It just has to be Ezekiel 37:1–14. Talk about your night of the living dead!

As I’ve previously mentioned on this blog, for the last eight years I’ve used the NRSV as the standard English Bible translation in the college courses I teach. Throughout that whole time, however, I’ve found that students sometimes have difficulty understanding the English of the NRSV; with unnerving frequency the NRSV translators chose to use less familiar English words when more familiar ones would do. The NRSV has some very strong points in my opinion, but it doesn’t really qualify as colloquial English for ordinary readers.

This semester I have been exploring the use of the TNIV as an alternative to the NRSV. The TNIV tends to be much more readable than the NRSV, and that is a big mark in its favor. Zondervan graciously sent me an examination copy of the TNIV Study Bible, and I’ve been linking the students’ reading assignments to the Bible Gateway TNIV resource.

Yet my experience using the TNIV in class over the last few weeks has been less than satisfactory. The problem, simply put, is that the TNIV translators seem comfortable with simply altering the text when the actual Hebrew text does not suit their theological outlook. They don’t rewrite whole passages willy-nilly, of course, but they do “spin” the semantics and even add words that completely change the meanings of entire sentences or passages.

In the last week and a half I’ve been teaching from the Latter Prophets in class, so here are some prime examples.

(1) Jeremiah 7:22-23

In Hebrew:

כי לא־דברתי את־אבותיכם ולא צויתים ביום הוציא אותם מארץ מצרים על־דברי עולה וזבח כי אם־את־הדבר הזה צויתי אותם לאמר שמעו בקולי

A fairly literal translation of this long complex sentence would read:

For I did not speak to your ancestors and I did not command them in the day when I brought them from the land of Egypt concerning matters of burnt offering or sacrifice, but rather this word I commanded them, saying, “Listen to my voice …”

For those of you unfamiliar with Hebrew syntax, the word pair כי אם (ki ’im), which I have translated above as “but rather,” introduces the positive alternative to a negative statement that was itself previously introduced by לא (lo’), translated above as “not.” In other words, a sentence with the structure לא … כי אם has a “not this … but that” logic. Jeremiah 7:22–23 flatly makes the claim that God did not give commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices, but rather about obedience. Of course, this does not quite square with Leviticus, and whether Leviticus is historically inaccurate or whether Jeremiah is spinning history to make a point is something that has to be determined through exegesis and interpretation. The syntax, however, is not at all equivocal: not about sacrifices, but about obedience, did God issue commands at the time of the exodus.

The TNIV translators, however, apparently can’t stand the idea of Jeremiah disagreeing with Leviticus, so without any warrant in the Hebrew text or in Hebrew syntax they add one small English word that completely changes the sense of the entire passage:

For when I brought your ancestors out of Egypt and spoke to them, I did not just give them commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices, but I gave them this command: Obey me …

By just adding just one little word, the TNIV translators have just completely reversed the claim that Jeremiah is making. I just really wish they hadn’t done that; it makes this passage basically unusable unless I explain to the students how the TNIV has mistranslated the passage. One of the reasons I’ve been experimenting with the TNIV is that I don’t want to have to take up valuable class time “translating” between NRSV English and their everyday spoken English, but I also don’t want to spend valuable class time having to explain why their TNIV is translated incorrectly.

Note: The following comments on Isaiah 7:14 are marred by hasty and incorrect grammatical analysis. Don’t trust anything I say in the marked-out section. Instead, see the comment below by Peter Kirk to find out why I was dead wrong … at least on the grammar.

(2) Isaiah 7:14

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the TNIV treats this one no better than the original NIV, but it’s still a pain when you’re trying to get your students into the mindset of the Syro-Ephraimite crisis (c. 735-732 BCE) and their translation makes them think of Christmas. The Hebrew text reads:

הנה העלמה הרה וילדת בן וקראת שמו עמנו אל

I should say that I have no objection to the evangelist Matthew (or “Matthew” if you prefer the “scare quotes”) quoting Isaiah 7:14 from the Septaugint and applying it to the birth of Jesus, but I do have a problem with translators acting as if the Hebrew text read the same as Matthew’s quotation. Again I will offer a more literalistic translation:

Look, the young woman has conceived and she will bear a son and she will call his name Immanu-El.

