[A]ttempt[ing] to establish dates for events in the Pentateuch requires the combination of information from various sources which may not always be compatible. Historical schemes also operate with unproven assumptions and make use of circular reasoning. In the end we can only conclude that fixing such dates cannot be accomplished with reasonable certainty. Fortunately, this may not matter a great deal.

—Mark McEntire, Struggling with God: An Introduction to the Pentateuch (Mercer University Press, 2009)

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.

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?

The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures has recently published an article by Bob Becking and Marjo Korpel entitled “To Create, to Separate, or to Construct: An Alternative for a Recent Proposal as to the Interpretation of ברא in Gen 1:1–2:4a.” In this article, Becking and Korpel analyze and criticize Ellen van Wolde’s proposal that ברא properly means “to separate” or “to differentiate,” not “to create.” In my judgment, Becking and Korpel show the unlikelihood of van Wolde’s suggestion from a lexicographical point of view, and they also provide a coherent lexical and theological account of the “neologism” ברא. If you’re interested in this particular subject, you should definitely put this article on your reading list.

I haven’t blogged much lately—at least, not on Higgaion. This simply reflects the number of hours in a day, and how I’ve chosen to spend my discretionary time. All work and no play makes Chris a dull boy, and a grumpy one. I’m increasingly trying to separate my work life and home/personal life, getting my pedagogical and scholarly work done on campus 7:30–4:30, and then leaving it behind when I go home.

The thing is, if I get my pedagogical and scholarly work done 7:30–4:30 daily, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for blogging. Occasionally I will take time to post something when I feel I have something important or useful to say. However, I hereby officially, explicitly, and ceremoniously declare myself free of any felt obligation to post stuff. I am not “retiring” from blogging or any such nonsense, just taking a different approach to budgeting my time.

I appreciate all of you who post regularly on your own blogs; thanks to the iPhone, you provide some of my favorite bathroom reading (was that too much information?), even if I don’t comment frequently. I appreciate all of you who have contributed regularly to the comments on Higgaion over the last few years, and I hope you’ll keep Higgaion on your RSS feed, even my posting slows to a crawl.

By the way, I just started reading Ellen van Wolde’s Reframing Biblical Studies: When Language and Text Meet Culture, Cognition, and Context (Eisenbrauns, 2010). This book includes a fully-detailed English-language version of van Wolde’s arguments regarding the sense of ברא in Genesis 1, and I’m eager to read that. So far, I have finished only the introduction (chapter 1), but I can already report that Van Wolde’s argument is far more complex than it appeared when all that we Anglophone bloggers had to go on was a brief report from a Netherlands newspaper. I will share more of my reactions to van Wolde’s book as I work through it—I hope to keep up a page pace (thanks, G.M.!) of no less than two chapters per week, but cannot really aim higher than that at the moment.

שלום עליכם

As always, I scheduled one day of class into this semester to give students some contact with the “mainstream” biblical wisdom tradition as represented (for example) in Proverbs, Psalm 1, and so on. However, I don’t feel like I teach the book of Proverbs very well, perhaps because I don’t really enjoy the book of Proverbs very much. Any suggestions?

My Religion 101 class will study selected psalms on Tuesday. To help lay a foundation for our in-class activities, I created the following videos, two of which I uploaded just a couple of hours ago:

• Parallelism in Biblical Hebrew Poetry
• Poetic Structures in the Psalms
• Sorting Through the Psalms

Enjoy!

Since returning from the 2009 Society of Biblical Literature meeting, I’ve uploaded three new YouTube videos. One relates to my Religion 101 class:

• Parallelism in Biblical Hebrew Poetry

I will soon (today, if all goes well) supplement that one with additional videos on poetic structures in the psalms and form criticism of the Psalter. Two other videos, which I created in response to an e-mail from another teacher of Biblical Hebrew (whom I met through the Cohelet project), introduce students to typing in Hebrew on a Macintosh:

• Typing Hebrew on Mac OS X, Part 1 — This video shows viewers how to activate and access Hebrew keyboards on the Mac, and how to use the Keyboard Viewer and Character Viewer.
• Typing Hebrew on Mac OS X, Part 2 — This video discusses font selections as well as some of the challenges with selecting and editing right-to-left text on the Mac.

I’ve also expanded the Cohelet and Semantic Biblical Hebrew offerings on iFlipr:

• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.1
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.2
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.3
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5 (Cumulative)
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Movement
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Prepositions
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Senses

Please let me know of any typos you find in the decks, and please send suggestions for additions (especially ways to expand the movement and senses decks without getting into obscure or difficult-to-illustrate terms).

Whew! Saturday at SBL 2009 proved rather busy and hectic for me, and the first half of Sunday looks about the same.

Remember those iTunes U and YouTube videos that I’ve been posting recently? Pepperdine University funded the equipment and software to produce those videos with a Faculty Innovation in Technology and Learning grant. As part of that grant project, I brought my equipment with me to SBL ’09 and partnered with the SBL folk who are working on the new World of the Bible web site. I spent a good bit of Saturday working with that project, and will do the same the first half of Sunday. If all goes well—I have some concerns about lighting and sound quality, but hope I can fix those issues in post-production—Pepperdine’s iTunes U and/or the SBL web site will soon feature the likes of Mark Goodacre, Aren Maeir, and others delivering 5-minute (or so) mini-lectures on the Philistines, Mary of Magdala, and so on. I’ll give more details later as I learn how well the video did or didn’t turn out.

I also gave my presentation “Drowning in Paint: The Deluge in Western Art” on Saturday afternoon. Aside from misusing one German word (audience members graciously corrected my error, and I learned that what I had said was true of Danish, but not of German), I thought it went reasonably well. The questions and comments offered afterward were helpful and on-point, and I didn’t get any of the “Why didn’t you write the paper I would have written?” or “What do you think about a completely different topic?” questions. (I hate those.)

The only other presentation I attended was David J.A. Clines’s presidential address. David gave a good talk, but I was weighed down by dinner and found myself nodding—not in agreement, but with sleepiness. Essentially, David put forward a lengthy-ish case for active learning. I completely agreed with his proposals, but didn’t find them as “new” as he seemed to cast them.

It’s now Sunday morning, 6:50, and time for me to head out to the “Church of Christ Professors Meeting” (a.k.a. on-site worship). See you around!