Papers

at the Manor House, University of Birmingham under the presidency of Professor Grahame Auld

Professor Graeme Auld (Edinburgh): Voices from the Past (Presidential Address)
This lecture is available for download here with all pictures (Voices: beware, large file of c. 4MB), or without them (Voices, text only).

Dr Yvonne Sherwood (Glasgow): Reading Backwards: Early and Medieval Christian Amplifications of Sarah’s ‘Voice’

Dr Craig Ho (Hong Kong): The Book of Genesis in the Holiness Code

Dr Kieran Heskin (Leeds): Qoheleth’s God

Revd Roger Tomes (Manchester): ‘Scripture its own Commentator’: A History and Evaluation of Cross-Reference Bibles

Dr Timothy Lim (Edinburgh): The Book of Ruth and its Literary Voice

Professor Philip Davies (Sheffield): What Is ‘Minimalism’ and Why Do So Many People Dislike It?

Professor Thomas Römer (Lausanne): Israel’s Sojourn in the Wilderness and the Construction of the Book of Numbers

Dr Martin O’Kane (Lampeter): Visualizing The Man of Sorrows: Artistic Understandings of Isaiah 53

Abstracts

Professor Graeme Auld (Edinburgh): Voices from the Past (Presidential Address)

This address excerpted from some of the near 800 letters and cards sent to Professor Norman Porteous by colleagues and friends over some 80 years, now in New College in the care of Edinburgh University Library. Ten of the correspondents quoted had been or would be Presidents of SOTS: Archibald Kennedy, Adam Welch, David Winton Thomas, Alfred Guillaume, Aubrey Johnson, Godfrey Driver, Christopher North, John Mauchline, Gwynne Henton Davies, and James Barr. Rather fuller attention was paid to six of Porteous’s large circle of overseas colleagues: Otto Eissfeldt, Albrecht Alt, Martin Noth, Gerhard von Rad, Walther Eichrodt, and Rudolf Bultmann. He had met several of these at the International Congress of Old Testament Scholars in Göttingen in 1935. The lecture was illustrated by a few portraits and facsimiles of some of the correspondence.

Full lecture with all pictures (Voices: beware, large file of c. 4MB), or without them (Voices text).

Dr Yvonne Sherwood (Glasgow): Reading Backwards: Early and Medieval Christian Amplifications of Sarah’s ‘Voice’

Contrary to prevailing stereotypes, pre-modern interpretation can sometimes be freer than its contemporary counterparts in ethical critique of biblical texts. An inviolable frame, in which God and the text incontrovertibly are, leaves pre-critical interpreters paradoxically freer to adopt a more vulnerable and experimental mode of writing within the frame. Responding to scripture as writing, and using all the resources of writing in order to do so, ancient Jewish and Christian interpretation teaches us that Abraham’s sacrifice is neither straightforwardly fulfilled nor straightforwardly negated. Rather, Genesis 22 affirms that Abraham would have sacrificed, and sets up an indelible act of testimony in the conditional or subjunctive tense. This in turn, opens up the possibility of scripting a counter-subjunctive, which ‘happens’ only as surely (or un-surely) as the sacrifice ‘happens’. Critique can be ‘expressed’, as it were safely, by exploring what Sarah would have done or said. By looking at examples from ancient Syriac interpretation and medieval morality plays, the paper explored how much was once risked in the hypothetical speeches of Sarah. Because the sacrifice has not yet turned potentially anthropocentric, and so tragic, ancient Christian Sarahs ‘say’ much more than in modern interpretation to date.

