Fifty years ago, Abraham Malherbe and Pat Harrell founded a new biblical studies and theology journal, Restoration Quarterly, aimed especially but not exclusively at members of Churches of Christ, Christian Churches, and Disciples of Christ. Every year on the Monday morning of the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, the editors, board, contributors, subscribers, and friends of this journal gather at breakfast for fellowship and a speech. On Monday, November 24, 2008, fires broke out in some of the manholes in downtown Boston, plunging several blocks’ worth of buildings into the dark (and cold). Somehow (cooking with gas?), the John Hancock hotel was still able to serve us a warm breakfast, and warm coffee (decaf for me, thanks). I enjoyed talking parenting, Bible translation, and iPhone apps with my longtime friend Brian McLemore. Nowadays, almost everybody teaching in a college or university affiliated with Churches of Christ holds a Ph.D. in his or her academic field—including biblical or religious studies—or is ABD; but that wasn’t always the case, and Tom Olbricht’s breakfast speech gave us some insight into the early history of Restorationists seeking Ph.D.s in biblical and religious studies, speech communication, and (as side notes) other fields.

From the John Hancock, I quickly made my way over to the Hilton for a session on the use, influence, and impact of the Bible. I especially wanted to catch the first two papers, both of which treated the use of the Bible in political rhetoric in the 2008 US presidential election. I reached the session five or ten minutes late, but found a nice comfy spot on the floor against the back wall. Thus I missed about the first half of the paper by Michelle Krejci and Simon Staffell on “The 2008 Primaries: Or, How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bible in Politics.” I can’t really tell you the thesis of that paper, since I didn’t hear the foundations laid at the beginning. What I got from the paper was chiefly some examples of religious or Bible-keyed language in the various campaigns. When an audience member asked what effect such rhetoric had on the American electorate, Krejci wasn’t able to answer (beyond restating the question). Most of the people asking questions had European accents, by the way, which I found somewhat interesting. For the second paper in the session, Jacques Berlinerblau, author (most recently) of Thumpin’ It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today’s Presidential Politics, also spoke on the ab/use of biblical citations in the 2008 campaign. His paper really focused on the successfulness (or not) of specific candidates’ religious (usually Bible-keyed) rhetoric. Berlinerblau shows how and why each candidate used biblical quotations or allusions well or poorly—as judged by whether such use garnered electoral support. The candidates used biblical references as marketing tools, and (for example) Obama proved a better salesman than Huckabee.

I went into the 9:00 AM session intending to stay only for the first two papers, but the mass exodus after Berlinerblau’s presentation made me feel bad for the third presenter, Valerie Stein, so I stayed both out of empathy and curiosity. One can understand why the crowd who came to the session primarily to here Berlinerblau’s secular analysis would bail on a paper about “Using the Bible to Teach Ethics to Children.” As a Christian parent who also happens to be a biblical scholar, I figured maybe I’d learn something. Focusing on the book of Ruth, Stein demonstrated how typical uses of biblical stories to teach children “value ethics” also teach children to read the Bible selectively and simplistically. But then, we already knew that.

I had mixed vegetables and orange chicken for lunch, followed by another trip to the exhibit hall—this time, to get the latest upgrade CD for Accordance, and to add the Joüon-Muraoka grammar (print version), Scott’s Simplified Guide to BHS (print version), and the Accordance Bible Lands PhotoGuide to my Accordance library.

From there I went straight to the Blackwell Bible Commentaries meeting at 1:00 PM. We focused mainly on how to find works of visual art—and on deciding what to include and what to omit from our commentaries, and we finished up about 3:00 PM.

