Dad

There are (at least) two biblical Hebrew words for breasts: dad and shad (or possibly shod). I have just spent a fairly fruitless half an hour trying to determine whether these two have an etymological link or not. It doesn’t make much difference to my argument, I would just like to know. Feel free to tell me in the comments.

But I have been amused by the origin of the word dad suggested in several lexicons: child’s babble. Now, it’s true that babies learning to speak do indeed often make that sound, ‘dadadadada’. In English, we have interpreted this as recognition of the child’s father (just as ‘mamamamama’ is taken to be recognition of the mother). In Israel, apparently, it was interpreted as an expression of hunger, or recognition of the food source of the infant. It seems likely to me that both cultures are equally guilty of reading in their own meaning to the infant’s sounds. As far as I can see, babies just like making these kinds of sounds for the sheer pleasure of being able to do so. Associated meanings come much later.

SBL Presentations

Friday, 3.30-5.30pm, Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar

This was a discussion of Ellen Davis’s ‘Scripture, Culture and Agriculture’. Craig Bartholomew and David Moessner responded to the book, then Ellen Davis responded to them, and then there was general discussion. The focus of the book is an agrarian reading of the Old Testament, drawing attention to various models of land care. She notes, for example, the importance of the term ’seed’ in Genesis 1, with respect to the plants given for food. She observes the fragility but also the extraordinary richness of the land which the Israelites were given to farm. She points out that in iron-age Israel, the division between rural and urban was not nearly so sharp as it is today, and that most people were more-or-less directly dependent on their land. Both respondents raised the question of the effect of the new covenant on this issue and there was some discussion about this. It was an interesting and stimulating session and I think the seminar is doing some really good work.

Saturday, 1-3.30pm, Ancient Hebrew Poetry: Linguistics and Literary Approaches

Christo van der Merwe: Explaining Word Order in the Book of Joel
I think Christo’s point was that although there are more examples of non-standard word order in poetic texts such as Joel, the reasons why the word order varies are the same as in non-poetic texts.

Randall Buth: Multiple Frontings in Poetry
Um, it happens sometimes? One thing is fronted for contextualisation and the other for focus. I don’t know that I have any more to say about that.

Eep Talstra: Word Order, Clausal Hierarchy and Syntactic Function
Eep is producing a syntactic database of the OT. I am sure it will be very useful.

Pierre van Hecke: Word Order in Clauses with Haya
Sometimes these are copular (a is b) and sometimes existential (there is X). One of these has a particular word order, but I would need to check my notes to tell you which it is and what the word order is.

Saturday 4-5pm, Recovering Female Interpreters of the Bible
Michael Graves: Marcella of Rome – Technical Exegesis as an Expression of Piety
We know about Marcella from her correspondence with Jerome. She apparently asked him lots of searching and insightful questions, for which he valued her.

Al Wolters: Ann Francis (1738-1800) on the Song of Songs
Ann Francis was the wife of a Norfolk clergyman who wrote several volumes of poetry, including a Poetical Translation of the Song of Songs, published in the eighteenth century and read by several eminent OT scholars of the day. She included notes on her translation based on her understanding of the Israelite landscape, flora and fauna. Interestingly, she discerned three voices in the Song: one male, one Jewish female and one Gentile female, and she did not interpret the Song allegorically. I’d like to track down her translation one day.

That’s it for now. Will report on Sunday and Monday, and my paper, later.

Knitting at SBL

Something else which has made this year’s SBL more fun has been the knitting I brought with me. Most of the papers, even when they are interesting and well-presented, are not the kind of thing I need to be taking detailed notes on. So, to keep me alert, and to make best use of the time, I have been knitting during the sessions. This is also, I have discovered, an excellent way of meeting new people, and also a way of it being okay to be on your own in the spare minutes between sessions. I have finished one scarf and one Veyla. I will knit on the plane, but probably not the other Veyla, since double pointed needles are easily dropped and I don’t fancy trying to recover one that’s rolled through five rows of seats on the plane. So I think I will start something new with the wool I bought at my favourite yarn store in Chestnut Hill – I had a 20% off loyalty card that I remembered to bring with me! It’s bright pink baby alpaca and I think it is going to be a Peaks Island Hood as a present for a friend.