The TNIV reads:

The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

There are two issues here. One is the translation of עלמה (‘almah), my “young woman,” TNIV’s “virgin.” I don’t want to be too dogmatic about the semantics of עלמה; whether or not the word actually had the sense “virgin” is debatable, although in some of the very few cases where the word is actually used in biblical Hebrew, the term applies to young women who are arguably virgins. You can probably make that argument in at least four of the seven instances where the term actually occurs in the Tanakh. I suspect that such a sense cannot really be sustained in the two instances where the Song of Songs uses the word עלמה, but maybe an argument could be made. Biblical Hebrew has another word, בתולה (bethulah), that specifically means “virgin” and draws attention to the virginity; in fact, בתולה is related to the abstract noun in Hebrew for virginity, בתולים. Certainly, by using the word עלמה instead of בתולה, Isaiah (or the author of the book who crafts Isaiah’s dialogue) declines to specifically emphasize a virginal state on the part of the young woman to whom Isaiah refers. An עלמה is not definitely or clearly a virgin simply by virtue of the term, but she is definitely and clearly a young woman, according to the semantics of עלמה.

But the noun עלמה by itself is not really the key to seeing that this particular עלמה is not a virgin; that key, rather, is the verb form הרה. To oversimplify matters a bit for those of you who don’t read Hebrew, Hebrew verbs have two “aspects,” perfect and imperfect. Perfect aspect is generally used for actions that are completed from the point of view of the narration, and imperfect for those that are not yet completed from the point of view of the narration. Each of these can be “converted” into the other by the use of the conjunction ו, a usage called the “waw consecutive” (it also goes by other names). There are much more sophisticated ways of explaining all this, but that’ll do for the moment. In this sentence, we have three key verbs. The first, הרה (harah), is a perfect aspect form of the verb “to conceive, to become pregnant.” Since the verb is in the perfect aspect, with no waw consecutive affixed, this indicates that the young woman in question is already pregnant—and hence, no doubt, not a virgin. She has not delivered the child yet, as indicated by the use of ילד (yalad, “to bear, to give birth”) in the imperfect aspect (the affixed ו, for those of you wondering, is not pointed in the Masoretic Text as a waw consecutive, but as a simple conjunctive waw). Thus, the young non-virginal woman is already pregnant but has not yet delivered. But the TNIV obscures all this—screwing up the entire point of the sign in the context of the Syro-Ephraimite crisis and making students think that the real point is about Jesus.

(3) Isaiah 56:4–5

The TNIV (like the NIV) often goes in for phrase-by-phrase translation instead of word-for-word translation. In general, this is a laudable and highly responsible thing to do. In some cases, however, attempting to provide a semantically “equivalent” phrase ends up, shall we say, emasculating the text. (Okay, so there are probably ideological issues with my use of a maculine metaphor for a text; bear with me, and you’ll see why I chose that metaphor.) Here’s the Hebrew text:

כי־כה אמר יהוה
לסריסים אשר ישמרו את־שבתותי
ובחרו באשר חפצתי ומחזיקים בבריתי
ונתתי להם בביתי ובחומתי יד ושם טוב מבנים ומבנות
שם עולם אתן־לו אשר לא יכרת

Here’s the TNIV translation:

For this is what the LORD says:
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will endure forever.

