The Chronicle of Higher Education is just now figuring this out?

In case you’re not keeping up:

• Roberto Orci says that Star Trek is nearly finished. We’ll all get to see it May 8, 2009.
• Columbia Pictures wants to make a new Ghostbusters movie with Ramis, Ackroyd, Murray, and Hudson. No, really.
• Stephen J. Cannell is working on a feature-film version of The Greatest American Hero. No, really.
• Universal Studios is in the early stages of preparation for a Sigmund and the Sea Monsters film. No, really.
• Heroes returns next week with a premiere that reportedly includes Mohinder Suresh injecting himself with a serum that gives him a power.
• Tim Kring says that most of the answers to questions left unanswered at the end of Heroes volume (season) 2 will be answered by the end of the third hour of volume 3.
• Speaking of superheroes, rumor has it that 20th Century Fox is considering making more X-Men spinoffs than just the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine. They’re even talking about a Deadpool movie and a Daredevil sequel. I can see another Daredevil movie if Ben Affleck is interested—I personally think the original Daredevil was underrated—but Deadpool? Hollywood can easily kill the superhero movie genre with a glut of mediocre films about B-list heroes (can anybody spell Ghost Rider?).
• Of course, there are good superhero films, too, like Iron Man. A sequel is already planned, and Jon Favreau says he wants to bring in the Mandarin (though probably not as the main villain, yet) and turn Jim Rhodes into War Machine. All of this will ultimately lead up to the Avengers movie that’s in the works.

Verizon is currently promoting the new LG Dare phone with the tag line, “Dare to be different.” The primary competition for this phone is, obviously, Apple’s iPhone, which has been on the market for a little over a year now. Here’s an image used prominently in the “Dare to be different” campaign:

Let’s see about those differences, shall we?

Whereas the iPhone uses a hardware button to take users to the home screen, the Dare daringly blazes a new trail by using a small icon representing a house to take users to the home screen.

Whereas the iPhone crams twenty icons onto its launch screens by using square icons laid out in a rigid grid, the Dare daringly settles for nine icons per screen, allowing bold, quasi-random rotations and a greater variety of icon shapes.

Whereas the iPhone uses a white silhouette of a telephone handset on a green background to represent its telephone function, the Dare daringly uses a white sihouette of a telephone handset on a green background to represent its telephone directory.

Whereas the iPhone Settings icon depicts three cogs against a gray perforated background, the Dare daringly streamlines its Settings icon to two cogs against a gray perforated background.

Whereas the iPhone uses a closed envelope icon to activate its e-mail function, the Dare boldly opens the envelope.

Whereas the iPhone uses a silhouette of an iPod to activate its music functions, the Dare challenges all covention by using an icon of a Bose-style CD player instead.

Whereas the iPhone’s web browser, a specialized build of Safari, features a compass rose—with a red-and-white pointer pointing northeast—superimposed on a Mercator projection of the western hemisphere, the Dare breaks with staid tradition by representing its browser by an icon that superimposes the letters “WWW” over a globe with the Pacific Ocean turned toward the viewer. Lest wannabe iPhone owners potential Dare customers feel too left out, however, the Dare daringly repurposes the compass rose, making it the icon for a GPS function—with the pointer headed northeast (straight toward Cupertino?).

Somebody throw me a lifeline, please. I’m drowning in originality.

… know some people affected by the Metrolink wreck last Friday. One friend and a friend-of-a-friend are at Cedars-Sinai; another relative-of-an-acquaintance didn’t survive.

And now, for our next installment in the ongoing series, “Chris runs across paragraphs that act like potholes in the highway of argumentation.” Last time, I pointed out some unargued (and, I think, faulty) assumptions undergirding a paragraph by Jean-Louis Ska in a book that, overall, is quite good. Tonight’s example comes from Bill Schniedewind, whom John Hobbins had mentioned in comments to my earlier post. In How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Schniedewind advances a pretty strong case for locating the origins of much biblical literature in the reign of King Hezekiah of Judah. In the course of that argument, though, Schiedewind writes:

Writing also became a vehicle for a critique of urban and royal power, as in the Book of Micah. The prophet Micah came from a small Judean village called Moresheth in the foothills west of Jerusalem. Not surprisingly, Micah is a supporter of the people and a critic of the urban elites. He decries those who “build Zion with crime, Jerusalem with iniquity!” (Micah 3:10). He condems the social injustices that the people of the countryside saw as arising from urbanization. Micah gives a voice to the “people of the land,” who still strongly support the Davidic monarchy. They will later rise up after the assassination of King Amon (640 B.C.E.) to put the young boy Josiah on the throne. Josiah’s family also came from a small village (Bozkath), which was quite close to Micah’s village. Micah himself supports the ideal of the shepherd king from the village of Bethlehem: “And you, O Bethlehem of Ephrath, least among the clans of Judah, From you one shall come forth To rule Israel for Me—One whose oirigin is from of old, From ancient times … He shall stand and shepherd by the might of YHWH” (Mic 5:1–3). Earlier, in the ninth century B.C.E., in the days of Queen Athaliah (r. 845–837 B.C.E.), the “people of the land” h ad rushed to support the re-establishment of the Davidic line when it was threatened by “the city.” The people helped end Queen Athaliah’s threat to the line, and the narrator notes that “the people of the land rejoiced, but the city was quiet” (2 Kgs 11:20). (pp. 76–77)