SBL09

My feelings about SBL in general have not changed since the last time I went in 2006. There’s an awful lot of self-promotion and self-aggrandisement going on, not to mention the profiteering in the exhibition hall. However, I have to admit that I have enjoyed myself a lot more this time. Mainly this is because I know more people and have had more things lined up to fill the time. So, here’s my summary of how it went:

Friday: On the same flight from Philly to New Orleans as my former PhD advisor. Lots of time to catch up while waiting for the airport shuttle bus to our hotels. Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar discussing Ellen Davis’s book, ‘Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture’. Interesting discussions at the seminar and also over dinner, where I was at a table with another HTC student and a guy who is at Tyndale House.

Saturday: Started very early with the Tyndale House American Alumni breakfast. I checked everyone in, got to eat the breakfast, then had several useful conversations about the Tyndale Fellowship and Tyndale House. I think quite a lot of people appreciated having the chance to talk to someone on the admin staff, as well as the research fellows. In the afternoon, I gave my paper. I think that probably needs its own post. Dinner with old friends in the evening.

Sunday: Went to hear a friend’s paper in the morning and then we went for lunch together afterwards. Some interesting papers in the Hebrew Poetry section in the afternoon. In the evening, I’d arranged to meet a friend at the King’s College reception – these receptions with free food and drinks are excellent things for poor students.

Monday: Chatted to the Masons this morning, then went to a cookery demonstration at the New Orleans School of Cookery. The chef was Big Kevin (who some of my British readers may remember from the TV series Big Kevin, Little Kevin on BBC2 a few years ago). He was both hilarious and an excellent cook. We had biscuits with dark, thick cane syrup, then red beans and rice, cornbread, pecan pie and pralines. It was all delicious and I really shouldn’t have had seconds of everything but it was just too good to resist. Today was the first day it’s been sunny since I arrived in New Orleans, so after lunch I went for a walk along the river and a little bit around the French Quarter. This evening, I’m going to a dinner that John Hobbins has organised, and then tomorrow I’ll be flying home.

More on food and farming

From Ellen Davis, ‘Scripture, Culture and Agriculture’:

The positive aim of the agrarian critique is not that all surburbanites should be farmers but rather that they should move beyond romanticism – a mind-set that always includes a deluded and therefore potentially destructive element – to a realistic relationship with the land on which all our lives depend, a relationship of multigenerational commitment and nurture. (p. 67)

She cites Douglas Boucher’s observation that:

We now see that [combating world hunger] is not simply a matter of whether food is available in the market; people must have the money to buy it. In a world economy in which food is a commodity, poverty will lead to starvation no matter how productive agriculture becomes. The basic problem for hungry people is not a scarcity of food, but a scarcity of income. (Davis, p.77)

A few years ago I heard an interview with Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize winning economist whose study has focussed on the causes of famine. He had personal experience of living through a famine in Bangladesh as a child in a middle-class household, where there was always food on the table. In the interview he explained that even the most severe famines never affect more than 10% of a country’s population. The food is always there. What is lacking in a famine is the political will to get the food to those who are hungry.

Davis again:

In every country for which data is available, smaller farms are shown to be 200 to 1000% more productive per unit area. (p. 104)

In both the United States and Britain, the suicide rate among farmers is twice that of the general population; in other parts of the world it may be even higher. Rural residents experience significantly higher rates of depression and mental disorder, and studies have shown “exceptionally large increases” in the incidence of substance abuse and domestic violence. (p. 105)

Despite the food industry’s claim to be feeding the world, chronic extreme hunger has increased since the mid-1990s, with 842 million people severely undernourished – even though there is, in absolute terms, enough food in the world for the current population. …The United States and Europe dump agricultural surpluses on poor countries where local farmers cannot compete. The tragic irony is that such “food aid” increases both poverty and hunger. (p. 105)

