If you haven’t already seen the news on Mark Goodacre’s blog or somewhere else, R. Joseph Hoffmann of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion has released (via Robert Price’s website) a statement that seems to clarify a good bit of the confusion about the list of Project fellows on the Project’s web site. Read the whole statement for yourself to get the full scoop, but the short version is that the website’s list of fellows and their biographies was posted quite prematurely, as some of us had previously speculated. You may remember that I wrote in an earlier post:

So what we have here is something in the range of:

• a rush to put up a web site before all the ducks (er, fellows) were in a row; or

• a strange definition of “fellow” as “anyone who has been invited to speak at one of our conferences, or whom we would like to have participating in this venture”; or
• a case of para-academic fraud.

It’s hard not to feel the strong pull of the third item in the list, though I’m holding out for one of the other two, or some combination thereof.

Though he doesn’t quite put it in these terms, Hoffmann describes a combination of my first two bullet points above, mostly the first. Here’s the bottom line:

Anticipating a formal launch of its academic work in 2008, the Project floated (I have to stress this word) a website. It is here that an element of confusion enters the picture. While the website was only a model of things to come, a compilation of biographies of the entire list—UCD, listserv, and “under consideration”–was posted to the site together with some sample texts as active information. What was meant as a test has lingered on the site as a done deal. This was done largely because we were being hammered for information and were late in conceptualizing the site itself. The posting was premature; the website was not flagged as under construction. Results ran ahead of planning. Indeed, the website was (is) a work in progress: Even at the time of this writing, only a fraction of the 50 scholars comprising the Project have been chosen and perhaps they will not finally be chosen until January 2008. A fair number of those whose biographies were floated had already been deselected. My own work schedule has kept me—and there is real guilt in this—from surveilling the progress of the site, which I regarded as internet clay and not the pot. The very tentative nature of the site was not made clear on the site itself, and should have been.

Hoffmann seems unable to just leave it at that, however, and there’s a lot more to his diatribe. Click the “continue reading” link below if you want to read my more detailed reactions to Hoffmann’s statement.

Continue Reading »

In the 9:00 AM time slot on Tuesday at the Catholic Biblical Association meeting, Corrine Carvalho discussed with the members of the continuing seminar on “divinity in ancient Israel” a work in progress on the ark of the covenant in the book of Chronicles. The paper itself, which I think will soon (measured in years) be a chapter in a longer book on the ark, was well done even at this late (?) draft stage, and it supported a lively discussion. The most central question in this session was why the ark of the covenant is so important in the book of Chronicles given the (presumed) absence of the ark of the covenant from the actual working temple the Chronicle(s) would have known.

Dick Clifford gave the 11:00 address on the “image of God” concept in Genesis 1. The paper was quite good—not least because Dick affirmed ideas that I’ve been teaching in my classes for years with little bibliographical support. Dick played up the importance of the (sons of the) gods—the “heavenly assembly,” if you prefer—in helping to understand this locution. The Q&A session just ended a moment ago, so I’d better pack up, get some lunch, and hit the road.

As on Sunday, Monday at the Catholic Biblical Association meeting began with breakfast, and then the second round of continuing seminars. The “Divinity in Ancient Israel” seminar considered a paper by Dale Launderville that didn’t actually deal with “divinity, but instead focused on the “problem of intermarriages” in the book of Ezra. I won’t try to summarize Dale’s paper here, but it was very interesting (as Dale’s work normally is) and provoked a discussion that went on for the full two hours. One of the important things that came out in this session, though, was an attempt to appreciate the diversity of “parties and sects” (so to speak) in Yehud. More about that later, perhaps.

At 11:00 AM, during the “simultaneous sessions” (usually one Hebrew Bible-oriented and one New Testament-oriented), I went to the session by Craig Morrison on the function of 2 Samuel 22 in the overall book of Samuel. It was a nicely-presented and well-organized piece of large-scale rhetorical criticism, to make a long story short.

There were basically no Hebrew Bible/Old Testament papers being given during the “research reports” rounds on Monday afternoon, so my Pepperdine colleagues and I took the opportunity to go over to San Jose (a grand total of 2.2 miles) to visit Recycle Bookstore, a very nice used bookstore. I picked up several good books at good prices.

I realize that this brief notice is, well, rather briefer than you may have come to expect from me. All I can say about that is, “Um, sorry, see you tomorrow.”

