The May/June 2009 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review contains an article by (the infamous?) Robert Deutsch on “Shebnayahu, servant of the king” (שבניהו עבד המלך). I haven’t seen much on the biblicablogs about this. I’m on the mailing list for BAR updates, so I heard about it that way, and Ferrell Jenkins took note on his blog. G.M. Grena also pointed me toward the BAR article.

For those who don’t remember: in 1953, Nahman Avigad identified “–yahu, who is over the house”—a man mentioned on a tomb inscription excavated in 1870—with the Shebna of Isaiah 22:15, suggesting that the biblical Shebna’s full name was Shebnayahu, and that the same Shebnayahu had been buried in that particular tomb.

During Yohanan Aharoni’s excavations of Lachish (1966–1968), Volkmar Fritz unearthed a juglet full of bullae. One of those bullae bore the name of “Shebnayahu … the king.” For decades, scholars have wondered (and debated) what word occupied the broken, missing piece of that bulla. What was Shebnayahu’s relationship to the king: son (בן) or servant (עבד)?

According to Deutsch,

The puzzle remained unsolved for 42 years. Aharoni has long since passed away. Then in 2007, another bulla stamped with the same seal surfaced on the Jerusalem antiquities market. A simple examination leaves no doubt that it is an impression of the same seal as the Lachish bulla. It, too, is broken off at the right edge. But on this bulla, part of an additional letter to the right of ha-melekh, “the king,” has survived: a dalet! The word before ha-melekh ended in a dalet. The word was eved, “servant.” The seal that made this impression belonged to “the servant of the king”!

Deutsch concludes:

Thus, the Shebnayahu seal impression found at Lachish can now be positively identified as belonging to the “servant of the king,” who is very probably the same person against whom Isaiah prophesied and whose tomb still overlooks the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem. He probably sent a letter from King Hezekiah’s court written on papyrus to an official at Lachish. After wrapping the papyrus letter in string, he placed a blob of clay on the string and stamped it with his seal. What the letter said, we will never know.

So … what should we think of all this? If you want my opinions on the matter, follow me past the jump.
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My Religion 101 class involves a lot of memorization. While most students enter the class knowing, at least vaguely, some stories about Noah, Moses, David, and maybe Jonah, they often find that Jeroboam son of Nebat, Jehu, Ahaz, Hezekiah, Tiglath-pileser III, Sennacherib, Manasseh, Josiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others have completely escaped their notice (or at least their memory). My most basic goal in Religion 101 is to elevate my students’ biblical literacy above their starting point. To that end, I do test my students over names, dates, the contents of biblical books, and so on. By the end of the semester, I expect students to be able to identify a fairly significant number of biblical characers and historical Ancient Near Eastern figures, to distinguish the contents of about twenty biblical books from each other, to handle the standard chronology’s timeline of Judean and Israelite history with some facility, and so on. All of this makes Religion 101 a fairly data-driven course, and it requires memorization.

In class on Friday, I conducted a brief study session for the final examination. After giving students some basic information about the format and scope of the exam, I had them take out a blank sheet of paper or open a blank word processing document and write down the names of all the biblical books they remembered studying this semester. After reviewing the list with them, I had them go back and add brief descriptions beside each book’s name. Then they spent a little time helping each other fill in gaps. We repeated this process with the names of biblical characters, and I recommended that students repeat the process again with technical terminology (tetragrammaton, theodicy, theophany, election, and so on) in their own study.

As you might expect, some students bought into the exercise, and some groaned as they did it. (Some did both.) I like to justify this study technique to students using the analogy of a batting doughnut (resistance ring). You can often see baseball players warming up before their turn at bat swinging bats with these doughnuts or resistance rings attached to them, helping them to loosen their muscles and prepare to bat with the power and speed they need. I advise my students to study as if the test will be harder than it will really be; if they do this successfully, they will find the test easier.

Today, the digital version of the May 1 Chronicle of HIgher Education went live for subscribers, and one of the headlines confirms the value of this study strategy. For more details, follow me past the jump.
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You know the story: Potiphar, the Egyptian “captain of the guard,” buys Joseph, a good-looking young Hebrew, as a slave. Joseph distinguishes himself and gets promoted to the top position among the household servants. Potiphar’s wife propositions Joseph sexually, but he refuses to give in. He literally runs away from her, leaving a garment behind. When Potiphar returns home, his wife accuses Joseph of propositioning her (maybe even of trying to rape her). According to the biblical narrator,

When his master heard the words that his wife spoke to him—“This is what your servant did to me”—he became angry. Joseph’s master took him and put him in the “enclosed house,” the place where the king’s prisoners were confined.