For the most part, the TNIV translation of this passage is excellent. But the last line changes a negative Hebrew statement into a positive English statement. That in itself is not a bad thing, but there is, well, a “double entendre” in the last line that the TNIV obscures. The Hebrew phrase אשר לא יכרת, the last line, means “that will not be cut [off].” This is perfectly understandable, and English reads will “get the joke” if they see it: “To the eunuchs … I will give an everlasting name that will not be cut off.” Why did the TNIV translators choose to obscure the pun? Were their evangelical sensibilities just too squeamish to preserve the Hebrew text’s double entendre? Or did they have some “nobler” purpose related to “readability” (though I don’t think I’d agree with any such argument)? Semantically, to “endure forever” and to “not be cut off” are similar enough that the TNIV doesn’t distort the semantic sense of the passage, but it does distort the aesthetics (and cheeky humor) of the passage and robs readers of a richer reading experience.

You know what I really want? A translation that has the readability of the TNIV without the theological baggage that distorts the text—but not one that does as far as, say, the CEV in simplifying its vocabulary. Does anyone know of such a translation? Does it exist? Have I just missed it? Or is it time for a new translation project (maybe without the word “Standard” in the name—you don’t actually become a “standard” by claiming to be such)?

Are you an icosahedrophiliac? If so, you may want to know that I’ve now finally given my old role-playing blog the WordPress treatment, a facelift, and a new life. If you’re interested in my gaming reports, reviews, and so forth, I invite you to visit the new Icosahedrophilia blog and add it to your favorite RSS feeder. (Since “Icosahedrophilia” is a hard word to spell, the URL is just http://www.heardworld.com/d20.)

No, this isn’t another post about The Prestige, though if you’ve read that novel the question will take on new meaning. I saw on AKMA’s blog today a link to a page where you can find out how many people share your name. My full name is “Robert Christopher Heard,” my parents and friends have always called me “Chris,” and professionally I use the full form “Christopher.” Therefore, I tried various permutations of these names in the lookup form and here are the results.

520 Robert Heards (3rd most popular first name)
171 Christopher Heards (13th most popular first name)
36 Chris Heards

Of course, there is some “slack” in the lookup routine, as the program doesn’t know whether to resolve “Chris” as “Christopher,” “Christine,” “Christian,” etc., and I imagine that I count as one of each of the names that I tried.

Pepperdine University will be hosting “The Ascending Voice: An International Symposium of Sacred A Capella Music” from June 4–7, 2007 at the Malibu campus. As far as we at Pepperdine know, this is the first symposium of its kind, bringing together scholars from theology, church music, church history, musicology, and ethnomusicology along with, of course, singers to discuss and participate in the singing of sacred a capella music. My own Christian heritage, that of the churches of Christ (which is also Pepperdine’s heritage), has always been characterized by a capella singing, and a capella music has been treasured by Eastern Orthodox Christians, some Anabaptist groups, and others within the broad stream of Christendom. This symposium draws these groups together around our common love for the unadorned human voice raised in musical worship.

Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend the symposium, as I will be teaching in Argentina during the summer of 2007. However, if you have an interest in sacred a capella music, I urge you to attend if you can. I am glad to be teaching in our overseas program next summer, but sad to miss this event.

About twenty minutes (excluding commercials) from the end of The Exodus Decoded, Jacobovici turns his attention to Israel’s wilderness experience and the location of Mount Sinai. He starts this segment by claiming that the seismic activity behind the ten plagues also led to oil and gas fires in the Sinai peninsula, and that these fires produced “just as the Bible says … a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night, beckoning them into the desert.” (The ellipses represent the removal of the single word “is,” just to make the syntax flow well in the previous sentence). Curiously, the footage over which this claim appears shows multiple fires—how would Moses and the Israelites have known which one to “follow,” especially since a “pillar of fire” above an active gas vent or something like that would not be moving through the desert “just as the Bible says”? Moreover, in Jacobovici’s footage, the fires are clearly visible in the daytime, not obscured by smoke. Furthermore, the Bible does not say that the Israelites were led by a pillar of smoke (קיטר) but of cloud (עננ). Here, as in other parts of the film, Jacobovici has will-nilly altered the text’s claims, “explained” the modified claims “scientifically,” and then claimed that his explanation is “just as the Bible says.”