The first full day of the Catholic Biblical Association meeting at Santa Clara University has been a very fully day indeed for me. Except for skipping mass to browse the book displays, like any good Protestant should, I attended sessions in every available time slot.

After breakfast, the day kicked off with a round of continuing seminar and task force meetings. I always attend the “Divinity in Ancient Israel” continuing seminar. This year, we have three papers that all draw on the literature or material culture of the Persian period. First up (Sunday morning) was Gordon Hamilton’s paper on divine images on coins from late Persian-era (c. 400–350) Yehud and Samaria. You might not think that a paper about coinage would be theologically provocative, but this really was a very interesting paper. Unfortunately, Gordon has no plans to publish this paper anywhere or even to continue working on the issue (he called it a “service piece” just for this CBA seminar), so I can’t just say, “Look for the article when it comes out …” I’d love to discuss this one more fully, so I’ll probably come back and devote a whole blog post to it. Gordon’s paper sparked a discussion that ran up to and over the time limit for that particular session slot.

Next up were two “simultaneous sessions,” that is, quasi-plenary addresses. I went to Chris Franke’s presentation, “To what shall I compare (or not compare) thee? Disturbing Images of God in Second Isaiah.” (If you don’t know Franke, she is one of the editors of the Berit Olam series and has published several studies, mostly on Second Isaiah, over the last couple of decades. In this paper, Franke drew our attention to three “disturbing” pictures of God in Isa 40–66 (all of which Franke regards as Second Isaiah, with no Third Isaiah in sight): God as apologetic husband (practically begging his wife, Zion, to “take him back” after abandoning her; the focus was on Isa 54); God as a woman (midwife and mother; focusing on Isa 66, though there are other relevant passages); and God as a bowed but not-quite-defeated warrior (focusing on Isa 63). In the actual presentation, Franke did not have time to get to and through the third section. Due to running out of time, Franke also didn’t have a strong conclusion. While I found the presentation interesting and took two pages of notes, I’m not quite sure what the impact of Franke’s observations might be.

After lunch, a series of “research report” sessions were offered. If you haven’t been to a CBA meeting, you might want to know that the “research reports” are similar to the paper sessions at other professional meetings, except that there is only one paper per 40-minute session, and four sessions are schedule right in a row for you to choose á la carte.

At 2:30 I would have attended Dick Clifford’s paper on Genesis 1, but it got moved to a Monday time slot. Therefore, I attended Paul Mosca’s paper on the “Day of the Lord” in Amos 5. Some commentators have hesitated to use Amos 5 much in reconstructions of the “Day of the Lord” motif because (a) vv. 18–20 don’t seem to provide much information, and (b) vv. 21–27 have been interpreted separately from vv. 18–20. Mosca disagrees, and offered several good reasons for reading all of vv. 18–27 together as a judgment oracle. The most provocative part of his paper was his reinterpretation of Amos’s most famous line, Amos 5:24, as a judgment oracle rather than a call to social justice. The Hebrew text reads ויגל כמים משפט וצדקה כנחל איתן and is usually translated along the lines of “let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a never-failing stream,” but Mosca gave good reasons for rendering it as “so that justice will roll in like water, and righteousness like an eternal wadi,” with references here to the primeval cosmic chaos. Thus, if Mosca’s reading “works,” Amos is not telling the Israelites to shape up (he’s done that already elsewhere), but is here telling them what to expect from the “Day of the Lord,” namely, “de-creation.”

In the second simultaneous session, I attended Paul Niskanen’s presentation on “Number, Gender, and Definiteness: The Creation of (ha)Adam in the Image of Elohim.” Niskanen was taking another look at the “image of God” text, Genesis 1:26–27, with special attention to certain grammatical and morphological features of the language used. There was some pretty detailed discussion in the paper that I won’t try to reproduce here. Suffice to say that the issues are somewhat complex. Niskanen ran out of time before he could do much with the “definiteness” part of paper (the ha- on ha’adam), so the paper didn’t feel quite complete. I confess that I didn’t quite get down in my notes how Niksanen pulled it all together; by then, I really needed some caffeine.

