Conversational Theology

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.

Apart from the time, the money and the travel, that is.

Last year I remember feeling overwhelmed and not a little sickened by the sheer number of people making their comfortable living off the back of God’s word. Around 5000 conference delegates were supplemented by the many hundreds of vendors, publishers, agents and so on. I have no idea how many of these people are motivated in the studies or their business by a true desire to honour God and serve his people, but judging from what I observed, it’s probably a minority.

So it’s particularly pleasing to find one such biblical scholar admitting to deep feelings of unease about his own part in this. Hector Avalos thinks that the Bible has no more intrinsic merit than Shakespeare, yet he is a biblical scholar at Iowa State University. He spends his working life studying a book which he does not believe. In this article he notes how biblical studies departments are finding it increasingly important to justify their own existence. He is pretty blunt about this:

I have come to see the SBL as having a self-serving ideology that must be confronted if the SBL is to survive at all. Given the ever-growing irrelevance of biblical studies in academia, the SBL has increasingly become charged with stemming the death of a profession. The vast majority of SBL members are engaged in an elite leisure pursuit called “biblical studies,” which is subsidized through churches, academic institutions, and taxpayers. Keeping biblical scholars employed, despite their irrelevance to anyone outside of faith communities, is the main mission of the SBL.

Now, I fundamentally disagree with Avalos about the worth of biblical studies. I think that there is nothing the world needs more than to hear and understand properly the texts I spend my days studying. My motivation is not to make money (!) nor a name for myself, but to serve the church. And I’m glad to be studying with and under people who have similar goals.

But I can’t help feeling that there are some parallels between the majority of SBL delegates and the moneylenders whom Jesus threw out of the temple.