Over on Biblicalia, Kevin Edgecomb takes aim at the conventional scholarly analysis of the book of Isaiah as a tripartite book, with chapters 1-39 pertaining chiefly to eighth-century Judah, chapters 40-55 pertaining chiefly to the sixth-century Judean “exilic” experience, and chapters 56-66 pertaining chiefly to Achaemenid Yehud. You really should read the whole post for complete context, but let me quote at length:

The suggestion was based upon various literary criteria, and was also influenced by a reaction to those who viewed mention of Cyrus in chapters 44 and 45 as predictive prophecy, and the destruction of Babylon (passim) as thereby being a reference to the taking of the city by Cyrus the Great of Persia. There are several problems with this, on both sides. Most notably, we now know more about the history of both Persia and Babylon through the discovery and publication of various Assyrian historical documents, documents unavailable to ibn Ezra, Doederlein, and even Duhm. From these, we learn that Babylon was completely destroyed in 689 by Sennacherib of Assyria (see COS 2.119E). We also learn that there was a Cyrus of Persia (grandfather to Cyrus the Great; see Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander, 17-18, 878, where he follows Miroschedji in not recognizing the Ashurbanipal mention as referring to Cyrus I; see also an excerpt from the Ashurbanipal text in Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible, 71; it’s unfortunately not included in either ANET or COS) active in the mid-7th century, yet who would not have sprung fully-armored from the head of Zeus the day before the first tablet mentioning him was written. Though most would place the reign of this Cyrus as near its beginning from the point of his mention by Ashurbanipal, it is equally (I think more) likely that his reign was actually rather near its end, and he would have thus been king up to roughly 40 years before. This additional information, published only in the 1920s and 1930s, allows us to posit an Isaiah who lived and wrote in the final decades of the eight century and the first decade or two of the seventh century. There is no absolute requirement in Isaiah’s text to posit any later interpolation, and the objection to “predictive prophecy” is a non-issue, as there was no “predictive prophecy” involved, despite millennia of misconstrual. The Bibliocentric earlier scholars who knew only of the fall of Babylon to the Persians were wrong in referring every reference in all Biblical prophetic writings to this event, forgivably not knowing of, but unforgivably not permitting the possibility of an earlier destruction, one which places “predictive prophecies” of the utter destruction in later prophets like Ezekiel and Jeremiah in a whole new light.

Now at first you might think that Kevin is onto something important here, and if you are for any reason uncomfortable with the now-customary tripartite division of the book of Isaiah, you might jump at the chance to dispense with the need for the tripartite hypothesis. However—you knew this was coming—it’s not that simple. The name “Cyrus” and the association of this “Cyrus” with the defeat of Babylon are by no means the only indications that Isaiah 40-55 has “exilic” realities in view. If that were the case, then Kevin’s argument would be much stronger. But consider the following as you weigh Kevin’s proposal:

1. How would Isa 40:1-2 fit into an early eighth-century context? Their applicability to a mid-sixth-century context is plenty clear.
2. Why would a seventh-century defeat of Babylon—Judah’s erstwhile ally against the Assyrians—be considered “good tidings” for seventh-century Judeans (Isa 41:27)? Why this would be “good tidings” for an “exilic” audience is immediately clear. This question could be posed, in different terms, for Isa 43:14 and a number of other passages in Isa 40-55; see especially 45:1-7, where Cyrus’s success is supposed to be for “Israel’s” benefit. What possible benefit would Judah—much less literal Israel, scattered by the Assyrians half a century earlier—derive from an early seventh-century Cyrus defeating early seventh-century Babylon?
3. Perhaps the most obvious objection to Kevin’s proposal arises from Isa 44:24-28. It’s not just that Cyrus is to conquer Babylon, but that he is to “build Jerusalem” and order the construction of the foundation of the temple. This manifestly cannot apply to the early seventh-century Cyrus, for the Jerusalem temple was standing tall on its foundation at that time, nor did the earlier Cyrus have anything to do with rebuilding Judean cities (one could try, I suppose, to find a link to recovery after Sennacherib’s invasion, but I am skeptical that any such link could be demonstrated, and it still would have nothing to do with the temple).
4. Similarly, if Isa 45:13 pertains to Cyrus (as the NRSV and most other modern translations think it does, and it really pretty much has to in context), then the freeing of exiles (וגלותי ישלח) is explicitly part of Cyrus’s God-given task. The application to Cyrus the Great is obvious, but not to his grandfather.
5. Similarly, Isa 48:20 calls on “Jacob” to “go out from Babylon, flee from Chaldea.” How could this pertain to the early seventh century? Its mid-sixth-century applicability is quite obvious.
6. The Cyrus of Isaiah 40-55 appears to be Babylon’s enemy. According to the few reputable sources I can access online from home tonight (for example, Encyclopaedia Brittanica), Cyrus I supported Babylon’s revolt against Assyria in the 650s. I can’t find anything to suggest that Cyrus I fought against Babylon, which was under Assyrian domination during this time—apparently Cyrus I threw in with Shamash-shum-ukin’s attempted coup against his half-brother Ashurbanipal. Whether you think about Sennacherib’s sack of Babylon in 698, which Kevin mentions, or Ashurbanipal’s suppression of Shamash-shum-ukin’s rebellion, Cyrus I doesn’t seem to be on the anti-Babylonian side … which makes him a poor candidate for the Cyrus of Isaiah 40-55.

I could continue, but this would soon become even more repetitive, and I need to get back to grading papers. The long and the short of it is that the overall tone and content of Isa 40-55 has an obvious and explicit applicability to an “exilic” situation that involved the destruction of Jerusalem, its temple, and the towns of Judah, as well as captivity in Babylon/Chaldea. This simply does not fit the early-to-mid-seventh century. The identification of Deutero-Isaiah’s Cyrus as Cyrus the Great (Cyrus II), rather than Kevin’s proposal of Cyrus I of Anshan, is based on many factors other than the name.

I’m busily grading my students’ term papers just now, and so far two of the six or seven that I’ve graded have referenced Azzan Yadin, “Goliath’s Armor and Israelite Collective Memory,” Vetus Testamentum 54 (2004) 373-395. My students’ summaries of Yadin’s argument struck me as intriguing, but curious (in the “I can’t quite see this as plausible on its face” sense), so I decided to investigate for myself. (By the way, don’t get Azzan Yadin confused with Yigael Yadin, of whom A. Yadin is critical.)