A few shots of Diet Dr. Pepper later, I went back for John Willis’s paper, “Diverse Uses of Nathan’s Oracle in the Hebrew Bible.” John was my M.A. advisor and thesis chair at Abilene Christian University. John’s got a certain style that you might call “encyclopedic,” and his paper could justly be described as a kind of catalog of allusions to 2 Samuel 7 outside of the Deuteronomistic History.

The fourth simultaneous session began at 5:00, and I attended David Bosworth’s presentation, “King David and the Death of Bathsheba’s Firstborn.” Bosworth was, obviously, examining the story in 2 Samuel 12. The big questions that Bosworth was asking were why David behaves as he does in the story, and secondarily, why and/or how bereaved parents might turn to this text for comfort (he cited a couple of courses—Harold Kushner’s famous When Bad Things Happen to Good People and Harriet Schiff’s The Bereaved Parent, apparently reprinted a number of times since it original publication in the 1970s—that mention such instances). On the exegetical question, no new ground was really broken here, though Bosworth did discuss a number of interesting facets of the story. In the end, Bosworth opted to see David as neither “good” nor “bad” but “practical.” In the Q&A, the most interesting question came from someone whose name I don’t know, but who speculated that David might actually be relieved that this embarrassing child died, but I’m not sure how consistent that is with the characterization of David interceding for the child’s survival—a point on which Bosworth spent a lot of time and effort. After the session, a friend (an edging-toward-elderly woman who’s known me for a long time) asked whether Bosworth himself had actual experience as a bereaved parent. Of course I don’t know the answer to that question, but as a survivor (so to speak) of four miscarriages, I felt like the presentation was a bit too “clinical” for the answer to be “yes.” But, then, David reacted strangely too. All that talk about David, though, diverts attention from the really disturbing, really perverse part of the story: “the LORD struck the child … and it became very ill”! Here’s a cynical limerick that I wrote a dozen or so years ago when writing a paper (”Let’s Talk About Me for a Minute: Fetal-Infantile Subjectivity in 2 Samuel 12″—with a whole bunch of extra bonus points to your pop culture quotient if you “get” the title reference) on this passage:

To me, it seems quite a distortion
that mortality should be my portion.
My sire sinned, not me,
so why should I be
the LORD God’s post-natal abortion?

But we didn’t get anywhere near this topic in the session, except when Bosworth speculated that maybe הֶעֱבֶיר in 2 Sam 12:13 should be translated as “transferred,” as in, “the LORD has transferred your sin [to the child],” which becomes even more disturbing because now we’re talking about divinely-initiated human sacrifice. But like I said, Bosworth’s focus was not on the theological problem of God’s actions according to Nathan’s oracle, but on the exegetical problem of understanding David’s actions.

My Pepperdine colleagues and I ate dinner at a sandwich shop that had tasty fare served as slowly as molasses and, in fact, my order was not even filled correctly (the salad wrap that I was given is not the one I asked for, but by then I was just ready to sit down and eat the thing).

After dinner, I attended the night’s final session, where John Kaltner spoke on “Comparative Study of the Bible and the Qur’an Since 9/11.” This is John’s specialty; he has published several interesting books on similar topics, including Ishmael Instructs Isaac: An Introduction to the Qur’an for Bible Readers (Michael Glazier/Liturgical Press, 1999) and Islam: What Non-Muslims Should Know (Fortess, 2003, in their Facets series). This particular presentation turned out to be basically a review essay, as John described, and briefly analyzed trends in, a dozen books on the Qur’an and the Bible published since 2001. John divided these books into three categories: “books that denigrate” the Qur’an and elevate the Bible; “books that [attempt to] divert” Muslims from the Qur’an to the Bible, or Jews and Christians from the Bible to the Qur’an (it goes both ways); and “books that dialogue” about the similarities and differences between the two scriptural corpuses “without privileging one over the other.”

That’s all I have to report from day 1. Day 2 starts early tomorrow—oops, by now it’s later today—with breakfast at 7:15, so I’d better get some sleep. More tomorrow, er, later today.

I don’t know what happened—maybe an outcry from wired scholars?—but contrary to earlier reports, Santa Clara University has provided CBA attendees with instructions for accessing SCU’s wireless network. That means that I should be able to blog effectively and participate in the Biblical Studies Discussion List colloquium on Hector Avalos’s The End of Biblical Studies while here.