Jacobovici attempts to locate Mount Sinai on a map by, to speak rather loosely, triangulating its position based on distances given in the Bible. Before he gets to the actual data, Jacobovici states, “Many would argue that identifying Mount Sinai would be tantamount to corroborating the biblical tale.” I’m not sure who these “many” are, or why this should be believed to be true. If we could reach certainty that a particular mountain was indeed the mountain that the biblical writers had in mind when they wrote of Mount Sinai, all that locating this mountain would prove is that the mountain itself is not imaginary or, to use Jacobovici’s term, merely “legendary.” It would not prove that Moses actually got ten commandments from God there.

With a flourish typical of The Exodus Decoded’s “we were there first!” rhetoric (although quite often the connections proposed have been around for many years), Jacobovici tells viewers that “adventurers” have been seeking Mount Sinai for “thousands of years,” but have always ended up in the wrong place. Of course, the real test is not whether the rhetoric is annoying, but whether the data hold up. Jacobovici first takes viewers to Jebel Musa, the site of St. Catherine’s monastery, a mountain identified in Christian tradition as Mount Sinai since the third century CE. Jacobovici’s objections to Jebel Musa have all been heard before, and they are all quite reasonable. On a beautiful CGI relief map of the Sinai peninsula, Jacobovici traces the proposed “northern,” two “middle,” and “southern” routes of the Israelites through the Sinai peninsula. Jacobovici rightly rejects the northern route, since the biblical narrative explicitly says that the Israelites did not go by a coastal route (although Jacobovici seems not to realize that this wreaks havoc with his notion that some of those who followed Moses out of Egypt and to Mt. Sinai then sailed “back” to Greece). Since Jacobovici has already (and, as I said, quite reasonably, though not in much detail) ruled out Jebel Musa, this also rules out the southern route.

Jacobovici uses three biblical data to try to locate Mt. Sinai. First, according to Jacobovici, Mount Sinai is a fourteen-day journey from a place in Egypt called Elim, which Jacobovici says is “easily identified” just south of Lake Balah. There are at least a couple of significant problems with Jacobovici’s treatment of this biblical “coordinate.” First, note that Jacobovici places Elim fourteen days from Mount Sinai, and “just south” of Lake Balah. According to Exodus 15:22 says that the Israelites went a three days’ journey into the wilderness of Shur after crossing the sea, then went to Elim, and then on into the wilderness of Sin. The idea that Elim would represent a backtracking toward Egypt seems bizarre to me, and the book of Exodus does not hint at any connection between Elim and the sea, but the book of Numbers does indicate a stop by the Yam Suph in between leaving Elim and reaching the wilderness of Sin (Numbers 33:10). The usual identification of Elim, by the way, is much farther south than Jacobovici indicates, but then the usual identification of Elim is largely guesswork; curiously, Jacobovici’s map places Elim closer to the traditional location than to the site the voiceover describes. The real problem is not Jacobovici’s identification of Elim—about which the most that can be said is “maybe so, maybe no”—but with Jacobovici’s mathematics. As far as I can tell, the only way to derive Jacobovici’s elapsed time of fourteen days’ journey from Elim to Mount Sinai is to take the date given for the Israelites’ arrival at Sinai, “the third new moon” (the first of the month), and subtract the date given in Exodus 16:1, “the fifteenth day of the second month.” The elapsed time between the fifteenth day of the second month and the first day of the third month would be two weeks, Jacobovici’s fourteen days. So far, so good, but the problem is that this fourteen-day trip does not start at Elim. Read Exodus 16:1 carefully: “The whole congregation of the Israelites set out from Elim; and Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had deaprted from the land of Egypt” (NRSV). Elim is some unspecified distance from “the wilderness of Sin,” and it is from this wilderness that it takes the Israelites fourteen days to enter “the wilderness of Sinai” per Exodus 19:1. Thus we have two problems with using Elim as a coordinate for trying to find Mount Sinai: the identification of Elim itself is ambiguous, and its distance from Mount Sinai (taking the biblical narrative at face value) is ambiguous. These ambiguities make Elim practically useless as a coordinate for triangulating Mount Sinai’s location. (I don’t know whether Jacobovici’s estimate of how far the entire group of Israelites could have traveled in one day is realistic or not, or whether he has adequately taken into account terrain variances for the trip; Bryant Wood [see below] claims that Jacobovici has vastly overestimated the distance a large group could travel in one day.)

