Tyler Williams has a new photograph of the Leviticus scroll fragments obtained by Hanan Eshel, as well as a recap of coverage of this exciting acquisition. Many thanks to Tyler for his unflagging work on this news.

Several days ago, Michael Pahl posted his own wish list of lost texts on his blog. I’m a little late coming to this party, but mine would have to include:

• The Annals of the Kings of Israel
• The Annals of the Kings of Judah
• The Book of the Wars of the Lord
• The Book of Jashar
• Josiah’s “Book of the Law”
• Ezra’s “Book of the Law [of Moses]“

It would also be really exciting for someone to discover a “psalms” scroll representing an earlier stage in the development of the book than we have, e.g., some of those earlier collections that seem to be embedded in the book as it now stands. Unlike Jim West, I don’t wish for J, E, or P (though maybe D is in the list above), because then I’d have to rethink my skepticism of the classic Documentary Hypothesis.

After posting this and receiving a comment from Jim West about J, etc., it occurred to me there are some other texts I’d love to see:

• Isaiah’s למהר שלל הש בז tablet
• The original tablets of the ritual decalogue (“second Ten Commandments”)
• Habakkuk’s prophetic billboard
• Ezekiel’s inscribed sticks

Of course, this wish list presumes these things ever existed in real life. I just hope nobody takes the wish lists that Michael, Jim, I, and others have posted and decides to use them as forgery checklists.

… regarding the newly-discovered Leviticus scroll fragments from Nahal Arugot. The interview itself is set to appear in Christian Week, a Canadian publication, but Tyler blogs about the interview on Codex.

Every year, one of the universities or colleges associated with the Churches of Christ (my native religious heritage) hosts a small meeting called the Christian Scholars Conference. (This is not quite as presumptuous as it sounds; the conference is for academics, and the “Christian” label reflects the fact that Churches of Christ historically reject any denominational label other than “Christian.”) On Friday of this week, I am scheduled to present a paper entitled, in the program, “‘I Am What I Am’: Inputs, Outcomes, and the Open Theism Debate” (or something like that). I thought perhaps I’d post a brief synopsis of the argument here to see what sort of reaction readers of this blog might have.

First, if you don’t know what the “open theism debate” is, then you haven’t been keeping up with evangelical theology in the last ten years—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Very briefly put, “open theism” has been presented by certain self-described evangelical theologians as an alternative to what they call “classical theism.” (Various other labels are sometimes used.) The debate is really about the extent of God’s knowledge of the future. According to classical theists (painting in broad strokes here, following trends in the publications on this topic), God’s foreknowledge is “exhaustive,” meaning that God now knows, and has always known, everything that has ever happened, is happening now, and will ever happen (the temporal terms actually apply to our point of view, since God’s point of view is, according to classical theism, atemporal). According to open theists, on the other hand, God’s foreknowledge is “probabilistic,” meaning that God knows (with perfect clarity) what is likely to happen, but that God does not know for sure what any free moral agent is going to do until that agent does it (since each moral agent is free to choose, that agent may “beat the odds” and do something God doesn’t expect). A different way of putting the “open” view is that God knows with absolute perfection everything there is to know, but the future actions of free moral agents aren’t yet part of a “knowable” future, since they haven’t happened yet. Of course then this chains into all sorts of questions about the relationship between foreknowledge and causation, and so on, but this capsule description will do for now.

On both sides of this debate, advocates deploy what I call in the paper “appeal to effects” or “outcome-oriented arguments.” That is, open theists argue (as one stream of argument among several) that open theism has practical and pastoral benefits, especially that it will help you better cope with the evil in the world and that it will energize your petitionary prayer life if you accept it. Classical theists, on the other hand, argue that open theism will lead you to despair amidst suffering and pain (that phrase is taken from Bruce Ware, a vocal critic) and will eviscerate your prayer life. On both sides, these ideas are offered not just as implications of open theism, but as reasons to accept or reject open theism.