Yadin spends the first several pages of the article (pp. 373-378) arguing cogently that 1 Samuel 17 is not a useful source for historical reconstruction. Some earlier scholars had unwisely tried to mine 1 Samuel 17 for historical information about 11th-century Philistines and especially their warfare practices, but these efforts are untenable. Yadin goes back over familiar ground to establish this, making these pages a convenient digest of scholarship on this issue:

1. Nobody dates the final redaction of the Deuteronomistic History earlier than 560 BCE. To Yadin, it seems unlikely that historically valuable details would have survived such a long period of transmission (nearly half a millennium) intact. Yadin’s skepticism about transmission is not just impressionistic; the LXX version of the story, which is shorter than the MT version of the story, testifies to some fluidity in transmission (with the balance of scholarship being on the side of the LXX text-type’s greater antiquity in this passage).
2. The biblical portrayal of Goliath’s armor (helmet, mail coat, and shield) does not closely resemble the depiction of Philistine armor as portrayed in Egyptian reliefs. Instead, the biblical description of Goliath’s armor seems to be a mishmash of armor styles.
3. 1 Samuel 17 seems to be secondary to other material within the DH, specifically 2 Samuel 21:19.
4. The story of David vs. Goliath does not seem to be well-integrated into the “history of David’s rise”; the skirmish is not referenced in other parts of the DH that celebrate David’s military accomplishments

In all of this, Yadin is not breaking new ground, but is helpfully reviewing previous scholarship.

The next few pages (378–381) Yadin devotes to arguing against the view that 1 Samuel 17 is pure fiction. What Yadin means by this is that there are elements in the story that are not “typically biblical,” but, in Yadin’s view, show some familiarity with a Greek or Aegean culture.

1. Military prowess is an unusual way to legitimate a future king of Israel. (Or so Yadin claims. I am not convinced by this argument at all. The pattern of a private anointing followed by a public demonstration of military prowess occurs for both Saul and David.)
2. David and Goliath “engage in a contest of champions, a μονομαχία, a form of battle known almost exclusively from the Greek epic tradition.” (Yadin shows that Roland de Vaux’s attempts to demonstrate a single-combat tradition in the ancient Near East is seriously flawed; one-on-one combat is present, but not combat in which a single champion represents each side, with the outcome of the entire skirmish resting by convention on the outcome of the duel.)
3. Goliath’s armor does not resemble attested Iron Age Philistine armor, but does resemble Homeric convention.
4. The designation of Goliath as a איש הביניים, “man of the in-between” (a longstanding difficulty in translating 1 Samuel 17) appears to be a borrowing from Greek “man of the μεταίχμιον,” the μεταίχμιον being the space between armies as the camp across from each other.

Yadin takes these elements to demonstrate that the story evidences signs of external contact with a Greek or Aegean culture and is not simply a free invention of an author working within a Judean milieu.

Yadin now moves to a more original contribution: the suggestion that the David-vs.-Goliath story represents an instance of “collective memory.” Yadin thinks the key to resolving the impasse described above—that 1 Samuel 17 is neither a historically accurate report nor a complete fiction—is setting the narrative within “the historical situation at the time the narrative took on its final form, the 6th or 5th century BCE, and in particular the place of Greek culture in the Eastern Mediterranean” (p. 381). Yadin describes the evidence for an increased East-Greek, Cypriot, and Attic presence on the Levantine coast in the sixth century and onward, especially in the environs of biblical Philistia. Moreover, this period witnessed a significant and widespread change and interest in Greek self-understanding, and “the heroic past depicted in Homeric epic was engaged in the formulations of this collective identity” (p. 384). Yadin points to evidence adduced by J. Naveh (1998) that seventh-century BCE Philistia experienced “a national awakening, some search for the non-Semitic roots” (p. 385, quoting Naveh) that “may have included a renewed interest in heroic tales, spurred by, inter alia, the spread of Homeric epic” (p. 385).

From this, Yadin quickly moves to arguing that something of this sort—a conceptual fusion of putative ancient events with contemporary sixth-century realities—is evident in the Deuteronomistic History, and the David-vs.-Goliath material in particular. The storyline is set in the late eleventh century BCE, but the event is presented in terms reminiscent of sixth-century Philistia (Yadin invokes here the analogy of Renaissance painters depicting biblical characters in fifteenth-century garb). In this light, Yadin understands the David-and-Goliath story as an exercise in “collective memory,” “the way in which a society or group represents past events—irrespective of the historical fidelity of this representation, or even the existence of the event” (p. 386). Thus, for Yadin, “collective memory is a dialogue between the past and the present, and the representation of the battle of David and Goliath is an attempt to reconstruct the past so as to better withstand the pressure of emerging Greek cultural hegemony” (p. 386).

Yadin then launches into a long and interesting comparison of the David-and-Goliath story with contest-of-champion scenes in the Iliad—a discussion that I will not attempt to summarize here. Suffice to say that Yadin’s presentation, while perhaps not entirely conclusive, is really very persuasive in its attempt to show that the David-and-Goliath story exhibits a number of elements that are not typical of the biblical narrative tradition, but are instead strikingly “Homeric.” There are, however, significant differences (David is not a typically Homeric hero), which Yadin is careful to note and investigate.

The big question coming off Yadin’s “intertextual reading” of the Iliad and 1 Samuel is why the narrative exhibits this Hellenic flavor. Yadin thinks of the DH as “the national ‘epic’ of ancient Israel … redacted as the eastern Mediterranean experiences a movement—precipitated in part by the spread of Homeric epic—that eventually leads to a (pan-Hellenic) Greek national identity” (p. 393; I was gratified to see my own Dynamics of Diselection referenced in footnote 80, even though my book is about Genesis, not the DH). Thus Yadin interprets the David-and-Goliath story within the context of “a national epic formed in polemic dialogue with a competing national narrative” (p. 394).

I found Yadin’s analysis very interesting—obviously, or I wouldn’t have spent so much time blogging about it! I think that Yadin’s resistance to the simplistic history/fiction dichotomy is very important. Moreover—although this comment must be received in light of the fact that I’m largely ignorant of the Iron Age Aegean and East-Greek cultures—I found the parallels Yadin adduced between the David-and-Goliath story and Homeric conventions persuasive on their face (I really need to think about the whole issue more critically, but it looks convincing on a first reading). These are the main points at which I find Yadin’s proposal attractive.

On the other hand, I am left with some unanswered questions. I am not quite sure about the characterization of the DH as “the national epic of ancient Israel.” What sort of “national epic” is this, which ends in the dissolution of the kingdom (of Judah, not Israel!), its last royal scion a hostage (albeit in some degree of comfort) in a foreign land? More importantly, even granting this genre label, what would motivate a sixth- or fifth-century Judean to compose a “national epic” in “polemic dialogue” with the spreading Hellenic culture? On its face, the DH is preoccupied with defining Judah’s (and earlier Israel’s) position vis-á-vis the Mesopotamian and, to a lesser extent, Egyptian superpowers. Concern about encroaching Hellenes is not evident on the surface of the DH, at any rate. It does seem to me, on a first reading of Yadin’s article, that Yadin makes a pretty good case for the idea that the author of the David-and-Goliath story casts it in terms of “modern” (from Dtr’s point of view—using “Dtr” loosely) Philistines. That’s certainly enough of a payoff to make Yadin’s article a worthwhile read.