Jacobovici’s second biblical datum is the claim that Moses first encountered God at the burning bush on Mount Sinai itself (see Exodus 3:1 and, perhaps more importantly though overlooked in The Exodus Decoded, Exodus 3:12). Therefore, Jacobovici infers, Mount Sinai must be “within flock-grazing distance of Midianite territory.” It is worth noting that Exodus 3 calls the mountain of God “Horeb,” not “Sinai,” and we should reckon with the possibility that the different names stem from different Israelite traditions, and that these distinct traditions might not cohere with one another on the location of Sinai itself. Jacobovici’s assumption that data from different streams of biblical tradition will cohere with one another may not be well-founded. If not, this would introduce a serious problem with Jacobovici’s procedure, but a problem owing more to the nature of the source material than to Jacobovici’s reasoning. Within the framework of Exodus 3 and its larger source tradition, Jacobovici’s inference is entirely reasonable. Midian, of course, is in Arabia, not the Sinai Peninsula, which is one of the arguments advanced by proponents of identifying Mount Sinai with Jebel el-Lawz in western Arabia. Jacobovici, though, claims that Midianite remains have been identified at Timnah, which is deep in the southern Arabah, perhaps 27.5 km or so north of the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqabah. I do not know much about the excavations and discoveries at Timnah, but Jacobovici’s claim is consistent with the very little I’ve read about the site. Jacobovici’s scenario is certainly more plausible than those offered by proponents of Jebel el-Lawz.

Jacobovici’s third biblical datum comes from Deuteronomy 1:2, “By the way of Mount Seir it takes eleven days to reach Kadesh-barnea from Horeb.” As an aside, although the specific identification of Mount Seir is uncertain, it would seem to be in Edomite territory, in a ridge that runs down east of the Dead Sea all the way down to Timnah and its environs. If Mount Sinai is not Jebel el-Lawz in Arabia (and I don’t think it is), I have no idea why anyone would want to go from Kadesh-barnea to Mount Horeb by way of Mount Seir. It seems like a strange route to me, and the circuity of the route should be taken into account while trying to measure the “eleven days.” Jacobovici, however, doesn’t take the phrase “by the way of Mount Seir” into account; he simply draws an arc showing an eleven-day journey from Kadesh-barnea. Also, 1 Kings 19:4–9 throws a monkey wrench into the machinery by saying that it took Elijah—one man traveling alone—41 days to reach Horeb from Beersheba. Beersheba is nowhere near a thirty-day journey from Kadesh-barnea. Using Jacobovici’s figure of 15 km per day (which, remember, is for a large group of people traveling with children, senior citizens, and flocks), Elijah should have been able to get from Beersheba to Kadesh-barnea in just 5 days. Elijah’s journey is, in fact, one of the data that supporters of Jebel Musa cite in its favor. While the circuity of the route is a problem in Jacobovici’s own reasoning and lack of scrupulous attention to the actual details of the text, the Elijah problem points up the ambiguity of the source material itself. The biblical traditions about the location of Mount Sinai/Horeb may simply be too confused to provide the kind of firm geographical data that Jacobovici wants.

