Programme

Hulme Hall, University of Manchester

confidential material (minutes of the previous business meeting as well as proposals for membership) can be found here (log-in required).

Hulme Hall, Manchester, M14 5RR (see here for a googlemaps link; and here for a pdf with a description of how to get to Hulme hall).

25-28 July 2016

Under the presidency of Dr Adrian Curtis

Printable version of the SOTS programme.
Booking form for the Summer Meeting (pdf / doc )

Publishers are invited to display books for sale during the Meeting.

Members who have had books published recently are also invited to display copies.

MONDAY 25 July

• [2.00 pm Committee Meeting]
• 4.30 pm Registration
• 6.00 pm Reception, sponsored by the Centre for Biblical Studies, University of Manchester
• 6.45 pm Dinner
• 8.15 pm Yvonne Sherwood (Kent), “If only Joshua had had a theodolite: ancient texts, modern states, and the problem of the land”

TUESDAY 26 July

• 8.00 am Breakfast
• 9.15 am Alan Millard (Liverpool), “Floating around in Ancient Arks”
• 10.00 am Andrew Macintosh (Cambridge), “The meaning of Hebrew תשוקה”
• 10.45 am Tea and Coffee
• 11.15 am Pekka Pitkänen (Cheltenham), “The Structures of Numbers”
• 12.00 noon Kathy White (Manchester), “A ‘Stanislavskian’ approach to reading Jeremiah 8:23 [ET 9:1]”
• 13.00 pm Lunch
• 2.15 pm “SOTS panel discussion: ‘What should the relationship be between biblical scholarship and faith communities in the 21st century?'”
• 4.00 pm Tea and Coffee
• 4.30 pm Cynthia Crewe (Manchester), “Plant Motifs on Jewish Ossuaries and Sarcophagi in Palestine in the Late Second Temple Period”
• 6.00 pm Reception, sponsored by Journal of Semitic Studies, University of Manchester
• 6.45 pm Dinner
• 8.15 pm Reinhard Kratz (Göttingen), “Creating National Identity: The Promises to the Patriarchs”

WEDNESDAY 27 July

• 8.00 am Breakfast
• 9.15 am William Tooman (St Andrews), “The Evolution and Redeployment of Intermarriage Law in the Hebrew Bible”
• 10.00 am Mervyn Richardson (Leiden), “per ardua ad ***: managing conjectural emendations in MT lexicographically”
• 10.45 am Tea and Coffee
• 11.15 am George Brooke (Manchester), “Manchester and the Dead Sea Scrolls”
• 12.00 noon Business Meeting (SOTS Members only)
• 1.00 pm Lunch
• 1.45 pm Outing to Jodrell Bank and President’s Tea (booking required; spaces limited)
• 6.45 pm Dinner
• 8.15 pm Hindy Najman (Oxford), “Lamentations and biblical traditions of recollection, recovery and radical hope”

THURSDAY 28 July

• 8.00 am Breakfast and depart

Domestic Arrangements

The venue for the Meeting is Hulme Hall, Victoria Park Campus, Oxford Place, Manchester, M14 5RR. The telephone number for the Conference Office is (+44) (0)1612 750210. There is a very limited number of parking spaces on site for those with particular needs, which cannot be reserved in advance, so if you are able to, please use the on-street parking or the multi-storey car-park on Hathersage Road about 10 mins walk away. Public transport is also recommended. Please refer to the enclosed maps and travel information for directions to Hulme Hall and possible parking locations.

The charges for hospitality are shown on the enclosed Booking Form. There is an option of standard or en-suite rooms but NO twin or double rooms. Members are requested to pay their accounts in full when returning the form but, if necessary, a non-returnable booking fee of £40 will be accepted and the balance will be payable on arrival at the Meeting. A discounted price is available to those whose bookings are received by Thursday 19th May 2016 (please see the details on the form). There is a subsidised price for those on low incomes or from economically disadvantaged countries. All bookings must be received by Thursday 23rd June 2016; no bookings can be accepted after that date. Bookings can be made by email to sotshospitality@gmail.com with cheques to follow by post, or payment by bank transfer. Please note that in making a booking, members render themselves liable for payment of the full cost of that booking, a liability that will be waived only in the light of extenuating circumstances and only when the final conference accounts permit a refund. You may wish to consider taking out insurance on your booking (or check that your annual travel insurance is applicable) to cover the possibility of you having to cancel your booking. You are advised to make a copy of your completed Booking Form for your own records.

