7:00 AM: Churches of Christ Professors Meeting

Sunday morning was an early morning, as the “Churches of Christ Professors Meeting”—a worship service attended chiefly by members of churches of Christ and Christian churches—commenced at 7:00 AM. The organizers wisely kept the service a bit shorter this year, giving us more time to visit afterward. In a way, the service itself is a little bit hokey. It’s kind of like being back in the high school youth group: the floor is opened for anyone who wishes to do so to quote scripture, begin a song, or pray aloud. At a pre-set clock time, someone or other (this year it was Jason Bembry and Randy Chesnutt) directs our communion (eucharist) service. Then we go around the room introducing ourselves, then adjourn to get reacquainted. This is really the best part—reconnecting with old friends and meeting new friends.

9:00 AM: Pentateuch

At 9:00 on Sunday I went to the Pentateuch session where the theme was the composition of the Pentateuch. This is a topic in which my interest is steadily increasing. There are so many competing ideas out there right now. Sometime in the near future I would like to expend some scholarly energy in this area, pulling together the various threads of argument to see whether I can come up with a synthesis that I find convincing.

The first paper in this session was by Reinhard Achenbach from Münster, who argued that the process of diverse rewritings of the Pentateuchal materials was influenced by developments in sacerdotal institutions in ancient Israel, Judah, and Yehud. I got really sleepy near the end of Achenbach’s presentation, so my perception may be a little skewed, but I think there was a certain degree of circularity in Achenbach’s argument. At least, it was never clear to me how Achenbach arrived at his dating of various texts—e.g., whose scheme he was using, or if this was his own—and I wondered to what extent the dating was determined by the very content features that Achenbach thought he could pull from the text to illustrate the development of sacerdotal institutions, which then became evidence for successive rewritings of Pentateuchal materials. When I say “it was never clear” and “I wonder,” I mean those things very seriously: this is the sort of paper where I really need a printed copy with extensive footnotes before I can adequately judge the merits of the presentation.

The second paper was by Baruch Schwartz, a good scholar who also presents papers well and is never boring in conference presentations. The title of Schwartz’s paper was “The Priestly Narrative of Israel’s Descent into Egypt,” and the burden of the paper was to demonstrate that there actually is such a thing. Schwartz’s own understanding of P differs from the two dominant schools of thought, which hold either that P never existed as a separate source, but is merely a label for the material added in the latest redaction of the Pentateuch, or that P did exist as a discrete document and that it reworked material from the non-P sources. Schwartz argues that P was a separate document composed in isolation from and ignorance of the other Pentateuchal sources. It seems like every year I go to the SBL harboring strong doubts about the JEDP hypothesis, and every year Baruch Schwartz gives me another reason to hang onto it.

Ed Noort had retitled his paper between the printing of the program book and the actual session, from “A Wild Ass of a Man: The Son of Hagar in Genesis 16 and 21: Competing Stories and Views” to “Created in the Image of the Son: Hagar and Ishmael in Genesis 16 and 21.” Noort made what I thought was the entirely predictable point that there were Arabian nomads in ancient times, and the biblical writers’ views of these nomads may have influenced the portrayal of Ishmael. Perhaps a bit more interesting was Noort’s suggestion that the biblical writers’ image of Ishmael came first, and shaped the biblical portrayals of Ishmael’s mother Hagar. In a departure from typical source-critical models, Noort argued that Genesis 21 presupposes chapter 16, or at least, that’s what I thought he was saying. I think one reason I responded so tepidly to Noort’s paper was because I wasn’t hearing anything new; my book Dynamics of Diselection has a whole chapter on Ishmael, and nothing Noort said seemed to extend beyond the discussion that was current in the late 1990s. I was also mentally exhausted from trying to follow Achenbach’s and Schwartz’s papers. Moreover, Noort’s translation of the “Ishmael oracle” from Genesis 16 struck me as odd. Not only did he not bother to try to justify translating the preposition ב in that oracle as adversative (if you don’t know what the issue here is, see pp. 69–71 of DoD, or maybe I’ll blog on it some other time), he translated על־פני as “apart from,” when in fact it means “near” or “upon”! (Again, see pp. 71–73 of DoD, or Joel Drinkard’s critical note “על־פני as ‘East of’,” JBL 98 [1979] 285–286, or just look it up in Koehler-Baumgartner/HALOT under פנה, although the sense they give for על־פני in Gen 16:12 is specious.)

I did not literally sleep through Jan Christian Gertz’s paper “Literary Contexts of the Deuteronomic Code,” but my mind was completely elsewhere during the presentation. I just couldn’t get engaged in the argument.

The final paper was Joel Baden’s “The Tower of Babel: A Critique of the Methodology of Literary Analysis,” originally scheduled for the Saturday Pentateuch session but swapped around for some reason (scheduling issues, I presume). I found Baden’s paper fascinating, because it was a case study in the use of literary-aesthetic analysis to critique source criticism. Baden focused on three studies—by Umberto Cassuto, Isaac Kikawada, and Jan Fokkelmann—whose authors claim that there are literary-aesthetic features in the canonical form of the Babel story that are damaged by splitting the story into two sources á là Hermann Gunkel. Baden showed convincingly that all of these features can actually be shown to operate within the sources individually. For example, Cassuto had adduced certain word plays, alliterations, and so on in the Babel story, which he put forward against Gunkel’s source analysis, but Baden’s closer examination reveals that, for example, Cassuto’s paranomasia is entirely contained within Gunkel’s “city source,” as is Cassuto’s proposed inclusio of כל הארץ while Cassuto’s word play on פוץ and repetition of על פני כל הארץ pertain only to Gunkel’s “tower source.” Kikawada and Fokkelman are practically obsessed with chiasms, but Baden shows that you can diagram each of Gunkel’s separate rescensions chiastically if you are so inclined. Baden’s paper thus leads to an important methodological conclusion: showing that the text as it stands canonically has interesting literary-aesthetic features doesn’t show that it’s not composite.

6:00 PM: The Smithsonian

I spend the early part of Sunday afternoon visiting with old friends and new acquaintances, then dropped out for a bit of a nap before going over to the Smithsonian for the “In the Beginning: Bibles before the Year 1000” exhibit. The exhibit is really a remarkable chronicle of early biblical manuscripts. There is a heavy bias toward Christian manuscripts, though—I’m not saying this is ideological, just a bit of truth in advertising. There are fewer than half a dozen Hebrew manuscripts in the exhibit—a couple from the Cairo geniza, one palimpsest of medieval Hebrew poetry over a Greek (Aquila’s translation) text, and a portion of the Isaiah scroll from Qumran. Naturally, I spent most of my time gazing upon these wonders … and was shocked to see that the curators had labeled two of the fragments incorrectly! The two fragments from the Cairo geniza were from two different Torah scrolls; each fragment held a portion of Genesis, but the one labeled as being from Genesis 14ff. actually held the genealogy in Genesis 5, and the fragment labeled as being from Genesis 4–6 actually held the story of Abram’s encounter with Melchizedek (Genesis 14)! Oops. (Yes, I did notify the staff. I hope they correct the labels, which were silk-screened outside of the glass, so correction is an actual possibility.)

9:00 PM: SMU/Perkins Reception

After returning to the convention venue from the Smithsonian, I made my way over the Perkins/SMU reception, where I was delighted to get to visit with a number of old comrades and meet some of the new students and faculty.