Finally, it would be inappropriate to end this post without a couple of personal notes. (1) See, Kevin, I told you I’d comment on some of the good stuff I was reading and not just the “garbage”! (2) Nidya and Nick, thanks for drawing my attention to this article. I learned something new as a spin-off result of reading your term papers—which doesn’t really happen all that often.

Duane commented:

Chris,

Very interesting post. I need to dig up Yadin’s article. My own background makes me (too?) sensitive to common traditions with in the larger Mediterranean cultural environment. I do think that you observations are pertinent, particularly this one.

“On its face, the DH is preoccupied with defining Judah’s (and earlier Israel’s) position vis-á-vis the Mesopotamian and, to a lesser extent, Egyptian superpowers.”

I’m not sure what my own opinion of this is or even if I have one, but Loren Fisher sees a parallel between the David and Goliath story and the Egyptian account of Sinuh’s victory over Retenu.

I commented:

Duane,

Yadin makes a brief reference to Sinuhe vs. Retenu, in the course of his discussion of R. de Vaux’s attempt to show a “tradition of single combat” in the ANE. All Yadin says is: “The Egyptian tale of Sinhue is the only Near Eastern story that approximates the Greek μονομαχία, but even here there are significant differences” (p. 380). He footnotes on this point J. E. Miller, The Western Paradise: Greek and Hebrew Traditions (Bethesda, Md., 1997), p. 71. Yadin doesn’t cite Miller’s publisher, International Scholars Publications—whose other publishing credits include such gems as Jesus in India: A Reexamination of Jesus’ Asian Traditions in the Light of Evidence Supporting Reincarnation , which makes me a bit suspicious of any conclusions drawn from Miller’s work (I can’t seem to find an International Scholars Publications web site, which makes me think it might be a kind of vanity press, a place where books that can’t find publishers elsewhere go).

I’m chugging away at grading (that’s “marking” for Tim Bulkeley and others who can’t seem to speak American English) term papers right now—it looks like it might be an all-nighter, since grades for graduating seniors are due at noon tomorrow (Friday the 29th)—and I thought I’d offer Higgaion readers a chance to glance over my shoulder at the process. Of course, it would be both rude and a FERPA violation for me to discuss here any personally-identifiable specifics, and I’m going to resist the temptation to use this space to rant publicly about any of the things that annoy me about the papers (except this: “I wish students would learn how to use commas!”, and this: “I wish students would learn how to use the SBL Handbook of Style properly!”). Rather than focus attention on my students and their strengths or shortcomings, I’ll use this space as a way to be transparent about my own practices.

To that end, I’ve uploaded the rubric that I use to grade term papers. It’s actually less of a rubric than it is a flowchart designed to make explicit the type of reasoning I go through when I grade term papers. What I tried to do was take the questions I actually ask myself when I grade a paper and formalize them into a systematic and external form. The goal is to make it quite clear to students how I arrived at the grade given. There are a lot of big judgment calls in the rubric, of course, even though at first glance it seems terribly mechanistic. I invite you to review the rubric and welcome your comments.

Update: When I first published this post, I had malformed the URL to the rubric. I’ve just corrected the problem (at 9:00 AM PDT on Friday morning), so please try again if you got “file not found” the first time.

Jim West is at it again, with back-to-back posts today attacking homeschooling.

In the earlier post, Jim agrees with Robert Parham that the Southern Baptist Convention needs to “come clean” on supporting public education “versus”. supporting home education. Since I am a complete outsider to the SBC, I have no particular interest in what the SBC leadership does or doesn’t do as a group. What I find curious is the “either-or” mentality that Jim seems so intent on promoting. The quotation that Jim plucks from Parham’s article seems to suggest that the SBC is undermining public education by selling home education curriculum. I question this logic. Is it necessarily the case that serving one constituency undermines support for another constituency? By publishing the Jewish Study Bible, does Oxford University Press “undermine” its support for Christian readers served by Oxford’s New Oxford Annotated Bible, or vice versa? Of course not. Neither does the an organization like the SBC necessarily undermine public education by selling home education curriculum to those who want it.

In addition to the logical problem of trying to lock the SBC into an “either-or” position with regard to public education and home education (please note that I have dropped the “versus,” since I’m arguing that there is an unnecessarily exclusive opposition being promoted here), there is also a theological issue. Now I admit to speaking out of turn here, since I am not a Baptist, but it seems to me that the Southern Baptist Convention ought to be a “big enough tent” to embrace both public educators and home educators. After all, one of the fundamental Baptist doctrines is the notion of “soul competency”— the accountability of each person, individually, before God. It seems quite strange to me to insist that this accountability extends only to matters of ultimate import, like deciding whether to follow Jesus, and not to matters of (theologically speaking) lesser import, like deciding whether public education, private education, or home education best fits your own children’s educational and, yes, spiritual needs.

Jim’s second post is simply outrageous. Jim charges—with no evidence other than the timing of the opening of private Christian-run schools in Nashville from 1965 to 1985—that racism is the real root of the home education movement. Jim is once again riding on Robert Parham’s coattails. Parham draws a correlation between the timing of court-ordered school integration in the 1950s and early 1960s and the “building boom” of Christian secondary schools in the Nashville area from 1965-1985. While I think there are a few problems with some of the specifics, the idea that the boom in private education in a large southern city in 1965-1985 is largely linked to “white flight” hardly seems gainsayable. I think it would be unreasonable to doubt that Southern white Christians (speaking of the entire population generally) who moved students from public schools to private schools were in part motivated by racism. That’s one of the sad realities of life in the American south.

Nevertheless, I think the next leap is unwarranted. Over the course of just two sentences, Parham moves from the statistics for public schools vs. private schools in Nashville, 1965-1985, to “disdain for public education” as a broad phenomenon, to homeschooling in particular:

One can’t understand southern Christianity and the disdain for public education without recognizing the role of racism.

Some parents who send their children to Christian academies or homeschool them …

Those are the sorts of leaps that I grade students down for in term papers (which, by the by, I ought to be grading right now instead of blogging). But don’t draw conclusions about Parham’s article just yet; there is more to say.

While I was writing the above, a couple of comments were left on Jim’s blog. Jim ended a response with this statement:

The galling thing about the homeschooling lot is their selective reading, selective ignoring, and intentional misrepresentation of the simplest of statements.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, given how “selective” and “misreprentational” Jim’s own post and comments are! Jim’s comment was in response to one “Bonnie” who argued for a difference between “homeschooling and sending your child to a bigot-run religious school.” Bonnie is quite right: Parham’s article does not actually draw a link between homeschooling and racism, despite what my quotation above might make you think. Jim stops his quotation from Parham after the word “racism” in what I quoted above. I went on to give you the one and only explict mention of homeschooling in Parham’s article (though it’s clear from other articles that he is no fan of home education). Let me provide the rest of the paragraph that I ellided above:

Some parents who send their children to Christian academies or homeschool them admit the entrenched reality of racism and seek ways to reform culture. They make their decisions for a variety of reasons other than race. Not all Christian school parents and homeschoolers are racists (and not all public school parents are free from racism).