At whom was Potiphar angry? (I ask this as a literary question, not a historical one.) The crafty narrator doesn’t actually say. The narrator does, however, show Potiphar treating Joseph with incredible largess. Your wife accuses your chief slave of trying to rape her, or at least trying to seduce her—and you put him in the country club prison? Since when?

Our narrator complicates things even more by paralleling Joseph’s rise to prominence in Potiphar’s household with Joseph’s rise to a position of authority within the prison. Impressed with Joseph, the chief jailor elevates Joseph to a rank that we might call “chief trusty.” Our clever narrator calls Joseph’s supervisor שר בית הסהר in Genesis 39, but שר הטבחים in Genesis 40, or perhaps the שר בית הסהר reports to the שר הטבחים. At any rate, it’s the שר בית הטבחים who places the cupbearer and baker in Joseph’s care (Genesis 40)—but שר בית הטבחים is Potiphar’s title in Genesis 39!

Was Potiphar angry with Joseph? His subsequent actions seem a little strange were this the case. He continues to place Joseph in relatively comfortable circumstances and in positions of authority. Might Potiphar have seen through his wife’s ruse, and been angry at her, or at least at this awkward situation in which he found himself, forced by his wife’s false charges to dismis his favorite and most successful household servant?

The Los Angeles Times reported last week:

Leaders of a Jewish seminary in Los Angeles are arguing against a proposal by its parent organization that could lead to the closure of the campus as part of a larger financial restructuring.

The head of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion has raised the possibility of closing two of its three U.S. campuses. The three are in Los Angeles, Cincinnati and New York. In response to the proposal, leaders at the Los Angeles campus have sent a five-page memo to the college-institute’s president, Rabbi David Ellenson, and other key administrators, arguing that a bicoastal arrangement would work best.

I do hope the Los Angeles campus can survive.

Not one, but two universities related to the Stone-Campbell heritage made Inside Higher Ed‘s headlines last week:

1. Texas Christian University, affiliated with the Disciples of Christ, changed its mind and decided not to create gay-themed student housing units.
   
2. Lipscomb University, affiliated with the Churches of Christ, has designed a three-year bachelor’s degree program that has students in classes year-round. Many students nationwide have pieced together their own three-year plans with judicious selection of summer courses, but Lipscomb has taken this a step further by overtly supporting this type of arrangement.

Why do fools fall in love?

Michael M. Homan of Xavier University, writing on the ASOR blog, begs archaeologists and journalists to “please stop finding the Garden of Eden!” While I agree with his sentiments and have no objection to labeling the biblical Eden story as “myth”—the narrator’s utopian geography tells sensitive readers that Eden is literally nowhere—I found it ironic that Homan, or the ASOR webmaster/blog manager, chose to illustrate Homan’s post with the middle panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights.”
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With all due respect to Professor Geoffrey K. Pullum’s position as head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh, Pullum’s criticisms of William Strunk and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style in the April 17 Chronicle of Higher Education (available online today for subscribers) left me cold. Truth to tell, I rarely consult Elements when writing, although a copy of the third edition does reside on my bookshelf. I matters little to me whether Strunk and White “were grammatical incompetents,” as Pullum insists. I resist Pullum’s criticisms not out of any misguided loyalty to Strunk and White, with whom I have no personal or sentimental ties, but out of a love for what Strunk and White called “vigor” in writing. If you would like to hear more about Pullum’s critique and my own reaction thereto, please follow the “continue reading” link below.

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… of attempts to provide “scientific explanations” for ten historical plagues, see Michael Lukas’s Slate article today, “A Skeptic’s Guide to Passover.” But Lukas mistitled his piece. A true skeptic would simply treat the plagues as fictional elements in an ethnogenetic myth. Indeed, many sober believers would do the same. Many other believers—increasing in number as one moves toward the “right” along the “liberal-conservative” spectrum, would affirm the plagues as real-world, historical miracles. This business about affirming the plagues as historical events and then trying to elucidate scientific principles by which they might have happened belongs neither to skepticism nor to conservatism, but is the bast illegitimate offspring of a strange tryst between apologetics and scientism.

(Hey, Duane, does that qualify as a “rant”? I’m still working on it.)

It’s just a typo that some people found funny, and others didn’t.