My paper is about the evidentiary force of appeals to effects or outcome-oriented arguments. My argument is that, regardless of which side is more nearly correct about the benefits or detriments of open theism, that those benefits or detriments are finally immaterial to the ontological truth about God. That is, God is what God is (I use the phrase “I Am What I Am,” from the divine self-revelation at the burning bush in Exodus 3, as a controlling motif), whether or not we judge the implications of what God is to be good or bad, beneficial or detrimental, exciting or terrifying, comforting or disturbing. Of course, in one sense the appeal to outcomes is simply a morass, because different people will place different value judgments on the same outcome (e.g., is it better for God to be so committed to human free will that God refuses to prevent—or even to know in advance—evil decisions that humans might make, or for God to be completely in control of every action that humans take, even the evil ones, or something in between?). But even if there were universal consensus (there’s that word again, Mark!) on what value judgment to attach to different outcomes, our value judgments about the relative values of different outcomes does not in and of itself have the power to define what God is like (admitting, if you will, the possibility that God might choose to adjust the divine character for the sake of approaching at least some human preferences).

What I am arguing for is, in a sense, a variety of theological realism: there is a reality to God that is independent of human conceptions about God. Suppose, against classical theists, that God’s foreknowledge is not exhaustive; classical theists’ judgment that a God with exhaustive foreknowledge is better than a God with limited foreknowledge cannot change the reality of God’s foreknowledge. The same thing could be stated in reverse, by supposing, against open theists, that God’s foreknowledge really is exhaustive; open theists’ judgment that a God limited foreknowledge is better than a God with exhaustive foreknowledge cannot change the reality of God’s foreknowledge.

I realize that one implication of my argument is that “perfect being theology,” a la Anselm’s Prosologion, is methodologically flawed. I feel a great deal of trepidation here, for who am I to challenge Anselm? Nevertheless, I do think that “perfect being theology” is fundamentally flawed, because it seems to me mainly an exercise in definition that can pretty much proceed without reference to any divine reality. If you accept the definition that God is the “most perfect being imaginable,” then the rest of “perfect being theology” pretty much follows; but what if you don’t accept the definition? What if you conclude that Anselm’s definition is unwarranted? What if your concept of God gives God room to be something other than our (as if we all shared the same) concept of perfection?

At any rate, I offer these thoughts as conversation starters, and perhaps as trial balloons to get some feedback before the public presentation on Friday.

For the last few days I’ve been working hectically on a paper touching on theological methodology in the evangelical “open theism” debate. I’ll blog more about that later, but for now please allow me to vent a frustration I’ve run into in several articles by authors critical of open theism. The phenomenon is especially prominent in John Frame’s No Other God: A Response to Open Theism (Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2001), and gets picked up in Robert C. Kurka’s “God, Open Theism, and the Stone-Campbell Movement,” Stone-Campbell Journal 6 (2003) 27–52. Frame, and Kurka following him, argue that open theists make the claim “God is love” out to be the most important scriptural claim about God’s character, but that in fact (according to Frame and Kurka) “God is lord” is a more dominant scriptural motif. Frame writes, “The title Lord represents God’s very name, Yahweh” (45 n. 11). Similarly, Kurka states, “‘Lord’ is the translation of the divine name that God gave Moses” (43).

Frame and Kurka may or may not be right to say that “God is lord” is a more prominent biblical motif than “God is love,” but they are objectively, semantically wrong to say that the divine name יהוה (“Yahweh”) means “lord,” or that “lord” is a translation of that name. So far as I can tell, יהוה is simply and purely a proper noun, end of story. That name may well have some sort of etymological basis in common vocabulary; much energy has been spent trying to understand the relationship between the name יהוה and the Hebrew verb היה, for example, following the leads in Exodus 3. But even if such a derivation is etymologically correct, that has nothing to do, semantically, with the word “lord” (or any Hebrew translation-equivalent). To be sure, the extant ancient Greek translations of Hebrew biblical texts placed κύριος, “lord,” in the position held by יהוה in the Hebrew sources; but this is a circumlocution or euphemism, the substitution of a title for a name, not a translation.

As a Christian believer with strong roots in the Hebrew biblical tradition, I wholeheartedly affirm that יהוה is Lord! However, the word “יהוה” is not semantically related, much less equivalent, to the word “lord.”

On a final note: one of my colleagues, Timothy Willis, recently pointed out to me a deep irony in the biblical translation tradition: despite the injunction in Hosea 2:16, “On that day, says יהוה, you will call me ‘my husband,’ and no longer will you call me ‘my lord’,” (“lord” being a genuine semantic translation of בעל, which also happens to function as the name of the Canaanite/Phoenician god Baal), “lord” has come to be a substitute for יהוה in both Judaism and Christianity dating all the way back to the Septuagint (albeit by way of אדון and κύριος rather than בעל).