More from Ellen Davis

It is difficult to make too much of the words a good poet employs, although one might read them badly – for instance, by confusing poetic language with dogmatic or scientific statements. [A] poem then should be read with the presumption that every word is deliberately chosen and therefore important. If a word seems out of place, that is all the more reason to assume we are meant to be slowed down or arrested by it. (p. 44)

Scripture, Culture and Agriculture

I’m reading Ellen Davis’s book of this title in preparation for the Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar which will be discussing it in New Orleans next week. Here are some of the highlights:

In attending to issues of land care in Israel’s Scriptures, I am to some degree shifting the terms common in biblical scholarship and contemporary theology, which have given more attention to possession of land as a national territory. The biblical writers themselves consistently regard the two matters as related; land tenure is conditional upon proper use and care of land in community. (p. 2)

Overall, from a biblical perspective, the sustained fertility and habitability of the earth, or more particularly of the land of Israel, is the best index of the health of the covenant relationship. (p. 8)

The essential understanding that informs the agrarian mind-set, in multiple cultures from ancient times to the presetn, is that agriculture has an ineluctable ethical dimension. Our largest and most indispensable industry, food production entails at every stage judgments and practices that bear directly on the health of the earth and living creatures, on the emotional, economic, and physical well-being of families and communities, and ultimately on their survival. Therefore, sound agricultural practice depends upon knowledge that is at one and the same time chemical and biological, economic, cultural, philosophical, and (following the understanding of most farmers in most places and times) religious. Agriculture involves questions of value and therefore of moral choice, whether or not we care to admit it. (p. 22)

Writing that is genuinely agrarian can come only from a relationship with a place deep enough to shape the minds of writer and readers.
…
Certainly the Scriptures of ancient Israel know where they come from. They reflect the narrow and precariously balanced ecological niche that is the hill country of ancient Judah and Samaria – “a strip of land between two seas,” as they say, with water to the west and relatively barren wilderness to the east. The Israelite farmers knew that they survived in that steep and semiarid land by the grace of God and their own wise practices.
…
The Bible as we have it could not have been written beside the irrigation canals of Babylon, or the perennially flooding Nile, any more than it could have emerged from the vast fertile plains of the North American continent. For revelation addresses the necessities of a place as well as a people. Therefore, ancient Israel’s Scripture bespeaks throughout an awareness of belonging to a place that is at once extremely fragile and infinitely precious.(p. 26)

…agrarians know the land, not as an inert object, but as a fellow creature that can justly expect something from us whose lives depend on it. (p. 29)

It is noteworthy that in ancient Israel agricultural land seems to have been literally invaluable. There is no record, biblical or inscriptional, of an Israelite voluntarily selling land on the open market, because – in contrast to their neighbors in Egypt and Mesopotamia – Israelites seem to have had no concept of arable land as a commodity to be bought and sold freely. …a piece of land is the possession of a family, to be held as a trust and transmitted from generation to generation. Although the rights to land use may temporarily be sold to pay off debts, the land reverts to the original family unit every fiftieth year (Lev. 25:31). There is to be no permanently landless underclass in Israel. (p. 39)

Land is the earnest of the covenant, the tangible sign and consequence of God’s commitment to the people Israel.

The New School of Theology

I think I want to teach here. Shame it doesn’t exist.

Yet.

A Modest Proposal

According to this horrifying article from today’s Telegraph, three babies are being killed every day in the UK because they have been diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome.

Horrid.

But perhaps the most shocking statement in the whole article was this:

However, doctors say that women must make the decision according to their circumstances, and that some may be better placed financially to deal with it than others.

Because it’s always been acceptable to kill the children you can’t afford to keep.

Looking for a job?

There’s one going at HTC. Mike Bird has the gen. I’ll add my two penn’orth and say that I agree wholeheartedly that HTC would be a great place to teach. Though you should bear in mind that Dingwall is a very long way from anywhere. Make sure you look at a decent map!