End of the blog

For the moment, anyway. I haven’t been posting a whole lot lately and I don’t plan to until after 2010: The Year of the PhD is over. So long, and thanks for all the comments. I’m freezing the threads now so that I don’t get distracted by new comment notifications.

A post-mill view of the future

Courtesy of Peter Leithart.

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

An ambition unexpectedly fulfilled

My brother got married on Saturday. He is not a Christian, and after a certain amount of discussion and compromise, he and his fiancée decided to have a civil ceremony, followed by a church blessing. The church service was really very good in lots of ways – welcoming and warm, appropriate to the couple, clear on the distinctives of marriage, openly Christian whilst recognising the different opinions of others. But there was one particular thing about the service that made me very happy indeed in a wholly unexpected way.

I did one of the readings, and since they asked me to choose what I wanted to read, they got something from the Song of Songs. The passage that I read included the wedding procession of 3:6ff in which the bridegroom arrives perfumed with frankincense and myrrh, in a carriage inlaid with gold. In a totally unrelated decision, they chose to sing a couple of Christmas carols in the service, including O Come All Ye Faithful, with the following verse:

Lo, star-led chieftains,
Magi, Christ adoring,
Offer him incense, gold, and myrrh;
We to the Christ-child
Bring our hearts’ oblations…

Coincidence? I think not.

Their works shall follow them

Jam Cary (co-author of the funniest sitcom on TV at the moment) is organising the second Blueprint annual conference for Christians working in the media, arts, design and music on Feb 13th, 2010. I seem to have agreed to lead a seminar on the portrayal and use of sex in the arts and media, a subject about which I feel somewhat underqualified to speak, but nonetheless one which is extremely important to consider.

More information about the conference is here and booking forms are here.

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)