Abstracts

Yvonne Sherwood (Kent), “If only Joshua had had a theodolite: ancient texts, modern states, and the problem of the land”

This paper argued that we tend to fabulously exaggerate the powers of pre-modern Gods, Bibles and Empires—particularly their ability to give land and to actualise that gift on the ground. These narratives of absolute divine power are an offshoot of the stories that we tell, in secular contexts, about what it means to be ‘secular’ or ‘modern’. According to a widely-held secularisation narrative, modern liberal politics emerged when we rebelled against the absolute power of the gods and divine right kings. The emancipatory narrative of secularism leads us to magnify the old religious powers beyond any height or coverage that they actually achieved. Ironically, we tend to ascribe to the ancient gods and emperors powers of which they themselves could never dream—or only dream. Joshua, Judges, and Deuteronomy tell a different story: a story without the military powers and administrative structures that modern states and modern imaginations take for granted. Joshua has no theodolite. In order that Moses can ‘view the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites for a possession’ (Deut 32.48), God takes him to the top of a very high mountain to see as far as he can see. It could prove to be a politically important move to reverse the secularisation story and compare the massively amplified powers of modern states to the more limited capabilities of the ancient gods, including Yhwh. The famously tortured biblical story of the occupation of the land, with its shifting borders, delays and losses, is the perfect expression of the limits of ancient media and military techniques.

Alan Millard (Liverpool), “Floating around in Ancient Arks”

This paper drew to members attention, The Ark before Noah (2014) in which Irving Finkel published a previously unknown cuneiform tablet of c. 1700 B.C., expanding the description of the ‘ark’ in the Babylonian Epic of Atrahasis. In this text the ‘ark’ is shown to be round, a huge bitumen-coated coracle, built of reeds, about 70m in diameter, with a deck and cabins. Its ground area was nearly the same as Noah’s Ark (14,400 sq. cubits vs. 15,000). Animals entered ‘two by two’! The ‘ark’ is called a ‘boat, ship’, whereas Genesis uses ‘container, box’, borrowing an Egyptian word; the paper suggested that Finkel’s argument for a Hebrew borrowing of a rare Babylonian word is unconvincing. The paper observed that the biblical ark needed neither rudder nor oars, keel nor prow, as it was not intended to make a voyage, but to be a floating refuge and further suggested that a flat-bottomed vessel, perhaps with its sides sloping inwards from the base, would float well. The paper noted that Finkel saw the Hebrew narrative as based on exilic-period Babylonian sources, but the speaker suggested that a relationship in the Late Bronze Age or even earlier may also be envisaged.

Andrew Macintosh (Cambridge), “The meaning of Hebrew תשוקה”

The paper sought to define the meaning of the rare word תשׁוקה†, which occurs three times in the Hebrew Bible and seven times in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The evidence of the ancient versions and of certain Rabbinic commentators was reviewed in respect of the biblical passages. Where the occurrences of the word in the Dead Sea Scrolls are concerned, the standard English translations by Vermes and Garcia Martinez were considered as well as the opinions of Israeli scholars such as Yalon and Licht. The evidence of comparative philology, and in particular of Arabic, proved to be important and this was illustrated by a number of relevant verses from the Quran. The speaker concluded that the word, in the MT as in the DSS, means ‘concern, preoccupation, (single-minded) devotion’.

Pekka Pitkänen (Cheltenham), “The Structures of Numbers”

This paper began by observing that discerning a cohesive structure for the book of Numbers has on the whole remained a challenge. The book contains a mixture of narrative and legal materials, however, it has been difficult to conceptualize how these may constitute a coherent whole. This paper submits an explanation that sees the book as part of a wider and essentially coherent literary work of Genesis-Joshua, with particular reference to the work of Jacob Milgrom in terms of its thematic-literary coherence and the concept of ancient settler colonialism as its unifying ideology. The paper then proposes that the narrative continuity and stylistic discontinuity in the literary transition from Numbers to Deuteronomy can be accounted for by postulating two authors working together, with the first essentially responsible for Genesis-Numbers and the second for Deuteronomy and Joshua. Within this context, the book of Numbers can be seen as progressing from Sinai to Moab in terms of its plot, with a threefold division between Sinai, wilderness and Moab on the one hand, and a conceptual division of the book between the first generation at Sinai and the second generation at Moab, in line with what has already been suggested by past scholarship. Further observations were offered regarding the relationship between narratives which advance the plot, legal-instructional materials and miscellaneous episodes all of which serve to propel the larger narrative of Numbers more or less smoothly.