Parham explicitly says that racism is neither necessary nor sufficient an explanation for the option to send your children to a private Christian school or to educate them at home, but Jim transforms this into a quasi-assertion that racism is the root of homeschooling. Yet somehow Jim can write, apparently with a straight face, that homeschoolers are characterized by selective reading, selective ignoring, and intentional misrepresentation. Mrs. Potts, meet Pa Kettle.

Jim defends himself against Bonnie’s on-the-money comment by criticizing Bonnie for not noticing the “?” at the end of his post’s title: “Racism: The Root of the Homeschooling Movement?!” The funny thing is, Bonnie actually copied-and-pasted the title into her comment, so I think it’s clear that she didn’t ignore the “?” Bonnie probably didn’t ignore the “!” either—a mark that Jim conveniently ignores when he asks Bonnie, “Did you not notice the ? at the end of the heading?” Jim, there isn’t a “?” at the end of your heading. There’s a “!” at the end of your heading. Yet somehow Jim can write, apparently with a straight face, that homeschoolers are characterized by … oh, wait, I already wrote that.

Parham is undoubtedly onto a real correlation in linking Christian “flight” from Nashville public schools in the 1960s and 1970s to racism. He is also undoubtedly correct when he asserts (in different words) that racism is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain why people choose to educate their children at home. I’ve previously explained our own decision to educate our children at home. One of the hardest parts of that decision for me was pulling Nathan away from his non-”white” friends (mostly Asians) at the public school. Yet that problem was outweighed for us by the fact that Nathan was being pulled toward mediocrity by the realities of managing a public school classroom. If one of the prices we pay to help Nathan love learning and thrive educationally is that we have to work harder and more intentionally to make sure that he has non-”white” friends rather than “just letting it happen” in public school, so be it.

And by the way—it’s not as if the fact of statistical integration in public schools is a sign of social integration in those schools. Virtually every week some new incident of violence along racial lines erupts in one Los Angeles school or another—and usually, it’s non-”whites” involved on both sides. I think it was even Turks vs. Armenians at one school not long ago; quite often, it’s African-Americans vs. Mexican-Americans or Mexican immigrants. Nobody who pays any attention at all to what happens in Los Angeles can possibly think of the public schools as bastions of racial harmony.

In this post (see also Joe Cathey’s response I’ve been critical of Jim’s appropriation of Parham, and of some of Parham’s logical moves, but I do want to end this post with a selective quotation from Parham with which I fully agree:

Racism’s roots run deep into the soul of conservative Christianity, despite the vigorous protests that born-again evangelicals are color-blind, prejudice-free, full of love for all God’s children. The racism deniers have an inadequate understanding of the power of sin—sin that sculpts culture, shapes social power systems and shades self-perception.

Racism is America’s original sin. As American Christians, we need to confess our sin of racism, apparently on a continuous basis.

I do not, however, agree with Parham or Jim that homeschooling somehow confounds efforts to overcome racism, or that homeschooling is antithetical to bettering public education.

Ken commented:

Chris, with regard to the “?” fiasco, Jim also conveniently ignores his first, introductory sentence, which reads, “Ethics Daily has an interesting, historically insightful, op-ed concerning the real roots of the homeschooling movement.” This sentence clearly implies that Jim agrees with the article, at least in the main. Furthermore, when he lays out his response in the comment thread to Bonnie, the comment you quote shows perfectly well his absolutely apalling attitude towards homeschoolers/homeschooling… an attitude he has advanced in many previous blog entries. It behooves him, if he wants to clarify his position towards the article, to make it abundantly. But, I doubt very much he would because his statements on this issue have been consistently hateful. His church ought to hold him to account.

Bonnie commented:

He is talking out of both sides of his mouth. He has continually quoted Luther and others citing the importance of teaching children the holy scriptures and the “theology of the cross”, then condemns parents for not sending their children to the one place in this country where they are sure not to be taught the scriptures!

FTR, I firmly believe it is NOT a public school’s job to teach the Bible, so if I want my child educated in the scriptures a public school would be the last place I’d send them.

I don’t know what Jim West is getting at. He seems to be set on disagreeing with homeschoolers on any and all points just for the sake of disagreement, and doesn’t seem like he is even considering the very valid points any of us are making.

I’ve officially written him off as a raving lunatic. I hope his congrgation isn’t bearing the brunt of his inconsistent “teaching”.

Bonnie commented:

Apparently he has declared victory citing his integrity in not calling names. Did anyone besides me catch his little rant a few days ago (before he deleted it) accusing homeschoolers of engaging in an “orgy” of making comments at his blog exploding in an “orgasm” of patting ourselves on the back for it? Or some such rot…I didn’t copy and save it. Anyone? I admit it wasn’t exactly name calling but crude to say the least.

So while he satisfies himself by smuggly exalting his good-heartedness in not calling names, I hope he will remember that the God Who Sees knows the truth of Jim West’s words and actions and will not be put off by a coward’s ‘delete entry’ option on a weblog.

Ken commented:

Bonnie… Jim West has demonstrated this lack of integrity on many occasions in the past. He has misused, deleted, and ridiculed people in many an argument. This is a cycle of conduct with this man, which is shocking to me still from a pastor. You can rest assured, I think, that most people who have read your interactions with him know well that Jim is certainly not the “victor” in this debate.

I commented:

I hope that all my readers know that I consider Jim a friend—but a friend who I think is incorrect on a number of issues, including this one about homeschooling.

Bonnie commented:

Duly noted, Christopher. Thanks for the space to be heard and the link over at Dr. West’s blog so I could follow you back here. It was helpful to be able to understand his m.o.

Blessings!

Mrs. Sherman commented:

The black homeschool movement is growing, as well as other minority home school families. There are many black homeschool support groups that bear this out. If the minority races are homeschooling, is it for race reasons?

Those of you who read other Bible-related blogs, or follow the SBL Forum, will already know about Miqra. For those who don’t,

Miqra is an online site for scholarly dialogue about literary, linguistic, archaeological, social, political, historical, and ideological issues in studying the Hebrew Bible. It is not for discussion of contemporary religious interpretations of texts or (above all!) confessional/doctrinal matters. The assumption is that contributors will have the necessary expertise in Hebrew and cognate languages; knowledge of ANE history, literature, and culture; familiarity with the ever-expanding reading strategies (“methods”) used in biblical studies; and an interest in collegial discussion – all of which should be hallmarks of our discipline. This is a moderated list, which means that your comments will be screened to make certain posts conform to the above standards. My interest is not in limiting debate but promoting scholarly discussion free of ad hominem attacks and other types of heavy-handed rhetoric.