There seems to be quite a bit of good stuff to choose from this year. Here are the papers I’m most anticipating:

• Sunday
• Gordon Hamilton on divine images on coins in Yehud and Hellenistic Judah (continuing seminar paper)
• Chris Franke, “To What Shall I Compare (or not Compare) Thee? Disturbing Images of God in Second Isaiah”
• Paul Mosca, “Amos 5:18–27: Light, Darkness, and the Day of the Lord”
• Paul Niskanen, “Number, Gender, and Definiteness: The Creation of (ha)Adam in the Image of Elohim” (with apologies to Don Benjamin and John Schmitt, whose papers are scheduled at the same time)
• John Willis, “Diverse Uses of Nathan’s Oracle in the Hebrew Bible”
• David Bosworth, “King David and the Death of Bathsheba’s Firstborn”
• John Kaltner, “Comparative Study of the Bible and the Qur’an Since 9/11″
• Monday
• Craig Morrison, “David Sings a Song: The Function of 2 Samuel 22 in the David Narrative”
• Dale Launderville on Ezra’s banishment of “foreign” wives (continuing seminar paper)
• Deirdre Dempsey, “The 2007 Season of Excavations at Tell Qarqur”
• Karl Kuhn, “Differences in Dialogue: Taking Our Cue from Canonically Endorsed Diversity”
• Tuesday
• Corrine Carvalho on the ark of the covenant in Chronicles (continuing seminar paper)
• Richard Clifford, “Genesis 1: A Second Look at a Venerable Text” (I think Clifford has his ordinal number wrong!)

The accommodations here at SCU are the best (most luxurious) I’ve ever seen at a CBA meeting, and since we stay in dormitories, that means that the accommodations for undergrads are pretty nice here at SCU. I’ll keep you updated as things progress, and hopefully press ahead with my review of The End of Biblical Studies.

Since my initial post about the Jesus Project, the discussion has continued among bloggers and members of e-mail discussion lists. Mark Goodacre reportedly posted to the Crosstalk e-mail list (to which I don’t subscribe, hence the word “reportedly”) a comment to the effect that Richard Bauckham, listed on the Project web site as a Project fellow, has no knowledge of or ties to the project. Similarly, Jeffrey Gibson reported to the Biblical Studies Discussion List that John Dominic Crossan, also listed as a Project fellow, has no interest in the Project and doesn’t want his name associated with it.

I have not yet received a reply from my e-mail to CSER regarding the Project and the list of fellows, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the list of fellows is, at best, wishful thinking on the part of the Project organizers. But that’s being overly generous. The Project organizers have listed a number of scholars as Project fellows for the purposes of securing some degree of recognition and confidence in the Project—even though a number of these scholars have no knowledge of the Project and/or no desire to be involved in the Project. If the Fellows page had said “We hope these people will join in” or “These are the kind of people we want,” that would be a case of overweening optimism. But the CSER seems to be feeding information like the following to reporters (well, specifically, one reporter, Jennifer Green of Can[ada]West News Service and/or the Ottawa Citizen—sorry, the bylines aren’t terribly clear):

In January, the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER), a secularly minded organization in Amherst, N. Y., launched a five-year initiative called the Jesus Project in which 50 scholars across many disciplines will try to determine the hard facts behind the human figure of Jesus, including whether He really existed. …

So far, about 70 scholars have expressed an interest in joining the project. About 39 have been vetted and added to the team. The remainder are expected to be in place by early May.

Some of these “fellows” did speak at a “Scripture and Skepticism” conference, but I don’t think they realized they were being added as “fellows” of this Jesus Project. We now know for certain that Bauckham and Kloppenborg—whose names have now disappeared from the list of fellows—and Tabor, and Crossan—whose names are still on the list of fellows—did not know themselves to be “fellows” of the Jesus Project until the web site went up a few days ago (there’s also a blog, but no posts—only a pitch for donations in the sidebar), and Crossan isn’t interested.

So what we have here is something in the range of:

• a rush to put up a web site before all the ducks (er, fellows) were in a row; or

• a strange definition of “fellow” as “anyone who has been invited to speak at one of our conferences, or whom we would like to have participating in this venture”; or
• a case of para-academic fraud.

It’s hard not to feel the strong pull of the third item in the list, though I’m holding out for one of the other two, or some combination thereof.