For the moment, let’s stipulate that everything Schniedewind says about Micah’s attitudes, goals, and relation to the “people of the land” is true (and never mind any debates about the historicity of Queen Athaliah). How does anything after the first sentence actually relate to the first sentence—unless one presupposes that Micah wrote stuff down? The book of Micah itself certainly makes no such claim, nor does it contain any references to prophetic writing activity, or even dictating to a scribe (as we will get with Jeremiah a century later). Assuming that the oracles in the book of Micah actually go back to Micah, Micah seems to envision religious teaching as something that comes orally, even in the ideal future: “For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem … for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken” (Mic 4:2, 4; we must take care not to project modern Christian use of “word of the LORD” to mean “the Bible” back onto an 8th-century BCE figure). When Micah puts on his so-called “covenant lawsuit” in chapter 6, he does not appeal to the Sinai tradition, or to written laws, or even to a “covenant,” but to the saving acts of God in Egypt and the wilderness. Contrast Micah, for whom courtroom injustices are perpetrated by judges who love bribes (3:11; 7:3) with Jeremiah, for whom such injustices are perpetrated by scribes whose “false pen … has made [the law of the LORD] into a lie” (Jer 8:8). There isn’t a single feature of Micah’s “critique of urban and royal power” that implies that the critique was delivered in writing.

To be fair, Schiedewind doesn’t actually claim that Micah wrote the book that bears his name. Indeed, Schniedewind remarks, “Ironically, the so-called early writing prophets—that is, Isaiah, Micah, Amos, and Hosea—were not writers at all” (p. 84). His argument is more sophisticated:

Indeed, it is probably no accident that none of the superscriptions to these prophetic books mentions any king after Hezekiah. As David Noel Freedman, professor of biblical studies at the University of California, San Diego has suggested, “the collection of the books of the four prophets was assembled during the reign of Hezekiah, to celebrate and interpret the extraordinary sequence of events associated with the Assyrian invasion of Judah and investment of Jerusalem, along with the departure of the Assyrian army and the deliverance of the city.” (p. 85)

Of course, Freedman’s suggestion isn’t evidence for anything, but represents a conclusion that Freedman draws from other evidence. So I’m left struggling to find the actual texture of the argument. As far as I can tell, the only argument that Schiedewind advances for the written form of the books of Isaiah (1–39, or something similar thereto), Amos, Micah, and Hosea is that “none of the superscriptions to these prophetic books mentions any king after Hezekiah” (p. 85). Schniedewind states very plainly that none of these four prophets wrote their own books, and that the superscriptions “point to the editorial activity of collecting prophetic oracles.” Well … the statement about Hezekiah and the superscriptions is true, as far as it goes. None of the superscriptions mention Manasseh, much less Amon. But then again, the superscription to Amos doesn’t mention Hezekiah either, only Uzziah of Judah and Jeroboam II of Israel. By Schniedewind’s argument, shouldn’t we date the composition of that superscription before Uzziah’s death? Actually, there’s a simpler explanation: the superscriptions’ authors—whenever they wrote—stated their understanding of the spans of those prophets’ careers, such that Hezekiah isn’t mentioned in the superscription to Amos because the editor thought that Amos had stopped prophesying (or died, or whatever) before Hezekiah took the throne, and ditto for Isaiah, Hosea, and Micah with respect to Manasseh’s reign. If the editors simply wrote what they believed or inferred to be true about the prophets’ years of activity, this would have no bearing at all on the timing of the editors’ lives. The argument “book B doesn’t mention king K, and therefore must have been written before king K’s ascension to the throne” simply doesn’t hold water.

But I’ve gotten a long way from my main initial point, which was simply that in the paragraph from pp. 76–77, the second and subsequent sentences have no evidentiary relationship to the first sentence. The paragraph hangs together topically around the figure of Micah, but as a matter of argumentation, the second and subsequent sentences neither flow from nor support the claim made in the first sentence, and I find that most frustrating.

Of course, Schniedewind’s overall argument neither stands nor falls with this point about Micah; it’s much too robust and broad-based for that.

I recently read the following in a book on the Pentateuch:

Archaeological and epigraphic data and recent research on writing in the kingdom of Judah support neither the hypothesis of a Yahwist theologian in the court of Solomon nor von Rad’s thesis of an Enlightenment that occurred in his court around the 10th century B.C.E. At that time, Jerusalem did not have the means to support a class of professional scribes. The economic and cultural growth only reached a level high enough for the birth and development of literary activity of this sort two centuries later, first in Samaria and then in Jerusalem. Furthermore, this was the period when the first writing prophets appeared—for example, Amos and Hosea in the North and then Isaiah and Micah in the South.