If you’re interested in scholarly discussion of the Bible and related studies, add Miqra to your daily reading list (a convenient RSS feed is available so you can keep up).

Larry Stager has been circulating a “Statement of Concern” about ASOR and AIA restrictions on publishing and studying (in public presentations) unprovenanced artifacts. You can read the whole thing, and find out how to become a signatory, here.

The one thing I didn’t see addressed in Stager’s “Statement of Concern”—perhaps I just didn’t read carefully enough, but I don’t remember seeing it at all—is forgery. It seems to me that part of the issue with unprovenanced artifacts is not just the possibility of promoting looting, but also the possibility of promoting forgery. I’m sure Stager himself is not blind to the issue of forgery, but it does seem to be a blind spot in the “Statement.”

I’m not sure exactly why, but over the last few days Jim West has unleased a broadside against homeschooling:

• Pastoral Misconduct and the Dangers of Home-Schooling Isolationism (9:40 AM yesterday)
• Homeschooling Hubris (7:06 AM today)
• Homeschooling Law in the Civilized World (7:52 AM)

Despite my long to-do list for today, I can’t let this slide without some commentary from “the other side.” My eight-year-old son is homeschooled, and I am absolutely convinced that it is the right choice for him. Kindly allow me to explain why.

My son is a bright kid. Some adults who have known him have characterized him as “gifted,” although (as proud as I am of his intellectual abilities) I wonder whether he is “gifted” with greater native intelligence and talents or just an environment where he has been allowed, enabled, or encouraged to thrive. I suppose it’s probably some of both. The kid is really amazing. Over the last six weeks he read 5,002 pages; much of it was fiction, but that page count also included a grade-school level one-volume encyclopedia, several books on marine wildlife, and one book on each of the planets in our solar system (excluding “Xena,” which was unknown when the series was published). And he did all that to raise money to provide livestock to poor families in the “developing” world. But I digress.

We homeschooled Nathan for kindergarten as much out of necessity as choice—we were in the throes of a move that was very disruptive to us—and my wife found it rather difficult at times. I was not a big fan of the idea of homeschooling. As a college professor, I had encountered too many homeschooled students who didn’t know how to fit into an education system. I had also had some opportunities to observe homeschooled students “up close and personal,” and I didn’t like what I saw. Therefore, I argued strongly against my wife that Nathan should go to public school for first grade. My arguments included:

• Teacher qualifications: the public school folks are professional educators of grade-schoolers, while we aren’t
• Curriculum: much of the purchaseable homeschool curriculum of which we were aware was, in my opinion, inadequate and often reflected a narrow, dogmatic religious outlook that I didn’t want my son to be spoonfed
• Socialization: in a public school he would have a broader variety of friends

If you’ve been reading Jim West’s series, you may hear some echoes of his concerns. Each of my concerns sounds utterly reasonable—but overall, it turned out that I was wrong.

The one aspect of public school that really benefited Nathan was the diversity of friends that he was able to make in first grade. There were some good kids at his school and he really enjoyed playing soccer with them at recess. His social circle at school did connect him with a more diverse group of kids than he enjoys at home (obviously) or at church. But this, we eventually concluded, was where the advantages of public school ended. (Well, I’ll add one more: big group activities like “junior chorus.”)

However, our frustrations with Nathan’s education quickly overrode our delight at his social experiences. The biggest problem (from my perspective as a parent of an eight-year-old) with public education is that the student-teacher ratio in effect forces teachers to teach to the average at best, and often to the lowest common denominator. Although Nathan loved his teacher and his friends, he was getting bored silly by the curriculum. As a result, he wasn’t taking his work seriously, and was being categorized as a low achiever. His test scores didn’t reflect his actual ability, because he did not see the point of completing the tests. And he was being worksheeted to death. One worksheet in particular stands out in my mind. It was assigned in late December 2004. As I recall, the worksheet was around 25 math problems: single digit addition, and in every problem, one of the digits was zero. I mean, come on, there are only nine possible configurations for addition of a single digit plus zero, but this worksheet was a whole page full. I guess you can get up to eighteen if you flip it over and put the zero on top. When Nathan started first grade, he could do rudimentary algebra (solving for x in a simple equation that only involved addition). By Christmas, he was being asked to add zero to one-digit numbers. When Nathan started first grade, he was drawing elaborate pictures. By Christmas, he was just slapping a few lines and circles on a page and calling that a drawing. By Christmas, Nathan was struggling through books that were easy for him when he started first grade. Nathan was losing his love for learning, his joy of discovery. We wanted our little boy back.

So we pulled Nathan out of public school, in I guess February or March of 2005. We enrolled Nathan in the California Virtual Academy, a home-based public charter school. It was the best educational decision we have made in his short school career. I won’t use this space as an advertisement for CAVA; you can follow the link and learn all about it. I’ll say a few things about our choice though. The CAVA curriculum is standardized across all CAVA households. It is a rigorous curriculum. Parents are required to log attendance and make progress reports every day. Nathan takes tests whose scores are reported back to CAVA. CAVA employs supervising teachers—who have the same credentials as public school classroom teachers—who monitor and supervise about 25 students each. CAVA offers field trips with other CAVA families, mandates physical activity similar to a public school PE class, and requires students to complete the same statewide standardized tests as all other California students. Lessons are delivered via computer, CD, DVD, and by parents (who are “taught” by the curriculum what they should pass on to their children). We’ve been very happy with the CAVA curriculum, and have actually learned a thing or two ourselves in his art and history lessons. I can guarantee you that Nathan knows more about the Huns than I do. CAVA is not a religious organization (although the history curriculum does include the religions of the cultures studied, so he has learned some basic facts—always presented sympathetically—about Islam, Shinto, and Buddhism as well as Roman religion). The K12 curriculum is sound and robust, not at all like my experience of A Beka, popular among religious homeschoolers. I really can’t say enough good things about Nathan’s experience in CAVA. My only regret is that he doesn’t have a cadre of kids to go out and play soccer with every day—but we have enrolled him in Parks & Rec programs and AYSO so that he gets the experience of being around other kids on a team.

In a sense, Nathan is not really homeschooled by the traditional model. He is educated at home, but is enrolled in a public charter school, run by trained educators, that makes curriculuar choices and sets requirements. My wife and I do not decide on his curriculum or, for the most part, the pace at which he should go. We don’t have the option of skipping lessons on Islam or evolution. His exposure to diverse ideas is, in my estimation, actually larger with CAVA than in our local public school. So perhaps some of my enthusiasm is inapplicable to more traditional homeschools. In any event, I certainly don’t think Nathan is at greater danger of predation in our home than in public school (contra Jim’s suggestion from yesterday), and for intellectual achievement I would put him up against a public-schooled Bulgarian any day of the week (see Jim’s second post this morning).

