I’m blogging tonight from Loyola University in Chicago, which is hosting the 69th annual meeting of the Catholic Biblical Association.

This morning at 9:00 I attended a continuing seminar on “Divinity in Ancient Israel.” We were treated to Mark Smith’s response to a paper (circulated beforehand) by Bernie Batto on “malevolent deity” figures in Mesopotamia. Bernie basically surveyed “malevolent deities” in selected Mesopotamian texts and showed that over time competition between “malevolent” and “benevolent” deities in Mesopotamian myth came to be “collapsed,” as it were, into “malevolent” and “benevolent” tendencies within a single national god such as Marduk. There are quite a few “scare quotes” in the foregoing sentence because a good bit of the discussion problematized these terms. One interesting line of discussion followed the possiblity that this folding of malevolent and benevolent tendencies together in a single national god tracks along historically with the rise of imperial structures and royal aspirations in Mesopotamia (another thing that happens in parallel with this is the transition from anthropomorphic depictions of deities to symbolic depictions of deities). Yet another interesting line of discussion noted that the development Bernie traced seems to be reversed in Hellenistic Judaism—and Christianity follows along this trajectory—by offloading malevolent tendencies ascribed in the Tanakh to the national god onto intermediary or hostile beings such as angels, demons, and the devil. We started down that road late in the session, however, and didn’t get very far.

After our morning sessions, my colleague Ron Tyler and I drove down to the Oriental Institute and spent the early afternoon going through its collections of ancient Near Eastern artifacts. We returned to Loyola in time to catch research reports in the 4:15 and 5:00 slots.

At 4:15 I attended a research report by Joan Cook of Georgetown University, “Of Sons and Sacrifices: Perspectives on Genesis 21–22.” Here’s the summary from the abstract book:

The stories of the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael in Genesis 21, and the near-sacrifice of Isaac in chapter 22, two stories rarely examined in tandem, share literary characteristics that highlight the similarities in their meaning. This presentation analyzes those characteristics in order to elucidate the message of the two chapters, and how their juxtaposition enhances that message.

Quite honestly, nothing that I heard in this presentation was really new. Certainly all of the considerations Cook addressed were already “on the table” when I wrote about these texts in Dynamics of Diselection. I left vaguely dissatisfied and feeling that I had not learned much.

At 5:00 I attended a research report by David Bosworth of Barry University, “Do Biblical Characters Develop?” His short answer was “No.”

Commentators expect to see development in biblical characters for two reasons. First, real people change over time, so literary characters should show a capacity for growth. Second, the biblical insistence on right behavior and the possibility of repentance suggests that characters, like real people, should be capable of change. However, biblical characters do not develop in the ways familiar from modern novels. The paper will discuss the problem of character development with examples from modern literature and biblical Hebrew narrative, and consider the related issue of biblical anthropology and character ethics.

A key phrase in the abstract is “in the ways familiar from modern novels.” Bosworth had a very narrow definition of what constitutes “character development.” For Bosworth, “development” has not happened to a literary character unless (a) changes to the character come from within rather than as reactions to external stimuli, (b) readers are allowed to peer into the change process within the character’s “inner life,” (c) the character “becomes a different person” in the process, and (d) the development is something that is unique to that character. During the Q&A session, a number of attendees took Bosworth to task for his narrowness. Several approached the question by trying to offer counter-examples, but for each counter-example Bosworth could argue simply that the character changed in response to external stimuli and/or that the character was “still the same person.” Right at the end of the session, Jill Kirby started to get at the heart of the real problems with Bosworth’s argument when she asked (in effect; I’m paraphrasing, of course), “You’ve ruled out gaining knowledge about oneself as character development; you’ve ruled out growing up as character development; you’ve ruled out changing in response to external events as character development; so what’s left as a definition of character development?” Bosworth really needed to do a number of things to make this paper persuasive:

1. He needed to justify the decision to make psychological character development in modern novels the touchstone for what constitutes “character development” in all literature.
2. He needed to justify the claim that character development has not happened unless the character becomes “a different person”—and, indeed, he needed to explain what that it means to be “the same person” or “a different person.”
3. He needed to justify the claim that gaining new knowledge about yourself does not constitute character development.
4. He needed to justify the claim that changing in ways that are common to all people (e.g., growing up), or all people within a class, does not constitute character development.
5. He needed to justify the claim that changing in response to external stimuli does not constitute character development.

Bosworth did not do any of this, and frankly I do not think that it could be done persuasively. It’s easy to show that biblical writers do not describe or chart character development in the same way that some modern novelists do, but that does not mean—contrary to Bosworth’s thesis—that biblical characters exhibit no character development at all.