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Friday 16 Apr 2010

Comparing covenants

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.

7 comments Christopher Heard | Bible (specific texts), Israelite and Judean history, biblical world

Sunday 15 Nov 2009

Two new videos

I’ve posted two new videos at YouTube since my last update here. The links here will take you to YouTube. “Israel and Assyria” is also available in Pepperdine University’s iTunes U catalog; the Isaiah video should be up in iTunes U sometime Monday.

Enjoy!

4 comments Christopher Heard | Bible (specific texts), Israelite and Judean history, biblical world, online resources

Monday 26 Oct 2009

Higgaion Podcast 5: The Divine Council, Part 2

Episode 5 of the Higgaion Podcast continues Michael Heiser’s introduction to the divine council. In this segment, Michael takes up the problem of relating the divine council concept to our tradition of describing ancient Israelite and Judean religion as “monotheistic.”

Should you prefer to listen without going through iTunes U, you may download the file directly and copy it to your favorite MP3 player, or listen right now using the embedded player below.

Please note that for the time being, in spite of Mark Goodacre’s vote to the contrary, I’ve decided to stick with the relatively low-quality monophonic output in deference to listeners who have limited bandwidth or who have to “pay by the K” for downloads. I plan to review this decision frequently, however, and I’m always open to your feedback on this question. (That’s a pun. Get it? Audio quality … feedback … never mind.)

9 comments Christopher Heard | Bible (specific texts), biblical world, podcasting

Monday 19 Oct 2009

Higgaion Podcast 4: The Divine Council, Part 1

Genesis 1 portrays God as the cosmic king. But what’s a king without a court? In episode 4 of the Higgaion Podcast, Michael Heiser drops by to introduce listeners to the divine council.

Should you prefer to listen without going through iTunes U, you may download the file directly and copy it to your favorite MP3 player, or listen right now using the embedded player below.

4 comments Christopher Heard | Bible (specific texts), biblical world, podcasting

Tuesday 13 Oct 2009

First Dawkins, now Myers

PZ Myers has, I’m sorry to say, trotted out the “desert nomads” meme:

Here’s how you should look at the book of Genesis. Long, long ago, a tribe of desert nomads bumped up against the more cosmopolitan culture of Mesopotamia. They learned useful skills from the city people, like writing, but at the same time, the allure of those older, more sophisticated ideas was leading to the dissolution of tribal identity, and especially to a loss of respect for the austere and demanding desert god. Who wants to worship dry old El when slinky, sexy Innini is calling?

So in a move as old as religion, almost, the desert priests slyly adopted the popular culture of their neighbors, stealing all their myths, but rewrote them to put their one great god in charge of the whole story. Genesis is an exercise in syncretism, a wholesale theft of one tradition to be repackaged with a new set of symbols. It is not about the creation of the universe. It is about resolving a conflict between two human cultures. That’s interesting, sure enough, as long as you don’t forget where you are and start building big pseudo-museums in Kentucky dedicated to your misconceptions.

Despite my default high regard for PZ’s intelligence, those two paragraphs aren’t much better than what Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron were to come up with if they tried to write an introduction to On the Origin of Species …. Oh, wait. They did that. But I digress. At any rate, I left a ridiculously long comment on Pharyngula attempting to set the record straighter about the origins of ancient Israel and Iron Age Israel’s interactions with the Mesopotamian empires. We’ll see whether that sparks any interesting conversation—or any better representation of ancient history in the future.

9 comments Christopher Heard | Bible (specific texts), Israelite and Judean history, biblical world

Monday 12 Oct 2009

At long last, the Qeiyafa inscription gets its day in the sun

Aren Maeir has the story. I cannot fly to Jerusalem to hear the presentation firsthand, but I can barely contain myself waiting to hear what will be presented!

0 comments Christopher Heard | Hebrew, Israelite and Judean history, archaeology, biblical world

Wednesday 07 Oct 2009

Bronze Age desert tribesmen and the Bible they didn’t write

In a comment to my recent post griping about Richard Dawkins misinformedly attributing authorship of the Bible, or at least the creation stories, to “Bronze Age desert tribesmen,” Matthew Heaney asked:

For those of us who aren’t biblical scholars, can you please specify by whom the Hebrew Bible was written? Are you saying that it was not written during the Bronze age, or are you saying that is was written by someone other than desert tribesmen?

A few days later, perhaps partially preturbed by my silence, Matthew followed up with this comment:

The page here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_the_Bible

says the Torah was composed around 1400 BCE.

The chronology here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age

would put that in the late Bronze Age.

Can someone more scholarly than I please state during which age the Hebrew Bible was composed?

More info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_authorship

and here:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1985/who-wrote-the-bible-part-1

And by whom was the Hebrew Bible written, if not by “desert tribesmen”?

Do we know anything about E, J, P, and D?

Proper answers to Matthew’s questions can get complicated, and I thought they might be of interest to some Higgaion readers who don’t normally follow the comment threads on posts more than just a couple of days old. Therefore, I’ve promoted Matthew’s questions up to the top level here, and I’ll try to address them briefly. (But you know me—I’ll probably fail on the “brief” part.)
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9 comments Christopher Heard | Bible (general), biblical world, books

Wednesday 30 Sep 2009

When will they ever learn?

Dear Professor Dawkins,

Your new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, is both entertaining and informative when you are dealing with biology. Please get this straight, however: the Hebrew Bible was not written by “Bronze Age desert tribesmen.” This is not the first book in which you have propounded this error. Please let it be the last.

Sincerely,

Chris Heard

11 comments Christopher Heard | Bible (general), biblical world, books

Saturday 11 Jul 2009

Five good books with which I disagree

Loren Rosson tagged me with a meme that he didn’t bother to name (how inconsiderate of the man):

How about the five biblical studies books or essays you think have made extremely important and necessary contributions to the field, yet heavily disagree with in spite of this? I have in mind scholarship you find yourself burning to agree with, or a closet fan of, envying the author’s critical acumen, applauding the fact that all the right (and perhaps long-overdue) questions are being asked, but regretfully finding most of the conclusions just plain unpersuasive.

Loren thinks he’s come up with a “helpful exercise,” and because I agree with that assessment, I’ll participate. Let me warn you, though, that I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about my list, and it could easily change as this boat tosses up and down on the ever-shifting sea that is my memory.

This post offers more content »

2 comments Christopher Heard | Bible (specific texts), Israelite and Judean history, biblical world, books, memes

Tuesday 07 Jul 2009