and PowerPoint work this way, and I like what they accomplish—but without a second mobile device, that makes the laptop a one-trick pony for the duration of the slideshow. I often interrupt my Keynote sequences to switch over to a web browser (tip: use Spaces to do this without actually exiting your slideshow) to show something on the screen, but I monitoring a Twitter stream while simultaneously presenting with Keynote or PowerPoint has never worked for me. With the iPad I can envision doing just that (especially if someone will make a Twitter client with hashtag-aware push notifications).

I’m sure there several other uses that I haven’t yet considered or haven’t taken the time to detail here. I’d better stop now, because I have plenty left on today’s to-do list. But I did want to put this out there to get some conversation started. If you know of other places, educational websites for example, where this conversation is already ongoing, please hook me up!

I’ll head out tomorrow for BibleTech 2010 (or BibleTech:2010; the organizers/publicizers can’t seem to decide whether to use or omit the colon) in San Jose, California. On Friday, I’ll make a presentation on my efforts to “digitize” the introductory Hebrew Bible/Old Testament classroom.

Are any Higgaion readers attending BibleTech 2010?

The management of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport likes to call their facility “America’s friendliest airport.” One element of that friendliness: Sky Harbor offers a generous selection of electrical outlets as well as free wireless internet throughout the terminal. Props to Sky Harbor!

My current scholarly project has me investigating the “reception history” or Wirkungsgeschichte of the book of Genesis in Western culture. This investigation necessarily involves forays into the history and criticism of art, literature, music, drama, and other expressions of elite and popular culture. I try to keep an awareness of my utter dilettantishness in these fields always close at hand, and I approach them with trepidation. An article I read a few minutes ago drove this point home once again.

This particular article—which shall, along with its author, remain nameless here—focused on allusions to Genesis 11 within a particular short story. The author claims that “biblical commentary on Genesis 11.i–ix … bears an uncanny resemblance” to the short story in question. Although the article appeared in 2003, the author cites no source, either in biblical studies or literary studies, later than 1974. (I wonder whether a long delay intervened between the authorship and publication—without revision—or whether the article might be a reprint.) The only actual commentary cited is the 1952 Interpreter’s Bible on Genesis (the author of the article in question does not name the author of the old IB commentary), though one might consider Nahum Sarna’s Understanding Genesis to be a commentary. Otherwise, the author cites only a few encyclopedia articles (c. 1955–1975) as sources for understanding “biblical commentary on Genesis 11.i–ix.”

To me, this experience raises once again the question: How can I explore a discipline other than my own, in a scholarly publication, without looking like an ignoramus? How does one exercise quality control in the selection of sources from a field one does not really know as an insider?