I’ve never been a fan of von Rad’s “Solomonic Enlightenment,” so I cruised through the paragraph until I tripped over the last sentence. “Writing prophets”? Who uses that phrase any more? Did I fall into a time warp? All kidding aside, I know of no solid evidence that Amos, Hosea, Micah, or even Isaiah themselves wrote the books that bear their name. The books of Amos, Hosea, and Micah, in fact, completely lack any reference to scrolls, scribes, or writing, so there’s not even an internal claim to the effect that Amos, Hosea, or Micah wrote the book named after him. One might use the first-person passages in Amos and Hosea (I’m not sure about the first-person passages in Micah, whether the speaker is really speaking of himself as “I” or taking on a persona, playing a role) to argue for at least some material that authentically and directly derives from the prophets named. But that is at least several steps way from a claim for literary authorship, and if one argues in that fashion, one is almost compelled, logically, to use the third-person passages in those books as evidence that the prophets named were not the ones who completed their books, even if they started them.

As for Isaiah, the comment above about first and third person narration applies here, too. Of the eighth-century latter prophets, only Isaiah is actually said in his book to write anything—and that is only the phrase “l-Maher-shalal-hash-baz” and the oracle against Egypt in chapter 30. The stretch to calling Isaiah a “writing prophet” isn’t as large as for Amos, Hosea, and Micah, but to go to Isaiah as author of a large scroll full of his own prophecies and biography is still a pretty big leap (and clashes against the first-/third-person phenomenon).

It’s really only when you get to Jeremiah that we have actual biblical testimony of a prophet producing something like an extensive scroll full of his prophecies (Jeremiah 36), and even that is obviously not identical to the book of Jeremiah as we have it (not least because of the date given to the writing of the scroll and, indeed, the very presence of the story about the scroll—it undoubtedly wasn’t on the scroll itself—in our book of Jeremiah, even if the story is 100% historically accurate).

In my opinion, giving the eighth-century prophets the moniker “writing prophets” and then using that moniker to try to date the material conditions for writing other biblical texts takes us into the realm of smoke and mirrors.

I mean those folks from Beloit who love to give us trivial lists of factoids that are supposed to somehow reveal incoming college students’ “mindset.” I’m not terribly impressed with or enlightened by such lists. Sometimes, the Beloit list gives me a wry chuckle or two about how things have changed in my lifetime. But in the current list, item 51 shows just how out-of-touch the Beloit people are:

51. Windows 3.0 operating system made IBM PCs user-friendly the year they were born.

Anybody who classifies Windows 3.0 as a “user-friendly” operating system obviously wasn’t living in the real world to begin with.

I’m referring, of course, to “new traditional,” which really means, “country music the way it was played twenty years ago.” I understand the need for shorter genre labels, but can something really be “new” and “traditional” at the same time?

Of course, there’s also the dilemma of Bruce Springsteen’s 2008 album being labeled “classic rock.” Good? Yes. Rock? Yes. But “classic”? Not yet.

Yeah, it’s just a link post—two weeks of silence, and that’s the best I can do? Well, Michael Holcomb has done a fine job with Biblical Studies Carnival XXXII on his blog, pisteuomen (or, if you prefer, πιστευομεν). Michael either got a whole bunch of great nominations this month, or he’s an incredibly prolific blog-reader. Or maybe both. Unless you’re pretty much reading every single religiously-themed blog on the internet, you’ll probably find something in this month’s carnival that you haven’t already read. Kudos to Michael for a job well done.

The call for papers for the 2009 meeting of the Western Commission for the Study of Religion, of which the Society of Biblical Literature/Pacific Coast Region is a part, went out a few weeks ago, but in the hustle and bustle of pre-semester preparations I failed to post a notice of it here. Submissions should be sent in by October 1. Please see the WECSOR web site for the full call for papers, but I’d like to highlight the following sections for Higgaion readers:

The 2009 Annual Meeting of the Pacific Coast Region of the Society of Biblical Literature will be held jointly with the Pacific SW Region of the American Schools of Oriental Research and with the Western Region of the American Academy of Religion March 22-23, 2009 at Santa Clara University, California. Members wishing to present papers should send or email a one-page abstract to the appropriate section chair listed below by October 1, 2008. First-time presenters and graduate students are encouraged to submit completed papers. Papers from established scholars are particularly encouraged. For more informaion, of if you have any questions, please contact Beth Alpert Nakhai.

Neo-Assyrian Insights on Ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible (Joint Session ASOR and SBL)
The Neo-Assyrian Insights on Ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible unit invites 10-15 minute papers that briefly suggest a question or area that should be given (more) attention within the intersection of Neo-Assyrian and biblical studies. The paper should contribute to the theme, “What questions should we be asking?,” and presenters may be asked to participate in a panel discussion. The session will include some invited papers. For more information contact Brad E. Kelle: bradkelle@pointloma.edu

Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament section invites proposals for papers focusing on any portion of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, interpretive methodology for its study, its historical and cultural contexts, and other relevant studies. We anticipate holding three open sessions at the 2009 meeting. Send papers or abstracts via e-mail to Christopher Heard at christopher.heard@pepperdine.edu or by regular post to Christopher Heard, Associate Professor of Religion, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA 90263-4352.