Programme

Cripps Hall, University Park, Nottingham

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

Cripps Hall, Nottingham, NG7 2QE (West Entrance; see here for a pdf with a description of how to get to Cripps hall, and links on the University of Nottingham website).

3—5 January 2017

Under the presidency of Prof. Paul Joyce

Printable version of the Programme.
Booking form for the Summer Meeting (pdf)

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

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

TUESDAY 3 January

• [2.00 pm Committee Meeting]
• 4.30 pm Registration
• 6.00 pm Reception, sponsored by the Centre for Bible, Ethics and Theology, University of Nottingham, and the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield
• 6.45 pm Dinner
• 8.15 pm Presidential Address: Paul Joyce (London), “The Way of the Future? Into Our Second Century”

WEDNESDAY 4 January

• 8.00 am Breakfast
• 9.15 am Andrew Mayes (Dublin), “Interpretations of the Joseph Story”
• 10.00 am Elizabeth Robar (Cambridge), “Unmarked Modality: Rhetorical Questions and Theological Suppositions”
• 10.45 am Tea and Coffee
• 11.15 am David Janzen (Durham), “What Historians Do, and What the Chronicler (An Historian) Did”
• 12.00 noon David Mitchell (Brussels), “The Origins of Masoretic Cantillation”
• 13.00 pm Lunch
• 2.30 pm Carly Crouch (Nottingham) and Jonathan Stökl (London), “Exhibiting Jerusalem: A SOTS Centennial Project”
• 4.30 pm Tea and Coffee
• 5.00 pm Anselm Hagedorn (Berlin), Nathan MacDonald (Cambridge), Janet Tollington (Cambridge), “Panel Review of Katherine Southwood’s Marriage by Capture in the Book of Judges (Cambridge: CUP, 2016)”
• 6.00 pm Reception, sponsored by Cambridge University Press
• 6.45 pm Dinner
• 8.15 pm Johanna Stiebert (Leeds), “Is Biblical Studies in Crisis? Queering the Question”

THURSDAY 5 January

• 8.00 am Breakfast
• 9.15 am Brad Anderson (Dublin), “Ireland and the Old Testament: Some Reflections on Transmission, Translation, and Significance”
• 10.00 am Caroline Blyth (Auckland), “And You See among the Captives a Beautiful Woman, and You Desire Her: Plundering the Woman’s Body in the Bible and Louis John Steele’s Spoils to the Victor”
• 10.45 am Tea and Coffee
• 11.15 am Ronald Clements (London), “A Prophet in Wartime: Reading Jeremiah in 1917”
• 12.00 noon Business Meeting (SOTS Members only)
• 1.00 pm Lunch, followed by departure

Domestic Arrangements

The venue for the Meeting is Cripps Hall, University of Nottingham, University Park Campus, Nottingham, NG7 2QW; the telephone number for Cripps Hall is 01159-514311. Please refer to the enclosed map for information on how to get to Cripps Hall. There is plenty of parking at or near Cripps Hall but we would recommend public transport where possible. The charges for hospitality are shown on the enclosed Booking Form. Members are requested to pay their accounts in full when returning the form but, if necessary, a non-returnable booking fee of £30 will be accepted and the balance will be payable on arrival at the Meeting.

There is a subsidized price for those on low incomes or from economically disadvantaged countries. Applications for a further conference grant to assist in meeting the costs of attending the Meeting must reach the Secretary, Dr David Shepherd (shepherd@tcd.ie) by 8th November. Application forms for grants are available on the SOTS website, /.