Ken commented:

Jim’s wrong on this and typically venomous about it. When a significant number of grade school teachers are twenty-somethings or thirty-somethings with little more than a BA or maybe a BEd and a half semester certification/internship, it’s tough to convince me that they are so much more qualified to teach children than most parents, especially a parent who is so dedicated as to take on the task. It also seems to me Jim has little understanding of the homeschooling programs and most homeschooled kids have high levels of interaction with Christian and non-Christian peers. Every homeschooled child I’ve ever met–and I’ve met many–has surpassed the standards of the public school system. Even in cases where the parents were KJV only Christians or in one cases a member of the Branham movement, I have found the children are typically well-educated, better adjusted, and less conflicted. All of those I know who reached college age were accepted into University programs, often with advance credit. Jim alleges that homeschooling is an attempt to withdraw from the world. Since when did the world get the mandate to educate our children? It seems to me that teaching your children is the highest responsibility of parents and for those, like you Chris, who are able to homeschool their children, I applaud it.

I commented:

I just want to make it clear that my wife gets most of the credit. She has only a BA (in Biblical Studies) but is incredibly conscientious about following the curriculum provided. It would not be right for me to soak up accolades; they belong to her.

Baruch Grazer commented:

Thanks for this post. My family has shared most of your reservations about homeschooling, and yet also find ourselves in a pretty mediocre public school district as we gear up for kindergarten. You’ve given me some good stuff to think about.

Homeschoolers who fall outside the narrow-religious-outlook model, I tend to think of as, “The Other Homeschoolers.”

Hebrew Bible III, 1:30-3:15 PM

Mark Miller, “Is God Always Holy? An Answer from Hosea 11:8-9

As the title of the paper indicates, Mark’s focal text for was Hosea 11:8-9:

איך אתנך אפרים אמגנך ישראל
איך אתנך כאדמה אשימך כצבאים
נהפך עלי לבי יחד נכמרו נחומי
לא אעשה חרון אפי לא אשוב לשחת אפרים
כי אל אנכי ולא־איש
בקרבך קדוש ולא אבוא בעיר

JPS translation: How can I give you up, O Ephraim?
How surrender you, O Israel?
How can I make you like Admah,
Render you like Zeboim?
I have had a change of heart,
All My tenderness is stirred.
I will not act on My wrath,
Will not turn to destroy Ephraim.
For I am God, not man,
The Holy One in your midst:
I will not come in fury.

Mark’s translation: How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I give you up like Admah, treat you like Zeboim? My heart has turned on me, my comfort and compassion have grown warm and tender together. I will not act on my fierce anger, I can not [sic] change in order to destroy Ephraim. For I am God, and not man. In your presence I am Holy, unable to come (to you) enraged.

A careful comparison of Mark’s translation with JPS or another modern English translation will quickly point up the main contrasts, upon which Mark’s paper focused. Where JPS has “I … [w]ill not turn to destroy Ephraim,” Mark has “I can not [sic] change to destroy Ephraim,” and where JPS has “The Holy One in your midst: I will not come in fury” Mark has “In your presence I am Holy, unable to come (to you) enraged.”

Mark’s thesis was that God is not always holy, but is holy only in Israel’s presence, and that holiness in Israel’s presence prevents God from following through on destroying Israel. In Mark’s words (as accurately as I could write them down during the presentation), “Once God arrives in Israel’s presence, God becomes holy, and God cannot carry out the vengeful intentions. … God is holy only and specifically in the presence of Israel.” God was able to destroy the cities of the plain (Admah and Zeboim) because God was not specifically holy (which only happens in Israel’s presence, according to Mark) at that time.

Although Mark’s paper was very interesting and seemed to be carefully reasoned with regard to the immediate passage, I confess that I did not find it completely convincing. I wondered out loud, in the Q&A afterward, whether the story of Nadab and Abihu might contraindicate Mark’s thesis. In that story, “fire came out from before the Lord and devoured” Nadab and Abihu for a cultic infraction. The report of this event includes the saying בקרבי אקדש ועל־פני כל־העם אכבד. In this case, God’s holiness clearly does not inhibit a destructive act; in fact, the demonstration of God’s holiness may even consist precisely in the destructive act itself. Tamara Eskenazi—who may be one of Mark’s professors at Hebrew Union College, LA—suggested that this incident actually bolstered Mark’s case because the destruction was limited to just two men and did not touch the community. But then again, the offense was committed by just two men, not the whole community, so I’m not sure I find that convincing. Somehow I just can’t imagine that the author of, say, Leviticus 11:44, 45, which contain the famous phrase והייתם קדשים כי קדוש אני “be holy, for I am holy,” conceived that God’s holiness was contingent on God being in Israel’s presence. Of course, there is plenty of room in ancient Israel for multiple understandings of God’s holiness, and perhaps a contingent understanding of holiness prevailed in some prophetic circles represented by Hosea, and a more absolute understanding prevailed elsewhere. Of course, it’s also possible that this contingent reading is a creative exegsis that would have really freaked Hosea out had he heard of it. In my mind, the jury is still out on this one.

Roger Good, “What Were Hebrew Verbs Doing in the Second Century B.C.E.?”

Roger is a doctoral student at UCLA. His presentation was a meticulously researched examination of the “dialects” or “registers” of written (literary) Hebrew and spoken Hebrew in the second century BCE, using the Greek translation of Chronicles as a touchstone. Roger’s work seemed to be careful and accurate, but I must confess that my eyes started to glaze over after a while as he piled on example after example, in essence an interpretive reading of his handout. It’s not that I perceived anything deficient about his research; it’s just that his paper was so intensely data-driven, and the main his presentation essentially a report of the data, that it was a little bit mind-numbing by the end of twenty minutes.

Jeremy Smoak, “Building Houses and Planting Vineyards: The Early Inner-Biblical Discourse of an Ancient Israelite Wartime Curse”

For Jeremy’s paper, too, my notes are horrendously incomplete. He started with Deuteronomy 28′s curses with respect to building and planting, and sought to place these curses and their variants against the background of Iron Age II. He claimed—due to the deficiencies in my notes, I cannot now reconstruct all of the evidence for this—that Deuteronomy 28 reflects the possibility that destruction of agriculture in connection with Assyrian siege warfare may have occurred after the besieged city was captured, as a punitive measure. Therefore, Jeremy says, this curse came in biblical literature to symbolize specific warfare practices known from eighth- to seventh-century Syria.

Jeremy traced this theme into Amos 5:11:

Therefore because you trample on the poor
and take from them levies of grain,
you have built houses of hewn stone,
but you shall not live in them;
you have planted pleasant vineyards,
but you shall not drink their wine. (NRSV)

Then Jeremy followed the theme into Amos 9:14, where the curse is reversed:

I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel,
and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine,
and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. (NRSV)

Jeremy suggested that the reference to “ruined cities” points to the aftermath of the destruction of Israel c. 722 BCE, and that “restore the fortunes” (שוב שבות) involves the restoration of a dynasty as well as its formerly held territory—all to b read in light of Hezekiah’s “reunification project.” (At this point, I wrote “Schniedewind student” on my yellow pad; when I checked later, this did turn out to be the case.)

