The 8:00 am Monday slot at WECSOR is usually the most undesirable slot you can have, often resulting in an extremely small group. At first, I was afraid we’d be following that trend in WECSOR Hebrew Bible III, 8:00–9:45 AM on Monday. When we started, we had the three presenters, two of their spouses, myself, and Kevin Edgecomb (who looks nothing like I imagined). I was a bit disconcerted at the way in which our first speaker’s presentation was continually interrupted by people coming in late, but on the other hand, I was quite glad that the session did fill up.

We began with Hilary Lipka’s paper “‘She Shall Be Put to the Fire’: The Case of the Priest’s Daughter Who ‘Defiles Herself through Harlotry’ (Leviticus 21:9).” Hilary is from UCLA, but I am still not clear on whether she is on the faculty or a graduate student. Whatever that case might be, Hilary’s paper was a very close and careful reading of Leviticus 21:9: “And a daughter of a man, a priest, who תחל לזנות, it is her father that she מחללת; she must be burned in the fire.” Hilary laid out in a very clear and systematic fashion various considerations regarding the words זנה and חלל in an attempt to understand just what this daughter did, how exactly it affected her priestly father, and why she receives burning as a punishment. I won’t attempt to summarize all of Hilary’s points, except to share her conclusion that the daughter engaged in some kind of illicit sexual activity that was understood to result in her father’s “desacralization” or loss of holiness. (Hilary had a good discussion of the distinction between חלל and טמא; the father is not “defiled,” but he is “desacralized.”) Hilary’s explanation of the “causal link” between the daughter’s illicit sexual activity and her father’s holiness was persuasive. She likened it to Israel’s ability to profane the name of God. God’s name sanctifies Israel, but Israel by its behavior can profane the name of God. Similarly, the daughter’s holiness derives from her father’s holiness, but she can profane her father through her own actions. As for the punishment of burning, Hilary suggested that it’s not just punishment (there are other possible punishments, even other possible means of execution, rather than the rare punishment of burning) but purgation that is sought by the imposition of burning.

The second paper was by James Findlay, who is on the faculty at California State University at Northridge. (I have a friend who teaches at CSUN, but apparently doesn’t know Jim.) Jim’s paper, “How a Mistress Became a Witch: Characterization and Translation in 1 Samuel 28,” traced the history of translation by which the anonymous בעלת אוב at Ein-Dor in the Saul story was transformed into “the Witch of Endor.” James showed that the text of 1 Sam 28 does not really portray the woman as a “witch.” She has some remarkable ability to see the dead, but she does not do any sort of incantations or rituals to accomplish this. In fact, Jim thought that she was characterized rather positively, and not at all as illicit. I’m not sure I can follow him on the last detail—one has to wonder why Saul ran her sort out of the land—but he read the text quite carefully. Jim then went from the Hebrew text to the Septuagint, then to the Vulgate, and then to the English Bible tradition, showing how translators injected their own concerns with the result that this “mistress of a ghost” was transformed into a “witch”—especially during the heyday of European witch hunts. I found this paper really interesting from the point of view of how ideology and contemporary concerns influence Bible translation (see also our session on The Contemporary Torah).

Leah Rediger Schulte then presented her paper, entitled (according to the program; I think she might have tweaked it slightly) “In Those Days There Was a King in Israel Who Could Not Keep His Own House: Tamar, the Levite’s Pilegesh, and David’s House.” To make a long story short, Leah detailed eight verbal and conceptual parallels between the story of the atrocities at Gibeah (Judges 19) and the story of Amnon’s rape of Tamar (2 Samuel 13). The overall point of the paper was that the story of Tamar’s rape is not just a tragic tale, but also a criticism of the monarchy. The paper was very detailed and very well argued, revealing all sorts of connections that I, for one, had never noticed before.