The charges for hospitality are shown on the 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 8th November 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 Tuesday 6th December 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

Paul Joyce (London), “The Way of the Future? Into Our Second Century” (Presidential Address)

The address began by reflecting on some features of the Society’s past and present, focusing on the challenges posed by issues of gender and sexuality; Judaism and the Society; religion and the secular; and Ireland, the rest of Europe, and the wider world. It then attempted to look ahead and consider the direction in which the Society and the study of the Old Testament might be moving. On the assumption that the plurality that has come to mark the field over the past generation, both in method as well as content, will continue to be a feature, the address explored one possible trajectory, making a conscious connection with the foregoing discussion of diversity and inclusion. It was argued that the healthy future of the Society depends on its increasingly global perspective and on its growing awareness of our shared humanity as scholars and as readers. This would involve a range of ways of taking the humanity of the reader more seriously, in his or her cultural context, individually and socially, and also learning from what the human sciences, critically received, might teach us about the nature of the human person, as well as highlighting those aspects of the biblical tradition that focus on related questions. It was argued that such a development might help heal the impoverishment of some of our work and also complement the important and ongoing historical-critical dimension of our shared task. This trajectory was illustrated with some examples, each of them rather different, relating to language about divine anger and judgment in history, biblical metaphors of remembering and forgetting, and the solidarity of human beings in extremis as exposed through reception studies. The full text is available in the centennial volume SOTS at 100 (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

Andrew Mayes (Dublin), “Interpretations of the Joseph Story”

This paper began by showing that in its canonical context the Joseph story makes a negative judgment on Joseph, based on his assimilation to Egyptian ways, where monarchic rule leads to slavery, and on his replacement as leader of the sons of Jacob by Judah. Positive understandings of Joseph assume an older independent Joseph story that has been secondarily adapted to its present context. There was such an older independent Joseph story; its prototype, however, is to be found in the Egyptian ‘Tale of Sinuhe’, with which there are many parallels in structure, theme and content. This tale is concerned to identify Egypt as the homeland for all Egyptians, which indicates that the purpose of the older Joseph story was similarly to establish Judah as the home for all Israelites. This suggests that the context of origin of the Joseph story was Judah in the late pre-exilic period when questions of the nature and identity of the Judean state were significant issues.

Elizabeth Robar (Cambridge), “Unmarked Modality: Rhetorical Questions and Theological Suppositions”

This paper began by observing that, like any language, Biblical Hebrew expresses modality. Contrary to the dictates of grammarians, however, it does not express modality primarily within the verbal system. A function-to-form inventory of modality provides many other categories, including, most notably, the use of particles and word order. Modality indicated by word order correlates somewhat with the phenomenon of unmarked questions. The very reality of unmarked questions indicates that interrogative modality is not a discretely marked category in Biblical Hebrew. When it overlaps with other kinds of modality, such as deontic or deductive, there is an ambiguity in markedness that parallels the ambiguity in English punctuation: Have we not had enough of the sin at Peor, that you too must turn away? Alternatively: Must you too turn away! In such cases, English question marks and exclamation points are interchangeable, or even used together in colloquial writing: Must you too turn away?! The function of the overlapping interrogative modality is often to challenge: Do you dare now turn away? Are you to take possession of the land? Possibly the challenge, which inherently contrasts with the assumptions it is challenging, naturally attracts the syntactic signals for contrastive focus, namely, fronted constituents (i.e. verb-medial word order). This may indicate a semantic restriction (along the lines of Mitchell’s incredulity, sarcasm and irony) of what kind of modality may be marked by word order. A brief analysis of the particles אַף כִּי clarifies some functions of deductive modality and rhetorical questions. Cases with the particle נָא showcase an overlap between weak deontic modality and interrogative modality in polite interrogatives. In the analysis of unmarked and rhetorical questions, theological presuppositions are unavoidable and, indeed, an essential part of the scholarly arsenal. Scholarly integrity with humility is the only suggestion for moving forward.

David Janzen (Durham), “What Historians Do, and What the Chronicler (An Historian) Did”

The first part of the presentation argued that the facts historians work with as they write historiographies are creations of narratives that bestow the status of fact onto things and events in the past. Historians create facts through narrative and then create further narratives to explain the significance of the facts, and this means that the past, insofar as it exists and is meaningful for us, is something that we create through our narratives. This means that there is not much difference between historians and fiction writers, since both write narratives and recent discussions among historians of the Hebrew Bible manifest disagreement as to whether particular histories of ancient Israel produced by modern scholars should be seen as histories or as fictions. Different cultures have developed different understandings of objectivity, or standards to follow so that writers produce historiography rather than fiction, but these understandings of objectivity are culturally determined. The second part of the presentation noted that the Chronicler did not follow the kinds of objective rules modern historians do, since he or she plagiarizes, assigns causation to divine action, and seems to alter source material for theological reasons, and so on. But it would have been possible for Judeans of the fourth century BCE to have seen Chronicles as history rather than as fiction. When we examine examples of the ways in which the Chronicler alters source material, we can see how at least some readers of his or her day would not have seen this as simply fictional invention but as alterations that would agree with their worldview. Chronicles is a history—a fourth-century BCE Judean history, at any rate, that follows the objective standards of that culture—that likely would have been accepted as history rather than fiction by at least some readers.