Dr Craig Ho (Hong Kong): The Book of Genesis in the Holiness Code

In the so-called Holiness Code, the laws prior to Leviticus 19 and after Leviticus 20 are thematically arranged, while those in Leviticus 19–20 (with the exception of the laws dealing with illicit sexual incidents reported in Genesis which are grouped together in Leviticus 20:1–21) show repetition and are not related to each other. On the one hand, this paper affirmed Calum Carmichael’s proposal that the laws in Leviticus 19–20 are responses to narratives in the Hebrew Bible, but on the other hand, it disagreed with his view on where the lawgiver got his inspiration — mainly from the Jacob story and the Joseph story in Genesis, sometimes from Judges and Samuel­Kings. Where one can agree with his explanations for the link between a law and a proposed narrative, a similar if not more appropriate narrative can sometimes be found earlier on in Genesis. The alternative hypothesis put forward in this paper is that the legislator of Leviticus 19–20 responded to the book of Genesis and formulated pertinent laws as he read from Genesis 1 more or less chapter by chapter until the end of the book. For example, the Sabbath commandment is mentioned twice (Leviticus 19:3, 30) because the world is created ‘twice’ — once in Genesis 1 and then in the flood story (Genesis 6–9). Between them are laws that can be linked to narratives between the two ‘creation’ stories. Thus, the laws against stealing and lying (Leviticus 19:11) are responses to the stealing of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden and Cain’s lie to Yahweh when asked about the whereabouts of his brother. The law that forbids partiality in judgment (Leviticus 19:15) is a response to Yahweh’s (problematic) protection of Cain upon his complaint about the harshness of the judgment he received. The last law in Leviticus 20:27 on the death penalty for mediums and wizards is directed to Joseph the diviner (Genesis 44:5, 15).

Dr Kieran Heskin (Leeds): Qoheleth’s God

Part one dealt with God’s activity, which—more than his attributes—is the subject of Qoheleth’s attention. This activity is mainly depicted as endogenous, arbitrary, incomprehensible and unchangeable. Even in the few instances where it is depicted as reactive, it is not depicted as warm, protective, or loving. The emphasis placed on endogenous divine activity inevitably highlights God’s sovereignty and superiority to man and leads to a cold depiction of God. The various limitations that God has placed on the human condition further contribute to the cold theological atmosphere of the book. Part two regarded the book of Ecclesiastes as marking a stage of development rather than a break with Old Testament thought. It is rooted in the tradition that produced Job and Proverbs. It also seems to have been greatly influenced by the first chapters of Genesis. Part three saw Qoheleth not only as a critical thinker but also as a man of faith, who appreciated both aspects of God’s dealings with his creatures: the endogenous aspect and the reactive aspect. He depicts them side by side without making any effort to reconcile the difference between them or to resolve the problem of determination and free will.

Revd Roger Tomes (Manchester): ‘Scripture its own Commentator’: A History and Evaluation of Cross-Reference Bibles

In 2003 Oxford University Press published a cross-reference edition of the NRSV. The paper traced the history of cross-reference Bibles in English from the invention of printing and the first vernacular translations, through the various Oxford and Cambridge editions of the King James Bible, to the 1898 edition of the Revised Version, with glances at the work of independent compilers such as John Canne, John Brown of Haddington and the Bagster Comprehensive Bible. It investigated the motivations of the various compilers and the kind of references they supply. The new Oxford edition of the NRSV was compared with its main present-day competitors: the editions with the references originally compiled for the Harper / Eyre & Spottiswoode Study Bible, and the NIV cross-reference edition / NIV Study Bible. Some reservations about the value of cross-reference Bibles were considered, particularly the charge that they perpetuate an understanding of the Bible as prophecy and fulfilment.

Dr Timothy Lim (Edinburgh): The Book of Ruth and its Literary Voice

By a study of the speeches in the book of Ruth, this paper further explored the intriguing line of research on the literary voice of the book. It began by examining Richard Bauckham’s gynocentric hermeneutics, Mary Lefkowitz’s gendering of classical literature, and Athalya Brenner and Fokkelein van Dijk-Hemmes’ theory of the F (feminine/female) and M (masculine/male) voice in the Hebrew Bible. Arguing for a more precise definition of ‘voice’ as speech in Ruth, the paper then showed that the focus of the narrative is primarily determined by dialogue between Naomi, Ruth and Boaz, as well as the minor figures of Orpah, the women of Bethlehem, all the people of the gate and the elders, the anonymous redeemer, the male harvesters (but not the female gleaners), and the young male overseer. The conclusion drawn was that the voice of the book of Ruth, as far as gender is concerned, is balanced between female and male.

Professor Philip Davies (Sheffield): What Is ‘Minimalism’ and Why Do So Many People Dislike It?