Jeremy went on to an oracle from Zephaniah, but at this point my notes become irrecoverably dismal, so I can’t really say more.

Lucas Schulte, “My Shepherd … Though You Do Not Know Me. Artaxerxes as Foreign King Manifesting God’s Will”

Lucas’s paper gave me yet another opportunity to despise Microsoft and their complete inability, or unwillingness, to fix the right-to-left Unicode support in Microsoft Office. Lucas, a graduate student at Claremont Graduate University, had a PowerPoint presentation that went along with his paper, but for some reason was unable to get logged onto the computer that was available in the room. Since he had the presentation on a flash drive, I figured we could just plug it into my laptop and project it from there. Once we snagged a VGA cable from the conference administrators, it looked as if it would work like a charm … until Lucas’s first slide with Hebrew popped up, and I suddenly remembered that MS Office for Macintosh OS X doesn’t support right-to-left Unicode. All of Lucas’s Hebrew ended up mangled.

Lucas’s paper consisted largely of an exceedingly—a critic might say excessively—detailed examination of Nehemiah 2:1-10. Lucas’s thesis was that Nehemiah 2:1-10 presents Artaxerxes as, in the words of the title, a “foreign king manifesting God’s will.” I must confess two things. (1) This was the last paper of the last session on the last day of the conference, so I was tired and mostly just followed Lucas’s handout instead of taking notes. Therefore, I can’t say much in detail about the argument. (2) Throughout the presentation, my overall sense of the argument was, “Sure, but you could make your point without so much effort.” I was experiencing “data overkill.” Don’t judge Lucas harshly on this, though; remember that less than an hour before Roger Good had bombarded my brain with a lot of data that was hard to retain. I think my neurons had reached data saturation point before Lucas ever started.

Well, that is the long and short (okay, not the short) of my WECSOR experience. I’ll let you know how things go next year, too.

The Expository Times 117.8 (May 2006) has just been released. The issue contains one Old Testament exposition: “Numbers 15″ by Tim Gorringe, pp. 316–318. A few minutes ago, Safari crashed (that’s not supposed to happen!) and lost the response that I had been typing on for about an hour. On other topics, I might just throw up my hands in despair and forget about the post. Yet Gorringe’s article contains such stellar examples of bad exegesis that I’m going to take the time to recreate the post I lost. (Memo to me: The “Save as Draft” button is your friend.)

Gorringe’s article is ostensibly an exposition of Numbers 15. The “teaser” line reads: “Numbers 15 seems to be a collection of disparate material dealing with sacrifice and ritual offences, but looked at more closely it has many connections with the contemporary world, not least in our understanding of the treatment of economic migrants and offenders.” That’s what intrigued me enough to read on.

The teaser line failed to mention that Gorringe’s first “contemporary concern” would be ecology. Numbers 15:1–31 deal with various kinds of sacrifices. Gorringe laments the tendency of Christians to focus on the guilt offering, due to an increasing tendency to think of the eucharist in terms of substitutionary atonement. Then he writes:

The truth of the matter is, however, that most sacrifices in the Hebrew bible were ‘todah sacrifices’, thank offerings. They were gratitude in response to grace. This is very clear in this passage in Numbers. Sacrifices are made in response to the unmerited gift of the land, and the sacrifices represent the fundamental work of the creation and re-creation of life. ‘Grace’ before meals was a very attenuated, but nevertheless important vestige of these sacrifices. The loss of this sense of sacrifice is a disaster. It is part of the development of what Lewis Mumford called an extractive approach to resources, based on mining. You do not nurture or till, but you dig out until a seam is exhausted, you leave huge spoil heaps, and you move on to another site. The economics of industrial capitalism (we can take William Stanley Jevons as an example) is marked by this kind of hubris. The earth is there for profit. Of course profit ‘trickles down’ and benefits all eventually, but what we celebrate are, quite literally, the movers and shakers, the big men who, in their creative destruction, move the economy and so the world on. It is now more than thirty years since the first Club of Rome report and Small is Beautiful. What the latter, from its Buddhist standpoint, was trying to do was to call us back to a more nurturing, more sacramental approach to economic reality, to the need for sacrifices of praise to honour the fact that we are husbanding a gift and not victoriously celebrating our own strength, our own capacity to do anything. The fact that, thirty years on, we do not have a single Green Member of Parliament, and that every major political party is signed up to ‘the market’, to ‘growth’, to ‘business as usual’, shows how far we have to go before the perspective of this text, and of the other sacrificial texts of the Hebrew bible, is properly recognized.

There are so many problems with this paragraph that I hardly know where to begin. I’ll try not to get sidetracked on the fact that Gorringe seems to want humans to engage in the impossible task of “tilling” and “nurturing” metallic ore, and just focus on Gorringe’s use of the todah sacrifice. For those not in the know, todah is often translated as “thanksgiving sacrifice” or “thank offering” in English Bible versions. It seems to me that Gorringe’s argument (if it can be called that) has three steps:

1. Most sacrifices in the Hebrew Bible are todah sacrifices.
2. Todah sacrifices represent “gratitude in response to grace.” Numbers 15 makes this “very clear.”
3. Todah “[s]acrifices are made in response to the unmerited gift of the land, and the sacrifices represent the fundamental work of the creation and re-creation of life.”
4. It is an appropriate “application” of sacrificial ideology to see that we are “husbanding a gift.”
5. Therefore, a contemporary Christian appropriation of sacrificial ideology means putting Green Party representatives in Parliament.

Let’s deal with these in order.

Item 1 is simply false. It’s just not statistically true that the majority of sacrifices to which the Bible refers are todah sacrifices. The todah sacrifice is mentioned only half a dozen times in the Tanakh. By contrast, the chattat or “purification offering” is mentioned over 120 times, the ‘asham or “guilt offering” is mentioned more than thirty times, and the shelam or “offering of well-being” is mentioned over fifty times. Statistics do not, of course, invalidate the theological dimensions of an application of the todah sacrifice to Christians, but Gorringe wants to claim an overwhelming biblical preference for the todah over the chattat, and that preference, measured by frequency as Gorringe claims, is simply not there.

Item 2 is a mixed bag. It’s true that the todah offering is a grateful response to something that God has done in the worshiper’s life, or the life of the community. But Numbers 15 doesn’t make this “very clear,” for Numbers 15 doesn’t mention the todah sacrifice at all. Numbers 15 mentions the “whole burnt offering” (‘olah), “sacrifice … to fulfill a vow” (zebach lepalle’-neder), “freewill offering” (zebach … bindabah), “regularly scheduled sacrifice” (zebach … bemo’adeykem), “grain offering” (minchah), “drink offering” (nesek), “sacred donation” (terumah)—a whole dictionary full of sacrificial terminology—but not the todah or “thanksgiving sacrifice.” In fact, the todah sacrifice is not mentioned anywhere in the book of Numbers at all (but only in Leviticus, Amos, Jeremiah, Jonah, and possibly a psalm or two). This truth simply shatters the link between Gorringe’s text and his application. The article is ostensibly an exposition of Numbers 15, but the entire paragraph about todah offerings has no connection whatsoever to the text of Numbers 15. What we have in this paragraph is not exegesis, not even exposition, but ideology cloaking itself in a biblical veneer that cannot stand up to exegetical scrutiny.