In any event, using these three data points leads Jacobovici to a relatively small area in the Sinai peninsula, highlighted in blue on the CGI map. Based on the presence of “sanctuaries,” Jacobovici narrows his search down to a specific mountain, which he calls “Jebel Hashem el-Tarif,” more frequently found labeled as “Jebel ash-Sha’ira.” Bryant Wood, a (very) conservative interpreter, writes this about Jacobovici’s triangulation:

Jacobovici’s methodology in attempting to locate Mt. Sinai is admirable in that he utilizes Biblical data. Unfortunately, some of his information is incorrect. He bases the location on the distances the Israelites could travel within the Biblical timeframe. He begins by saying it took the Israelites 14 days to travel from Elim to Mt. Sinai. Elim, he suggests, is located at Ayun Musa on the northeast shore of the Gulf of Suez, which is no doubt correct, but his timeline is off. According to Exodus 16:1, after the Israelites left Elim, they “came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the 15th day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt.” They then arrived at the Desert of Sinai a month later (Ex 19:1; Nu 33:3). So, the travel time from Elim to the Desert of Sinai was more than 30 days, not 14 days. The daily rate of travel Jacobovici assumes, 15 km (9 mi) is also incorrect. Pastoralists traveling with their flocks can go no more than 10 km (6 mi) per day (Wood 2000). In addition, one cannot simply multiply a rate of travel times the number of days traveled and draw a straight line on a map to locate Mt. Sinai. The ancient routes and the zigs and zags and ups and downs of traveling by foot in a rugged terrain must be taken into account. Although Hashem el-Tarif may be a valid candidate for Mt. Sinai, one cannot arrive at that identification using Jacobovici’s calculations.

But what of Jacobovici’s other “evidence” for the identification of Hashem el-Tarif as Mount Sinai? First, Jacobovici claims, the mountain is surrounded by a “plateau” that could have held “hundreds of thousands” of Israelites. Of course, if the biblical numbers are not exaggerated, you don’t just need room for “hundreds of thousands” of Israelites, but for over two million Israelites; the figure of approximately 600,000 exodus-ing Israelites, given in the book of Numbers, applies only to males 20+ years old who are physically fit for war; it does not count any women, aged men, infirm men, or boys age 19 and under. I don’t actually know whether the plateau could hold that many people—but then, I think the numbers are vastly exaggerated, if there’s any historical reality to the exodus story at all, so I’m not really worried about, or impressed by, the size of the plateau. (By the way, there’s an interesting tension in Jacobovici’s narrative here; on the one hand, he acts like the mountain is hidden away in a military zone, but three minutes later he says the mountain is easily accessible, right on the main highway.) Second, according to Uzi Avner of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, who appears on-screen in The Exodus Decoded, this particular mountain is surrounded by a high concentration of “open-air sanctuaries.” As it turns out, the Bible says nothing about any such sanctuaries, so the connection with the exodus is tenuous. Jacobovici’s reasoning seems to be that the Bible refers to Sinai as a “holy mountain”—though in fact the Bible uses this designation overwhelmingly for Zion, not Sinai—and therefore, there must have been sanctuaries there. Certainly the Bible narrates some worship activities going on there, but Jacobovici doesn’t present anything that would link these sanctuaries specifically to an Israelite presence. If Hashem el-Tarif is really the biblical Mount Sinai, and if the various “sanctuaries” around the mountain are ancient (nobody in the film speaks to this point), then we would expect to find among them Moses’s twelve pillars (Exodus 24:4). But nothing like this is introduced by Jacobovici, nor have I found any indication of such at Hashem el-Tarif in any other mention of the mountain. Third, Jacobovici shows footage of a “cleft in the rock” atop Hashem el-Tarif, but such a feature is hardly unique to this mountain. Fourth, Jacobovici says that a holy mountain should have gravesites of “holy men,” but this criterion is patently not drawn from the Bible, as the Bible says nothing about Sinai having any such gravesites. Rather, this criterion is drawn from Jacobovici’s own thinking about what a “holy mountain” must have—and undoubtedly from the fact that Hashem el-Tarif does have such gravesites. Finally, Uzi Avner shows Jacobovici some calcification that he says is evidence of an ancient natural spring, which Jacobovici claims the Bible says should be found at the top of Mount Sinai. In fact, the book of Exodus says nothing about any such spring, nor does Deuteronomy, nor does 1 Kings 19 (Elijah’s visit to Horeb). The closest thing I can find to such a claim comes from Exodus 17, set at Massah/Meribah. The text reads in part as follows:

The LORD said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. (Exodus 17:5–6, NRSV)

The text does not refer to a natural spring, but a miraculous provision of water. It also does not place this issue of water on top of Mount Sinai—in fact, the later narrative is emphatic about the people not going up on Mount Sinai, and not even touching the mountain. If the small, ancient spring on the top of Hashem el-Tarif reflects this “miracle” (no miracle at all, according to Jacobovici—like everything else in the story), then we must conclude either that the people really did swarm all over the mountain to get the water, or that Moses carted enough water for “several hundred thousand Israelites” (Jacobovici’s phrase from earlier in the program) down the mountain. Or maybe he had magically animated broomsticks that helped him. It’s entirely possible, of course, that some such natural spring lies behind the biblical text, and that it supplied water for a much smaller group, and that the mountain and the Israelite group have been magnified in the retelling over hundreds of years—but that’s not what Jacobovici keeps claiming throughout The Exodus Decoded. He keeps claiming that his reconstruction matches the biblical story, when in fact, it does not.

The “fit” between Hashem el-Tarif, as described in The Exodus Decoded (everything I know about the mountain comes from the program itself), and the biblical Mount Sinai is thus, as you can see, somewhat “loose.” Jacobovici’s identification is marred by the distance problems described above, and the entire procedure is limited by our inability to show that the source materials from which Jacobovici draws actually cohere in their own “understandings” of where Mount Sinai lies. Thus, it cannot be said that Jacobovici is certainly right. But it also cannot be said that Jacobovici is certainly wrong about the identification of Hashem el-Tarif as Mount Sinai. He might be right. He might be wrong. The case is not closed.

If you are interested in exploring more about the location of Mount Sinai, play around with the interactive map below. Please note that the map was prepared several years ago, long before The Exodus Decoded (so Hashem el-Tarif was not on my radar) and when I knew less about the debate than I now do.

Note: The map does not extend far enough east to show
the position of Jebel el-Lawz accurately. Jebel el-Lawz is farther east than
shown here.

Read the whole series: Part 1 | Part 2 (with addendum) | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13

Of late I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of The Prestige by Christopher Priest. It’s a fantastic (I mean that as a genre label) story of rivalry between two late 19th-century stage illusionists (think Penn and Teller, but they hate each other), and is wonderfully written from different points of view. “Embedded” in the novel are a book (fictional, obviously) by one of the magicians and a journal kept by the other starting at age nine. Interspersed with these two large blocks of first-person material are smaller blocks of first-person narration by 20th-century descendants of these two bitter rivals. In the audiobook version, the narrator is absolutely wonderful—perhaps the best I’ve heard—commanding British and American accents with ease. It’s a really delightful novel, and although I do not yet know the final dénouement (the unnecessary use of French words is characteristic of one magician’s locutions), I heartily recommend this book as a “good read.”

Touchstone Pictures has developed a theatrical version of The Prestige, starring Christian Bale (as Alfred Borden) and Hugh Jackman (as Rupert Angier). I loved Christian Bale’s performance as Batman in Batman Begins, and have a bit of a soft spot for Hugh Jackman thanks to his portrayal of Wolverine in the X-Men movie trilogy. The movie is directed by Christopher Nolan, who did a great job with Batman Begins. Thus, I have confidence in the cast and crew, and I’m sure it will be an enjoyable movie. I’m very uncertain, though, how they’re going to pull it off. The novel is very much a literary experience, consisting of characters reading books and journals. I’m “afraid” that the sense that the story of the illusionists’ rivalry is embedded in the story of their descendants might get lost, but the connections between past and present are critical to the way the novel unfolds. If the movie becomes just a story about Borden and Angier, and not about their descendants, it will still be a lot of fun but will lose something in the translation. I am not trying to be pessimistic, just thinking out loud about what I think is one of the more difficult novel-to-film translations attempted in recent years.