(For those of you who don’t read Hebrew and Greek: יהוה = yahweh [the pronunciation is disputed], the personal name of the God of Israel according to the Hebrew Bible; היה = hayah, “to be”; בעל = ba’al, “master, lord, owner” and the name of a Canaanite god; κύριος = kyrios, “lord.”)

Tyler Williams has posted a brief analysis of the newly-discovered Leviticus fragment. Read it; it’s well worth the few minutes it will take. Of course, Tyler’s analysis is based on the photographs not the physical fragments, but the photographs are nice and clean, and Tyler’s analysis is cogent and seems to me, on first reading, quite on the mark.

Reports about the newly-discovered Leviticus 23 fragment from the Bar Kochba era have now been posted by ABC News, the Sydney Morning Herald, Newsday, and Aljazeera. Pictures can be viewed at Yahoo! News; click here and here. Many thanks to the various bibliobloggers and mailing list posters who have pointed to these links.

A few days ago, the following questions about “consensus” appeared on Michael Pahl’s the stuff of earth blog. Read Michael’s original post to dig further into the background for Michael’s questions , but the questions themselves were these:

• What is consensus? [I.e., what percentage of people must agree to make a "consensus"?]
• Second, who gets to be part of the polling sample?
• Third, how does one actually go about doing the polling to assess consensus?
• What does consensus prove?

Jim West has been criticized in the last few days for his answers to Michael’s questions, but I would like to say a brief word in mild defense of Jim’s so-called cynicism. Jim defined consensus as “the self-illusory term utilized by scholars, academics, and politicians to bolster their own viewpoint.” While I can’t endorse Jim’s “definition” completely, Jim has hit on a tendency that is one of my own pet peeves. In my opinion, academics should immediately abandon the practice of using phrases like “It is generally agreed …” as if those were arguments in favor of what follows. Sentences in the form “It is generally accepted that P,” if they are true, serve at best as useful “tag lines” to a summary description of the state of scholarship on a particular topic (or public opinion, or whatever is under discussion). However, sentences like “It is generally accepted that P” can never prove the truth of P, because the number of people who agree that P is true is actually irrelevant to the question of whether or not P is true. Besides that, it seems to me that statements like “It is generally accepted that P” are quite often not true as they stand—by which I mean that P is often not as “generally accepted” as the statement claims.

So I implore my scholarly colleagues and interlocutors, and demand of my students, that you not use vague appeals to “consensus” to try to prove anything (unless, of course, the point under discussion is whether there is in fact a consensus on a particular topic).

Yitzhak Sapir posted this notice on the B-Hebrew mailing list:

Walla News, apparently reporting an article from Yediot Ahronot, reports that in the past year a small piece of scroll found at Nahal Arugot, near Ein Gedi, was purchased for $3000 by Prof. Hanan Eshel of Bar Ilan. Originally, Prof. Eshel refused to appraise the scroll when he was first asked to do so in August 2004, although he did photograph it at this time. When he came upon it again, it was near crumbling state, and he purchased it and turned it over to Amir Ganor of the Antiquities Authority, who are trying to locate the thieves. It consists of two pieces of deer-hide scroll, about 35 square cms, containing portions of verses from Leviticus 23, dealing with the Feast of Tabernacles, and differing from the MT only in that the scroll misses a single holam. It is dated to the Bar Kokhba revolt days. Prof. Eshel is calling for searching again for more scrolls which may still lay hidden among the caves in the area.

The article from Walla News, which is in Hebrew, can be found here.

I recently finished a long-overdue review of Michael Widmer’s Moses, God, and the Dynamics of Intercessory Prayer (FAT II/8; Mohr Siebeck, 2004). I can’t say that I was very excited by the book, which accounts for why it took me ten weeks beyond the deadline to finish the review. To make a long review short: Widmer offers entirely competent, but not engaging, exegeses of Exodus 32-34 and Numbers 13-14. Widmer apparently is not a native speaker of English, which accounts for the high frequency of dangling participles. On the other hand, Widmer is fluent in Dissertationese, which accounts for the entire chapters surveying source-critical analyses of these chapters despite the fact that Widmer is interested in a “canonical method” (that is, a “final-form” reading). There were some bright moments here, but for the most part, Widmer just synthesizes earlier research and takes sides in various debates. Most individual scholars will not find this volume to be worth the $115 list price, but if you are working on Exodus 32-34, Numbers 13-14, or the topic of intercessory prayer, it’s worth checking this volume out from a library and working through it.