Kathy White (Manchester), “A ‘Stanislavskian’ approach to reading Jeremiah 8:23 [ET 9:1]”

This paper explored the water references in Jer 8:23, drawing on elements of an approach developed by Stanislavski (1863-1938) for his acting classes which involved a close examination of the text in search of a character’s motivations, objectives and obstacles. Motivation considers everything that has gone on that causes a character to react the way he/she does. Objective has a future focus – what does the character hope will be influenced or changed by his words? For Stanislavski, the way a character responds to obstacles provides great insight into that character. However, the paper observed that the identity of the speaker in Jeremiah is ambiguous. Who is expressing this frustrated wish for a head full of water and the capacity to shed more tears than is humanly possible? A number of scholars have argued that we are meant to understand the speaker to be God. Taking aspects of water-metaphor and symbol into account, the paper suggests that the speaker is seeking to offer up his life-essence even to the point of death on behalf of ‘my people’ by pouring out tears of lamentation, even though he knows he can never weep enough. Previous research describes the ancient concept of tears as the outcome of physical changes going on inside the body as the weeper is literally dissolving from within. The rhetorical impact of the opening words מִי־יִתֵּן†is that of an anguished wish that cannot be fulfilled. The paper’s application of a Stanislavskian approach yields a reading of this verse as the profoundly human expression of a prophet in distress because he finds himself in an impossible situation, though it is acknowledged that Stanislavski’s method presupposes that characters will be people and focuses on dramatic integrity rather than on theology or literary devices.

Cynthia Crewe (Manchester), “Plant Motifs on Jewish Ossuaries and Sarcophagi in Palestine in the Late Second Temple Period”

This paper began with an examination of the nature of an ossuary and its decoration before demonstrating the range of plant motifs found on Jewish ossuaries and sarcophagi. Much of the speaker’s previous work has been devoted to identifying the whole range of plant motifs on ossuaries which have never been systematically investigated and identified before, but the stylised nature of much of the ornamentation has made it a difficult task. After a brief overview of the religious, ideological and sociological implications of ossuary use, illustrations of similar motifs found in non-funerary Jewish contexts were presented, followed by examples of possible external influences on the development of Jewish funerary art. In the light of all this evidence, the question of symbolic interpretation of plant motifs was addressed, taking into account further evidence from biblical and apocryphal texts and the possible use of Dionysiac imagery on ossuaries and sarcophagi. Ultimately, it was argued that, through a process of acculturation, a ‘type of symbolism’, which is not necessarily religious, may be inherent in the motifs.

Reinhard Kratz (Göttingen), “Creating National Identity: The Promises to the Patriarchs”

The main subject of this paper was the promises to the patriarchs and their role in the composition of the Pentateuch, asking whether the criterion of narrative coherence in analysing the relationship between Gen 12:1-3, Gen 15 and Gen 17 leads us to the documentary hypothesis as Baden (2013) claims. The paper came to the conclusion that narrative coherence is a major criterion, indeed, but certainly not the only criterion for the analysis of the Pentateuch and that this criterion does not lead us automatically to the division of the Pentateuch into three or four independent sources. Rather, narrative coherence must be combined with other criteria such as wording, form, position in the context, and tendency. Only by means of this combination of criteria is it possible to discern different literary layers in the Pentateuch, mainly those of Priestly and non-Priestly traditions. It was argued that Gen 12:1–3 represents the oldest discernible literary stratum of a pre-Priestly composition of the primeval and patriarchal narrative, prior to its connection with the exodus-settlement narrative. Gen 17 and Gen 15 presuppose the connection and spell it out in different ways. Thus the paper argues that we are dealing with not three independent sources but rather a pre-Priestly base text (both in Genesis and Exodus to Joshua), which was continuously reworked both within the same corpus and—with P—perhaps also in a separate scroll. This process of permanent reworking reflects the discourse of Israel’s national (or ethnic) identity in the Pentateuch, which may have its origins in the late 8th or 7th century BCE and lasted until the late Persian and early Hellenistic periods.

William Tooman (St Andrews), “The Evolution and Redeployment of Intermarriage Law in the Hebrew Bible”

In this paper, the speaker sought to offer a description of the explicit biblical laws on the subject of intermarriage and their redeployment in selected narratives. His aim was to better understand how the intermarriage laws within the Hebrew Bible were interpreted and implemented, and in particular, to understand the legal reasoning of their writers. The paper observed that not only were the laws progressively widened to include more and more people and more and more circumstances, but numerous laws that are not obviously related to the topic of inter-marriage were interpreted in such a way that they filled out the explicit laws, making them ever more complete. Numerous legal texts were interpreted as relevant to the issue of intermarriage, providing the legal basis for a comprehensive law on the subject. It seems that the biblical writers assumed that the Torah must be functionally complete. An essential part of legal, exegetical art, therefore, was to unfold the whole law, the Torah unabridged.