David Mitchell (Brussels), “The Origins of Masoretic Cantillation”

The cantillational marks or te‘amim of the Masoretic text are widely thought to be of medieval origin. This paper proposed instead that they were a written tradition inherited by the Masoretes from the Sanhedrin of temple times. Reference is made, first, to the testimony of the Masoretes, Moshe ben Asher, his son Aharon, and Aharon of Jerusalem, and then to rabbinic testimony. It was then noted that if the Masoretes invented the accents, they would have done so in defiance of their own credo. Further, they seem to have been at a loss to explain them. Indeed, the sudden appearance of the highly-evolved Tiberian system is inexplicable if it is a medieval invention. Equally inexplicable is its widespread acceptance within Judaism if it was of medieval origin. There is also evidence within the system itself. Its two systems—poetic and prosodic—could not have developed at once; they must have developed sequentially and been received together by the Masoretes. In fact, there is evidence of a history of development within the two systems of te‘amim, and even evidence of a history of musical development within the poetic te‘amim alone. The whole system shows a degree of musical expertise which the Masoretes lacked. Evidence is also adduced from the history of music notation. It is unthinkable that a sophisticated civilization like temple-period Israel did not have a system of musical notation when all their neighbours had. Further, the te‘amim look like the musical  notation of these neighbouring cultures. There is also evidence that the vocalic signs, the nekudot, date from the same period. The paper concluded that (1) The authority of the Masoretic text ultimately derives from the Jerusalem Sanhedrin, not from Tiberias, in fulfilment of the prophets (Isa. 2.3); (2) the nekudot and te‘amim have the interpretational authority of the Sanhedrin; (3) the nekudotrecord the pronunciation of biblical times; and (4) the te‘amim record the chant of the temple Levites.

Johanna Stiebert (Leeds), “Is Biblical Studies in Crisis? Queering the Question”

The paper began with an examination of Esther Fuchs’s statement, ‘The field of biblical studies is in crisis’ (Feminist Theory and the Bible: Interrogating the Sources, Lexington Books, 2016, p.6) and probed the distinctions and dissent between what Fuchs characterises as traditional biblical scholarship on the one hand and ‘nomadic’ biblical scholarship on the other. Next, the paper explores queer biblical criticism and the possibilities of interpretive fluidities it opens up. To illustrate this situation, the paper drew on biblical examples of first degree incest (i.e. prohibited sexual contact between parent and offspring, or between siblings), demonstrating that the designation of ‘incest laws’ for Leviticus 18 and 20 can be challenged. Moreover, as the paper went on to develop, even sexual contact between first degree relatives is not consistently or predominantly depicted in terms of illegality in Hebrew Bible narrative.

Brad Anderson (Dublin), “Ireland and the Old Testament: Some Reflections on Transmission, Translation, and Significance”

This paper explored the story of Ireland and the Old Testament, pointing to the complex yet significant place of this collection in the history of Ireland. Beginning with early Christian Ireland, the role of the Old Testament in the transmission of the Bible was investigated, including the use of the Psalms in education and piety, depictions of Old Testament scenes on high crosses, and the way in which Old Testament narrative is woven into accounts of early Irish myth and history, as seen in works such as the medieval Book of Invasions. Moving to the early modern period, the paper explored the story of the translation of the Old Testament into Irish under the guidance of William Bedell. Here we see how the translation of the Old Testament into Irish reflects many of the social and cultural issues of the day on the island, including colonialism, mission, and religious difference. Finally, the paper explored the emergence of several ideas from Ireland relating to the Old Testament that would have enduring and unexpected influence. Particular attention was afforded to James Ussher’s famous dating of creation and the historical context out of which his research emerged, as well as the personal and social factors that gave rise to John Nelson Darby’s dispensationalism and the use of the Old Testament within the development of his thought. Taken together, these snapshots present a picture of Ireland’s rich and varied history of engagement with the Old Testament.