I don’t blog much about “historical Jesus” issues, because my scholarly interests lie a bit earlier, chronologically, than the life of Jesus. However, the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion has been getting some press (possibly “orchestrated”) for its new Jesus Project. This Jesus Project (there are other organizations with the same name) bills itself as the successor to the Jesus Seminar, and in brief, its plan is as follows:

The Jesus Project will run for five years, with its first session scheduled for December 2007. It will meet twice a year, and, like its predecessor, the Jesus Seminar, it will hold open meetings. Unlike the Seminar, the Project members will not vote with marbles, and we will not expand membership indefinitely: the Project will be limited to fifty scholars with credentials in biblical studies as well as in the crucial cognate disciplines of ancient history, mythography, archaeology, classical studies, anthropology, and social history.

The web site has a list of Project “fellows” that includes some heavy-hitters in the field and some names that I’m surprised to see there (what do Walter Brueggemann and David Noel Freedman have to do with historical Jesus studies?). The page even has sub-pages for each of the “fellows.” Curiously, however, at least one of the Project “fellows” has never heard of the project. James Tabor writes on his Jesus Dynasty blog:

Although I am quite happy to be ranked among my superiors as “some of the biggest names in biblical studies today,” I think there is a bit of confusion between the upcoming conference, Scripture and Skepticism, at the University of California at Davis, and the formation of a group called The Jesus Project. Although I and lots of others will be reading papers or giving responses at the conference, this is the first I have heard of any Project of this description.

It’s not just a confused reporter, James; the organization is touting your involvement as a fellow, and that of many others—in a Project you know nothing about! (I would have left a comment on James’s blog, but he doesn’t seem to have enabled that feature, or else I could not find the appropriate link.)

A few minutes ago I dug up an e-mail address on the CSER web site and sent the following inquiry:

I wonder if you could clear up some confusion for me about the recently-publicized Jesus Project (http://www.jesus-project.com). The Project’s web site lists a number of Project “fellows” (http://www.jesus-project.com/fellows.htm), but at least one of these scholars, James Tabor, says he’s never heard of The Jesus Project (http://jesusdynasty.com/blog/2007/01/12/the-jesus-project/). What exactly is the status of these “fellows” in relationship to the Project? Is this a list of people who have agreed to be part of the Project, or a list of people the Project management is planning into invite to the December 2007 conference? Many people in the “bibloblog” circle are very interested in this question.

I’ll let you know what I learn.

Update: See now April DeConick’s post on this topic; according to the Jesus Project web site, she’s a fellow.

This just in: CBA attendees will not be able to access the Santa Clara University network, and through it the Internet, during the CBA meeting coming up this weekend. SCU will have Internet-connected lab computers available, but for those of us who use our own particular flavors of client software, this could pose a problem for blogging from the CBA. I’ll do what I can … but no promises.

The 8:00 am Monday slot at WECSOR is usually the most undesirable slot you can have, often resulting in an extremely small group. At first, I was afraid we’d be following that trend in WECSOR Hebrew Bible III, 8:00–9:45 AM on Monday. When we started, we had the three presenters, two of their spouses, myself, and Kevin Edgecomb (who looks nothing like I imagined). I was a bit disconcerted at the way in which our first speaker’s presentation was continually interrupted by people coming in late, but on the other hand, I was quite glad that the session did fill up.

We began with Hilary Lipka’s paper “‘She Shall Be Put to the Fire’: The Case of the Priest’s Daughter Who ‘Defiles Herself through Harlotry’ (Leviticus 21:9).” Hilary is from UCLA, but I am still not clear on whether she is on the faculty or a graduate student. Whatever that case might be, Hilary’s paper was a very close and careful reading of Leviticus 21:9: “And a daughter of a man, a priest, who תחל לזנות, it is her father that she מחללת; she must be burned in the fire.” Hilary laid out in a very clear and systematic fashion various considerations regarding the words זנה and חלל in an attempt to understand just what this daughter did, how exactly it affected her priestly father, and why she receives burning as a punishment. I won’t attempt to summarize all of Hilary’s points, except to share her conclusion that the daughter engaged in some kind of illicit sexual activity that was understood to result in her father’s “desacralization” or loss of holiness. (Hilary had a good discussion of the distinction between חלל and טמא; the father is not “defiled,” but he is “desacralized.”) Hilary’s explanation of the “causal link” between the daughter’s illicit sexual activity and her father’s holiness was persuasive. She likened it to Israel’s ability to profane the name of God. God’s name sanctifies Israel, but Israel by its behavior can profane the name of God. Similarly, the daughter’s holiness derives from her father’s holiness, but she can profane her father through her own actions. As for the punishment of burning, Hilary suggested that it’s not just punishment (there are other possible punishments, even other possible means of execution, rather than the rare punishment of burning) but purgation that is sought by the imposition of burning.