Mervyn Richardson (Leiden), “per ardua ad ***: managing conjectural emendations in MT lexicographically”

The paper began by noting that a basic source of conjectural emendations of the MT is found in the margins of Biblia Hebraica. S.R. Driver had been enlisted as a collaborator for the first edition. He died before SOTS was founded, but all subsequent editions have had some input from at least one of our members. Before BH1 another substantial list of emendations was published by Brill: A. Kuenen et al., Textus hebraici emendationes quibus in vetere testamento neerlandice vertendo (1900). These had been embedded in a controversial Dutch translation of the OT prepared essentially in the theological faculty of Leiden University: De Leidsche Vertaling. This Bible was condemned by the conservative Dutch church authorities, and had Kuenen not died before it was published he would almost certainly have been ostracized from his church. The speaker noted that a few years earlier Charles Briggs had been excommunicated from his church for expressing similar liberal views at Union Theological Seminary. But Briggs was saved for his vocation by being accepted for ordination as an Episcopalian, probably through his involvement with BDB and thanks to the D.Litt. Oxford awarded him. To dally with conjectural emendation at the beginning of the 19th century entailed the risk of being branded a heretic. But modern text critics regard the MT as an example of several variant texts circulating among the community of the time, so many older cases for emendation can be ignored, as has been effectively explained by Emanuel Tov in Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Chapter 8). Nevertheless, modern lexicographers still find they deserve attention. To illustrate this a close comparison was made of how two problematic lexemes are treated in scholarly dictionaries of today: philological evidence for describing Judah’s eyes as ‘red’ or as ‘dark’ in Gen 49:12, and grammatical evidence for changing the pointing of certain words in Job 20:26.

George Brooke (Manchester), “Manchester and the Dead Sea Scrolls”

This illustrated presentation had three parts. In the first, there was a review of some of the work of the first generation of Manchester scholars, including especially Meir Wallenstein, H.H. Rowley, Preben Wernberg-Møller, John Allegro, and F.F. Bruce. Particular attention was paid to Allegro’s contributions as a manuscript editor for the series of principal editions (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert), including his innovative practice of publishing preliminary editions, his major role in the opening of the Copper Scroll in Manchester in 1955-1956, his skills as a photographer, and his engaging enthusiasm for popularising the Scrolls. In the second part, there was a brief description of highlights from the last 30 years: the Temple Scroll Symposium (1987); the Scrolls and Septuagint Symposium (1990); the Manchester-Sheffield Centre for Dead Sea Scrolls Research (1995-2005); the Copper Scroll Exhibition (1996-1997); the Copper Scroll Symposium (1996); further contributions to the official editions of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (by P.S. Alexander and G.J. Brooke); and multiple other publications of various kinds. In the third part of the presentation some ongoing projects and resources were mentioned: the T & T Clark Companion to the Dead Sea Scrolls; the electronic catalogue of the William H. Brownlee archive and ongoing scientific research on the Ronald Reed Dead Sea Scroll fragments at the John Rylands Library; the digitisation of the Allegro archive at Manchester Museum; the revision of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert V for Dead Sea Scroll Editions; the place of the scrolls in the Profiling of Jewish Literature in Antiquity Database; the production of a Database on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament; and the ongoing publication of revised versions of their dissertations by Manchester doctoral graduates.

Hindy Najman (Oxford), “Lamentations and biblical traditions of recollection, recovery and radical hope”

How are we to understand the call to the reader to remember and what is the performative achievement of that call? This paper focused on Lamentations chs. 4 and 5, Psalm 137 as well as Apostrophe to Zion and 4Ezra—texts which all share in the practice of recollection/remembering and recalling as a kind of performance. The speaker noted that these texts call upon us as readers to participate and that there is also a call for change—for response and perhaps, we might say, for the ethical. It went on to observe that the use and incorporation of earlier textual traditions in response to historical exigencies and a hope which is radical (insofar as it creates new hope and new tradition and even new writing out of the embers of destruction) are precisely the elements that should interest us in the composition and unlocking of texts from our biblical antiquity. The call to the reader in the texts to respond to the exigencies of the time invokes past and prays for a better future. The paper noted that we live neither in the past we study nor in the future into which some of the texts we study catapult us. However, when we are called upon to exercise what Jonathan Lear has described as our imaginative capacity to overcome the loss and destruction of our own worlds, we can do so productively through re-performing the texts by interpretation and philological analysis. The recollection texts call upon the reader to overcome the gap between the past and the future. The paper concluded that the work of recollection and memory can prove to be healing insofar as it offers radical hope, insofar as it sustains a past history, and insofar as it actualizes the formation of text, individual and community.

[index of past meetings]