Update: Christopher Nolan has discussed some of these very matters, as reported by Sci Fi Wire.

Today I received a new catalog from Westminster John Knox Press. Styled an Academic Update and formatted much like a scholarly journal, the catalog includes news about WJK authors and excerpts from recent reviews and books as well as the expected book listings.

Although I don’t really have much interest in Dale Martin’s new book Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation (WJK, 2006)—my lack of interest is because the book seems to be mostly about Paul—I was delighted by the excerpt on “The Myth of Textual Agency,” which includes this paragraph:

One of the central goals of much of my writing over the past several years has been to undermine a common assumption, common among lay Christians as well as scholars: that the Bible “speaks” and our job is just to “listen.” Repeatedly we encounter biblical scholars talking as if the text of the Bible contains certain, identifiable “meaning” that it “communicates” to us, and our taks is to be as passive as possible and “receive” that message without distorting it too much. My scholarship, on the other hand, has attempted to highlight the activities of interpretation by which people “make meaning” of the biblical texts. I have insisted that the texts don’t “speak”—except in the most tenuous of metaphorical senses of that term—and that we humans have to do lots of hard work to interpret the texts before they have any meaning for us at all. I have tried to expose the complications of biblical interpretation in order to shine light on the agency of human interpreters and to insist that “the text itself” does not exercise its own “agency” in its own interpretation. Texts do not interpret themselves; they must be interpreted by human beings. To repeat a slogan I have often used in speaking to various audiences: “Texts don’t mean. People mean with texts.” Thus much of my work has been an attempt to disabuse people of the myth of textual agency.

Since Martin primarily writes on New Testament topics, I do not really know his work except in the vaguest sense of being aware of it. I could wish for more attention to the authors and tradents in the paragraph quoted above; the people who “mean” with texts (or try to do so) are not only the readers, but also, perhaps even pre-eminently, the writers. Yet even with this caveat, I appreciate Martin’s attempted disabusement of the “myth of textual agency.” The phrase “the Bible says” obscures more than it reveals; it obscures the role of specific human beings, in specific times and places, in writing and reading the biblical documents, and it treats the Bible as a de facto unity without grappling with the issues raised by inner-biblical diversity. The Bible is a little library of works by human beings, addressed to human beings, and interpreted by human beings (perhaps with divine input at any of these stages, but the human activity is indubitable), not an intelligent agent with its own desires, wishes, and agenda. I have heard Krister Stendahl quoted as saying that we should read the Bible as it wishes to be read, but the Bible is an “it,” an inanimate object (collection of texts), and has no ability to “want.” I know that phrasing like “the Bible says” is often a convenient shorthand, and I find myself slipping into it too from time to time, but I have worked hard to try to train myself to speak not of the Bible, or of biblical books, “saying” or “claiming” things, but to use these verbs of human beings or implied human beings (”the author,” “the narrator,” “the editor[s]”).

I’ve just finished recovering most of my old posts from the Blogger format, copying their texts and selected comments into WordPress’s database. I have managed to preserve almost all posts, omitting only those that either were so “timely” that I thought they had little lasting relevance, or they were so abysmally stupid that I would be embarrassed to preserve them, or I didn’t manage to get them backed up before I switched from Blogger to WordPress. If you wish, comb through the archives and enjoy.

William Dembski says it’s the “Darwinists.” Jason Rosenhouse think’s it’s the ID proponents. You decide (but I don’t mind telling you I think Rosenhouse makes the better case).