The second paper was by James Findlay, who is on the faculty at California State University at Northridge. (I have a friend who teaches at CSUN, but apparently doesn’t know Jim.) Jim’s paper, “How a Mistress Became a Witch: Characterization and Translation in 1 Samuel 28,” traced the history of translation by which the anonymous בעלת אוב at Ein-Dor in the Saul story was transformed into “the Witch of Endor.” James showed that the text of 1 Sam 28 does not really portray the woman as a “witch.” She has some remarkable ability to see the dead, but she does not do any sort of incantations or rituals to accomplish this. In fact, Jim thought that she was characterized rather positively, and not at all as illicit. I’m not sure I can follow him on the last detail—one has to wonder why Saul ran her sort out of the land—but he read the text quite carefully. Jim then went from the Hebrew text to the Septuagint, then to the Vulgate, and then to the English Bible tradition, showing how translators injected their own concerns with the result that this “mistress of a ghost” was transformed into a “witch”—especially during the heyday of European witch hunts. I found this paper really interesting from the point of view of how ideology and contemporary concerns influence Bible translation (see also our session on The Contemporary Torah).

Leah Rediger Schulte then presented her paper, entitled (according to the program; I think she might have tweaked it slightly) “In Those Days There Was a King in Israel Who Could Not Keep His Own House: Tamar, the Levite’s Pilegesh, and David’s House.” To make a long story short, Leah detailed eight verbal and conceptual parallels between the story of the atrocities at Gibeah (Judges 19) and the story of Amnon’s rape of Tamar (2 Samuel 13). The overall point of the paper was that the story of Tamar’s rape is not just a tragic tale, but also a criticism of the monarchy. The paper was very detailed and very well argued, revealing all sorts of connections that I, for one, had never noticed before.

Our Sunday night Hebrew Bible session at WECSOR was labeled Hebrew Bible II but was really a special thematic session focused on the Jewish Publication Society’s 2006 release The Contemporary Torah: A Gender-sensitive Adaptation of the JPS Translation. As the subtitle states, this new English version of the Torah is not a new translation, but a revision of the JPS Tanakh driven by the desire to be “gender sensitive.” For the editor, David E. S. Stein, “gender sensitive” does not mean “making everybody feel good about gender by obliterating gender distinctions.” Rather, as David himself told us in the first paper of this special session, “gender sensitive” means paying very careful attention to when the wording of the text seems to be inclusive or exclusive. In most cases, The Contemporary Torah—hereafter CJPS for “Contemporary Jewish Publication Society version,” as David suggested—is indeed worded in a more gender-inclusive way than the mid-20th-century JPS Tanakh—hereafter NJPS for “New Jewish Publication Society version.” In some cases, however, the CJPS is actually more gender-specific than the NJPS, when the editorial team of David, Adele Berlin, and Carol Meyers felt it was warranted by the wording or context.

In the first paper of the evening, David Stein laid out some general considerations regarding the editorial process. He explained the goals of the revision and its procedures. Much of this information you can find in a printed form in the preface to the CJPS, but David did not just read the preface. He really took us inside the minds of the editorial team to help us understand the types of questions they asked as they put the CJPS together. What he described was quite a daunting (to me) act of balancing accurate representation of the text with the needs of a contemporary Jewish audience (the CJPS is unabashedly a Jewish translation with a focus on serving today’s Jewish readers). See below for one particular area in which this dual focus might be very hard to carry through.

