The first day of the WECSOR 2007 meeting has come and gone, and I’d say that it’s been a good day. This is my first full year as chair of the Hebrew Bible section, my first year to have been involved with the paper selection process, so I’m actually kind of proud of the fact that there were no “dud” papers in the two sessions today.

Hebrew Bible I met in the first of the SBL slots, 12:45–2:15 on Sunday afternoon. The session started off quite inauspiciously, as the room (in fact the whole building) was locked and we could not even get into the room until five minutes after we were supposed to begin! However, things worked out quite well in the end.

Tammi Schneider kicked off the first session with a paper entitled “Rebekah, Tamar, Veils, the Middle Assyrian Laws, and the Pakistani Dupatta.” Tammi began by noting that interpreters have often construed Rebekah’s veil and Tamar’s veil in quite different ways; Rebekah’s is often taken as a sign of modesty, while Tamar’s is often thought to be a sexual solicitation. These interpretations jar a bit against the characterization of Rebekah and Tamar, however, as Rebekah is usually more assertive and Tamar is usually more docile. Tammi brought in the comparative material of the Middle Assyrian Laws and the Pakistani dupatta not to claim any direct applicability, but as ethnographic parallels (one much closer in time and space than the other, obviously). In the Middle Assyrian Laws, veils are explicitly reserved for married women and explicitly prohibited for prostitutes. Tammi speculated that perhaps Tamar veils herself in preparation for marriage, much like Rebekah, wanting to be taken back to marry Shelah. When Judah treats her like a prostitute, the docile Tamar acts like one. In the Q&A afterward, there was some discussion of whether the veil has any relation to the use of the terms zonah and qedeshah to name Tamar as a prostitute, but Tammi pointed out that the narrator never uses these terms, nor does Tamar; rather, these terms appear only in the speech of Judah (who, in Tammi’s view, misperceives many things) and his friend Hiram. There is more to be thought through here, but this was a very interesting exploration. Tammi’s work is always interesting, and her presentations are always quite lively.

Next up was one of Tammi’s students at Clarement, Lucas Shulte. I thought that Luke’s paper at the 2006 WECSOR was very good, so I was looking forward to this one and was not disappointed. His paper was on Lot’s daughters, and his thesis was that Genesis 19 portrays Lot and his daughters as the patriarchs and matriarchs of Moab. He first pointed to some parallels between Abraham in Genesis 18 and Lot in Genesis 19, although he thought that Lot comes out looking as a less successful (I think that was Luke’s terminology) patriarch than Abraham. I’ve made similar comparisons myself (in Dynamics of Diselection), though I think Lot can be read as looking rather better than Luke perceives. What was really new and interesting to me, though, was Luke’s attempt to show that Lot’s offer of his daughters to the Sodomite mob reflects the “endangered ancestress” theme. I was trying to take copious notes, but got a little lost (as far as the structure went) in the middle of the paper. Looking back at my notes, I find myself unable to reconstruct the middle part of the paper, and to untangle Luke’s own contributions from his use of certain ideas from Athalya Brenner. Some of Luke’s argument relied on a distinction that Brenner makes between “positive” and “negative” temptresses in Genesis. Luke wanted to show—and I think he was successful—that Lot’s daughters come out as “positive temptresses” using Brenner’s criteria. However, I’m not sure that Brenner’s criteria actually hold up; at first glance, they seem to me to generalize too hastily from scant evidence. Even so, Luke put these to very interesting use. I didn’t agree with all of Luke’s judgments about Lot, but Luke is very sharp (so is his wife Leah, but more about her after she presents tomorrow); be on the lookout for his presentations and (I hope) publications as he progresses through his doctoral work and (I hope) into a scholarly career.

One of my own M.Div. students, Jared Wolfe, presented next. His paper, with the rather unrevealing and not entirely fitting title “Sarah: Contract or Covenant?”, was a revision of a paper Jared wrote for one of my classes some time ago. Jared’s guiding question was whether Genesis 17 portrays Sarah as merely a vehicle, so to speak, for the chosen heir, or whether there is something more. By carefully comparing and contrasting what the narrator says about Abraham and what the narrator says about Sarah, Jared concludes that the narrator elevates Sarah as high as possible within certain social constraints. Jared proceeds on the assumption that Genesis 17 is a P(riestly) text and that the Priestly writer or school is most at home in 5th-century Yehud. For Jared, positing this setting helps to explain some features of the text, such as why Genesis 17 focuses on the promise of progeny and gives little attention to the promise of land, and why Sarah is not mentioned in connection with the land promise. Jared’s paper stimulated some good conversation that was resumed for at least a short time after the session ended. In my opinion, Jared has really good exegetical skills and is another “one to watch” if he follows through on his plans of doctoral studies in Semitics and Assyriology (all of which looks good right now).

The fourth paper was by Berkeley student Alison Joseph, on “Anagnorisis in the Joseph Narratives.” Usually, by the fourth paper, my brain is tired. In this case, I took more notes on Alison’s paper than on any of the others, but understood it the least well. Both of these facts undoubtedly relate heavily to to the fact that Alison’s paper dealt a lot with Aristotle on plot structure, a topic with which I am far less familiar than any of the other topics covered in this particular session. Alison gave us a brief introduction to Aristotle’s standards for “complex plots” and the various types of “recognition” that Aristotle discusses. She then used these ideas as a heuristic tool for examining moments of recognition and reversal in the Joseph narratives, focusing on Jacob’s recognition of Joseph’s tunic, and Joseph’s and his brothers’ recognition and non-recognition of each other in Egypt. At the end of the day, I am still not quite sure that Aristotle was really as necessary to the paper as was Alison’s own perceptive reading of the text. It actually seemed to me at certain points that Alison was in fact debating with Aristotle, as when she showed how artfully rendered is the scene when Jacob recognizes Joseph’s torn and bloodied tunic. In any event, here was another good paper that retained the audience’s interest and generated discussion afterward.

I was very pleased with this first session, and hope that tomorrow’s Hebrew Bible sessions will be more of the same. There was also a Hebrew Bible II, a special session on Sunday night, but I am too tired right now to blog about it. I will do my best to get to that tomorrow.

P.S. I have been away from the blog for a long time (over two weeks since my last entry). It’s just one of those exceptionally busy times of the semester, which I guess for me is just about always. I have in no way abandoned Higgaion, though, you may rest assured.