After the Blackwell meeting, I went back up to my room to recharge my MacBook’s battery and to rest a little. I intended to take a 20-minute “power nap” so that I could get down to a 4:00 session—but I set my alarm for 3:40 AM instead of 3:40 PM! I woke up when Ron came back into the room at 4:25 PM, and I quickly rolled out to try to get to the joint session of the Midrash section and the Bible and Visual Art consultation in time for the second paper, “Visions of Abraham: Pictoral Representations of the Aqedah from Mosaics to Moderns” by Victoria Hoffer of Yale Divinity School. I got to hear most of that paper, essentially a running commentary on a series of, well, pictoral representations of the aqedah (binding of Isaac, for those who don’t know). Hoffer showed some art that I didn’t already know about, but I could not really follow a specific thread that unified the presentation—perhaps because I missed the first paragraph or so, and thus didn’t catch the thesis, if there was one (I couldn’t infer one from the conclusion, other than “Cool, huh?”). Two cell phones—one belonging to a dozing senior scholar, and one belonging to the presenter himself—interrupted the third paper, on Byzantine iconography and hymnody. The “third” presentation actually included two separate presentations under one title; I left halfway through.

On my way to find some nourishment, I ran into Doug Mangum, so we had a second dinner together. (He had tacos from Qdoba; I had clam chowder, lobster bisque, and a salad from a local outfit in the food court.) We chatted about typical academicky things, and I commiserated with him over his brusque ouster from the Guild of Biblical Minimalists.

Speaking of minimalists: at 7:00 PM, half a hundred people (Claude Mariottini and Joe Zias among them) packed into a room too small to hold them for a panel “discussion” (read: a series of short interrelated speeches) of Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History—Ancient and Modern by Philip Davies, The Old Testament between Theology and History: A Critical Survey by Niels Peter Lemche, and Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? by Lester Grabbe. (For those of you who have always wondered: say LEM-kuh and GRAH-bee.) Davies had already gone home (I don’t know what’s up with that); the other panelists were Lemche, Grabbe, Hans Barstad, Alice Hunt, Diana Edelman, and Oded Lipschits. Grabbe read Davies’s prepared comments, which more or less presented some highlights from the book. Hans Barstad called Davies’s Memories a good, informative, balanced introduction to the current history debate, and then he spent the rest of his time interrogating the language of “memory.” Alice Hunt opined that “everyone should read Lemche,” but then she went on to focus on the dominance of white male Protestant concerns as an “unnamed core that is not the core” on the SBL program. (This reminded me of a recent trend in intercollegiate debate in which debaters make speeches about the very activity of debate, and assert that it privileges while males, rather than arguing the actual annual resolution.) Diana Edelman directly answered the session’s theme question—can we write a history of Israel any more, and if so, what would it look like—without interacting extensively with any of the three volumes (though she referred to some of Davies’s earlier work). Grabbe reiterated some aspects of his own book, and argued just a little with Lemche’s. Lemche promised not to write a history of Israel; history, he said, must be written using primary sources, but when you set out to write a history of “Israel,” you’ve already distorted your work just by using the name “Israel” (this claim depends, in no small measure, on the prior claim that the Israelites originated as Canaanites, as in the similar but not identical models proposed by Mendenhall, Gottwald, and Finkelstein). Lipschits suggested that the task of writing a history of Israel nowadays is so complex that the job must be parceled to various authors focusing on various time slices. Lipschits criticized Lemche for presenting, in Lipschits’s view, an unbalanced picture of modern critical scholarship; Lipschits further characterized Lemche’s book as a “manifesto for the next generation of the Copenhagen school.” The big take-away idea in the Q&A and panelist interaction after the prepared statements was that textual scholars and historians would dearly love to have easier and quicker access to excavation reports.

After the Davies/Grabbe/Lemche session, I grabbed a caffeine-free Diet Coke and retired to my room to play with my new Accordance modules, watch Monday Night Football, call home, and, well, type up this post. I will not post on “Tuesday at SBL 2009″; I won’t have time to attend a full 9:00 AM session tomorrow and still get to my 1:35 PM flight on time. I hope you’ve enjoyed these dispatches from the front.