‘Minimalism’ is widely presented as a radical approach, and has been subjected to often quite vicious attack. The paper argued that although there was no ‘minimalist’ or ‘revisionist’ school, a number of scholars shared the same ideas because these ideas were a logical extension of many trends in biblical scholarship generally. ‘Minimalism’ was largely created by fundamentalist-conservative groups and by those wedded to biblical archaeology who are alarmed at the threat it poses to their hold on popular understanding of the Bible and wish to try and distance these views from ‘mainstream’ biblical criticism. The extreme language in which the discussion is often couched should remind biblical scholars of the sharpness of the threat that it faces from external constituencies, aided by an alarming ignorance on the part of the public about what it is that we do and why; and should also warn us not to flinch from the implications of our own work. We should understand how far ‘minimalism’ is, far from being a radical assault on traditional practice, a mainstream position that is securely embedded in the long history of the discipline, and, whether or not in the end its conclusions are accepted, forms an intrinsic component of current discussion about the origin and nature of the biblical literature.

Professor Thomas Römer (Lausanne): Israel’s Sojourn in the Wilderness and the Construction of the Book of Numbers

The present debate on the Yahwist and the link between the Patriarchs and Exodus reveals that it is very difficult to maintain the idea of a pre-priestly document which would have constituted a Proto-Pentateuch of a sort. The debate on the extension of the original Priestly document allows the postulation that the original had its conclusion at Sinai (Exodus 40 or Leviticus 9). The consequence is therefore that neither the so-called Yahwist nor the original Priestly document contains a narrative strand that comprises the whole Pentateuch. This paper suggested that, at the beginning of the process which led to the formation of the Torah, there was a priestly ‘Tritoteuch’, which covered the narrative from the creation of the world to the installation of Israel’s worship, and the book of Deuteronomy, related to the Former Prophets. This means that the book of Numbers was created during the Persian period in order to integrate the latest texts of the Torah. The few wilderness narratives in the book of Exodus were originally positive accounts, revealing the same ideology as the allusions to the wilderness in Hosea and Jeremiah. This view is also represented by the priestly document. Post-priestly redactors transformed these positive accounts in Exodus 15-17 into stories of complaint. The invention of a ‘cycle of rebellion’ in the book of Numbers presupposed this transformation and radicalized the negative view of Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness. This was shown through an analysis of Numbers 11 and 12. Numbers 11 reveals the concerns of post-exilic charismatic prophecy; Moses is presented in a somewhat ambiguous way; and prophecy can exist without his mediation. Numbers 12 presents Moses as the incomparable mediator between Yahweh and Israel to whom the priestly as well as the prophetic functions are clearly subordinated. The author of Numbers 12 tries to correct ideas expressed in Numbers 11, in responding directly to the main assertions of the foregoing chapter. Despite their ideological differences, all texts in Numbers 11-20 agree on the idea that Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness was a time of ongoing rebellion. In this sense Mary Douglas is certainly right to claim that the book of ‘Numbers complements the other books [of the Pentateuch] by presenting a coherent mythic background for Judah’s political situation after the exile’.

Dr Martin O’Kane (Lampeter): Visualizing The Man of Sorrows: Artistic Understandings of Isaiah 53

The paper offered an appreciation of the Servant Song of Isaiah 53 through its visual imagery. Its starting point was the analysis of the poem by David Clines (I, He, We, and They [JSOT Supplement 1], 1976), who argued that the poem is essentially about modes of seeing the servant. The perspective of Hans-Georg Gadamer – the merging of the horizons of author, text and reader – applied to the relationship between painting and viewer (Truth and Method, 1973) facilitates a range of interpretations as to the role and mission of the servant; in this paper, a particular aspect of Gadamer’s hermeneutical aesthetic was highlighted, namely his notion that each visual instance of a (biblical) subject matter provides a coming forth (Darstellung), an epiphany, in the life of the viewer. Thus each instance of Isaiah 53 offers a distinctive and original interpretation of the poem and extends the nature of the subject matter itself. Three paintings were used to illustrate the argument: The Man of Sorrows by Andrea Mantegna (figurative), Still Life with Open Bible by Vincent van Gogh (non-figurative) and The Tale is Told that Shall Be Told by Patrick Hall (abstract). The horizons of the artists together with their distinctive interpretations of Isaiah 53 help illumine the mindset of the author of the poem and underline the important role of the viewer in intepreting and appropriating it.