Caroline Blyth (Auckland), “And You See among the Captives a Beautiful Woman, and You Desire Her: Plundering the Woman’s Body in the Bible and Louis John Steele’s Spoils to the Victor”

This paper offered an analysis of Louis John Steele’s painting, The Spoils of the Victor (1908) which hangs in Auckland City Art Gallery; viewers of this painting can stand and gaze upon a Māori woman, naked from the waist up, who is positioned in the picture’s foreground, tied to a wooden post among other items of “war spoil” collected by conquering warriors. The image may both shock us with its inherent violence but also invite us to look at – even admire – the sexualized image of this Māori captive. Arms tied above her head, she has been forced into a position that compels her to reveal her body to us and we are left with the option to either look (with interest, horror, or desire) or turn away, leaving her unassailed by our voyeuristic gaze but, at the same time, abandoning her to her fate. The presenter noted that whenever she looks at this painting, it conjures up for her the tradition of the “captive wife” in Deuteronomy 21.10-14, a legal code that essentially sanctions the treatment of captive women in war as “spoils of the victors.” Regarded by some scholars as a “humanitarian” law for the beneficent treatment of war captives, this code nevertheless invites us likewise to gaze upon women’s bodies as sexualized spoils of war. Its stipulations, which call for various rituals of “undress” and “removal” before the woman is “married” to her captor, serve to confine these unnamed female prisoners of war within a sacred narrative that weaves together sexual violence and sexual desire. This paper suggested how Steele’s The Spoils of the Victor might offer new reflections on this biblical tradition, looking in particular at the way both texts locate the captive woman’s body as an object of sexual plunder and eroticism.

Ronald Clements (London), “A Prophet in Wartime: Reading Jeremiah in 1917”

This paper began with the suggestion that the study of the prophet Jeremiah, and of the pre-exilic prophets generally was fundamentally challenged by the commentary of Bernhard Duhm of 1899 which sharply distinguished between the prose and poetic strata of material preserved in the book. For a British audience, interpretation was profoundly affected by the exposition by John Skinner, Principal of Westminster College, Cambridge, published in 1922 with the title Prophecy and Religion. Based on lectures given in Edinburgh in 1920 in the aftermath of war and the heavy losses of student life, Skinner sought to address a situation in which national opinion was sorely divided.  He was strongly opposed to the war, critical of the eulogizing of military heroism and particularly of the introduction of compulsory conscription. He was supported in this by his colleague John Oman whose book Grace and Personality (published 1915) emphasised the divine gift of individual choice and insight. Skinner interpreted Jeremiah’s remarkable appeal to surrender unconditionally to the besieging armies of Babylon in 587-6 BCE as a mark of divine inspiration. He developed this further to discern in Jeremiah, the breakthrough to a deep sense of individual choice and responsibility.  This responsibility he saw echoed in the choices made by contemporary conscientious objectors to military service many of whom had been severely punished in consequence . Another commentator of the period, Arthur S. Peake took a similar position and published short lectures also citing the biblical example of Jeremiah in support and carried the title Prisoners of Hope.

In sharp contrast to this view and the appeal to the biblical Jeremiah another scholar Sir George Adam Smith, used his inaugural address in 1916 as incoming Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland to oppose individual choice on conscientious grounds as a reason for evading essential public moral duty. He was rewarded by being appointed as extraordinary ambassador to the USA to elicit American support for the war. It is also relevant that Henry Wheeler Robinson drew upon his wartime experience addressing ministers and clergy in a time of severe national suffering to give lectures on the Old Testament understanding of the subject, published as The Cross of Job (1917) and later supplemented with a treatment of the prophet Jeremiah (The Cross of Jeremiah, 1925). Other scholars and historians later elaborated on Skinner’s interpretation which was strongly affected by the wartime background.