Our first respondent was Adriane Leveen from Stanford. I did not know Adriane before inviting her to be on the panel, and maybe I should let you in on a little of the behind-the-scenes of putting this panel together (which is probably not that different from how a lot of these low-budget—as in, can’t pay travel expenses or honoraria—panels get put together). I received a paper proposal for WECSOR from David Stein, but I thought the book was significant enough that I wanted to draw extra attention to it. Thus I conceived the idea of a special session with David’s paper plus responses. I immediately contacted Ronald Hendel (see below), but I was not quite sure who else to include. The problem is that although I have been in SoCal for almost four years now, I’m still just getting plugged into the larger social network of scholars who live and work in this region. I had a small list of people I thought would be good, but for various reasons (travel and other projects) these were not able to participate. At this point in the process, Adriane was not really on my radar, as we had never met and she was largely an unknown quantity to me. But Adriane was recommended to me indirectly by people whose judgment I respected, so I “took a chance.” And what a great recommendation it turned out to be!

Adriane gave a simply wonderful response to the CJPS and to David’s presentation. She began with generalities about the translation task, and applied these notions to the CJPS in a very complimentary way. One of Adriane’s key questions was, “To whom is one faithful when one translates?” This question (which I think Adriane derived from another writer, but I didn’t get down the bibliographical information) points to the twin “constituencies” to which David referred: the original audience and the contemporary audience. In Adriane’s judgment, the CJPS does a good job of remaining sensitive to both audiences. Adriane did offer a subtle criticism when she said that the CJPS “aims high,” and that David as its editor assumed that language can be clear. It seemed to me that maybe Adriane was not as optimistic as David on that particular note. One of the things that David is particularly proud of (and rightly so, I think, even if one doesn’t agree with all the specific decisions) is the sensitive and varied handling of the word איש. Adriane offered three passages as a kind of “test case”: Genesis 18, where Abraham is visited by three אנשים; Genesis 32, where Jacob wrestles with an איש all night; and Genesis 37, where an אישׁ finds Joseph wandering around looking for his brothers. CJPS renders איש rather differently in each case, but Adriane made a case for a greater degree of consistency in these particular cases, following a line of interpretation that sees the איש in each passage as a divine appearance.

Our other respondent was Ron Hendel, who teaches at UC-Berkeley and, among other accomplishments, heads up the Oxford Hebrew Bible project. Back in the day, I clashed with Ron a little bit over what I wanted to do in my dissertation (while Ron was at SMU, before he moved to Berkeley), but his input, although I didn’t want to hear it at the time, made my dissertation much better than it would otherwise have been. Among other things, Ron has an uncanny ability to make textual criticism interesting. In our session last night, Ron’s main point was that the CJPS project “runs into dizzying complexities” in certain places. For example, the modern contemporary audience doesn’t want God to be gendered, and it’s appropriate for the CJPS to translate using references to God that aren’t marked for gender. However, Ron found problems with David’s notion that in ancient Israel God was thought of as “beyond gender.” Ron agreed that such a notion can be found in Deuteronomy, but not in, say, J or E. To paraphrase Ron: we might prefer the Deuteronomistic view of the invisible God, and indeed that’s the view that won, but if we want to be historically accurate, we ought not efface biblical traditions of God’s visibility as in J, E, Isaiah, etc.

David’s response to Ron’s “problem” was interesting and quite revealing. David pointed to Genesis 1, which seems to work hard to avoid a gendered God, as a “control” on the way deity is read throughout the Torah. In other words, Ron’s criticism (and overall he was appreciative of the project, so don’t get me wrong) was historically oriented, toward the sources, while David’s response was canonically oriented, toward the whole. It’s not that they were talking past each other; both fully understood what the other was saying. But this recognition does point up the delicate balance attempted in the CJPS, and the possible impossibility of being “faithful” (to go back to Adriane’s terminology) to all of the relevant constituencies. It’s possible that it’s impossible to translate in a way that is both “faithful” to J and “faithful” to the final redactor at the same time, and so on. Truly a “dizzying complexity,” as Ron put it.

This morning, one of the conference organizers expressed the opinion that “the only thing wrong with that session was that the room wasn’t packed.” Indeed, it was a very rich and rewarding discussion, and I’m disappointed that it didn’t enrich and reward more people. Those of us there, though, had a great session.

Update: David Stein has informed me of the relevant bibliography for Adriane’s response:

The analysis of translation that Adriane referred to was that of Naomi Seidman, who is on the faculty at GTU. The book is titled Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation. See: http://www.gtu.edu/about/academic-centers-and-affiliates/richard-s-dinner-center-for-jewish-studies-1/faculty/faithful-renderings-jewish-christian-difference-and-the-politics-of-translation