Item 3 is partially true but overly narrow. Gorringe’s claim is minimally true, in the sense that todah offerings are indeed motivated by gratitude. But when he ties this gratitude specifically to God’s gift of arable land, Gorringe goes well beyond the biblical data, and in fact distorts it. The “regulations” for the todah offering are given in Leviticus 17:11-18, where the todah seems to be a subcategory of the shelam. Nothing is said there about the motive for presenting a todah offering; only the forms, quantities, disposition, etc. of the sacrificial elements are discussed. Within the narrative framework of Leviticus, however, the sacrifices are expected to be practiced in the wilderness, before the Israelites’ receipt of the gift of arable land. Gratitude for arable land certainly would be a conceptually appropriate reason to offer a todah sacrifice, but within the immediate context of the canonical book of Leviticus, one can hardly limit the todah to agricultural gratitude. In Jeremiah 17:26, hypothetical todah sacrifices are to be offered as gratitude for Israel’s military security. In Jeremiah 33:10-11, a similar situation is in view; here todah sacrifices thank God for the restoration of “the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem”—an obvious urban, not agricultural, context. In Amos 4:5, the motive for giving a todah is not specified, and in fact the giving of the todah is mocked (this comes in the context of Amos criticizing empty sacrifices). In Jonah 2:9, Jonah promises to give a todah when he is rescued from the deep. No actual biblical instance of the offering of a todah sacrifice, even a hypothetical one as in Jeremiah or Amos, is connected with agricultural blessings. Gratitude for agricultural blessings would certainly be appropriate motive for giving a todah, but the connection is not at all inherent in the concept of the todah, or even attested as motive for a todah in any biblical text.

Item 4 is better, but has no real connection to Numbers 15, the text ostensibly under exposition in the article. Certainly a part of the theology of agricultural sacrifices is to devote to God the “firstfruits” of God’s land grant. This is largely irrelevant, however, to anything in Numbers 15, except for the terumah offering described in Numbers 15:17–21. Yet the terumah is not particularly amenable to the ecological consciousness that Gorringe wants to inculcate. Gorringe wants to move from the consciousness of “husbanding a gift” to an ecological ethic, but the terumah offering is all about consuming the produce of the land. The terumah regulation in Numbers 15:17–21 has nothing to do with “giving back to the land” or “nurturing” or anything of that sort, much less “the fundamental work of the creation and re-creation of life.” The idea is simple: from the first batch of dough that you make from your first harvest of the year, you dedicate a portion to God. It’s actually not stated what you do with this portion, but other biblical material on the terumah suggests to me that you give it to the priests for them to eat. Gorringe’s notion that sacrificial ritual has something to do with “the creation and re-creation of life” is just silly. Sacrifices in the Torah work no agricultural magic. The productiveness of the land is God’s own gift—as Gorringe himself should know, as he writes on the very next page that we have a “need for sacrifices of praise to honour the fact that we are husbanding a gift and not victoriously celebrating our own strength, our own capacity to do anything.” That lack of “capacity” applies to sacrificial magic as much as to technology.

Item 5 is an Olympic-worthy leap of logic that clearly has nothing to do with Numbers 15 or with sacrificial theology. Instead, Gorringe has parleyed the agricultural roots of the terumah (not the todah, as he claims) into a springboard for expressing his own political views.

And that’s just in the first page-and-a-quarter. I’ll turn to Gorringe’s other exegetical offenses in a later post.

Well, after some consideration I deleted my recent rant about students writing “not applicable” into my fill-in-the-blank question. Duane Smith posted a comment asking whether there was a whole class of questions to which the answer “not applicable” was being given. It wasn’t a whole class of questions, but a single entry. And I figured out what was going on: many students were copying “Not applicable” from another slot in the same question where the entry really wasn’t applicable. Here’s the question:

17. One of the major ideas in the modern study of the Latter Prophets is the hypothesis of the tripartite structure and composition of the book of Isaiah. In the chart below, which outlines the theory, some of the key words and phrases have been replaced with letter codes. Please fill in the blanks on the answer sheet that correspond to the appropriate letter codes with the words that complete the chart. (8 points)

Prophet	Chapters	Century	Superpower nation	Scholar who first proposed that a separate prophet contributed the section
Isaiah	A	8th	B	Not applicable
C	D	E	Babylon	F
Trito-Isaiah	G	6th-5th	H	Bernard Duhm

It seems that a lot of my students simply copied the “Not applicable” from the first row into their answer for F, which is illogical, because while no scholar had to first propose that a prophet contributed substantial material to the book of Isaiah when it is seen as a unity, somebody had to be the first to come up with the idea of a two-part book reflecting the preaching of two different prophets. Can you do better than my first-year General Education students? Leave your answers in the comments. No fair doing research or checking Wikipedia—just go with what you know. (Jim, how’s that for soliciting interaction?)

Kevin P. Edgecomb commented:

The only relatively tough one is F: J. C. Doederlein. It should be specified that he considered all of 40-66 to be “Deutero-Isaiah.” Duhm resituated Deutero-Isaiah from Babylon to Lebanon because, of course, no author could ever possibly write about a cedar unless he were in Lebanon (cough); he also invented Trito-Isaiah, situating him in Jerusalem circa 450 BC. Of course, a very interesting factor that is typically ignored in discussing the partitioning of Isaiah is that it was begun (Doederlein in 1775) and finished (Duhm in 1892) completely without reference to other ancient Near Eastern literature, a telling fault.

I only happened to have this down as I read it only a few weeks ago, in working on a timeline of critical biblical scholarship project (still in progress). Alors, it is not the little grey cells alone which have accomplished so great a feat of memory!

I commented:

Kevin, in the course lecture on this topic, I make it clear that Isa 40-66 was treated together before Duhm. It’s hard to represent that in the diagram on the test, though.

Your answer to F, however, is incorrect. Doederlein was not the first scholar to treat Isaiah 1-39 and 40-66 as separate pieces reflecting the work of individual prophets.

Do we have any other contestants?

WERBEH commented:

If I remember correctly, Ibn Ezra was the first to propose the two-fold division of Isaiah about the 11th or 12th century.

Do I get an A, Chris?

I commented:

We have a winner! Abraham ibn Ezra beat Doederlein to the punch by 500+ years. Kevin’s definition of “scholar” just needed to be a little bit less modern.

Rarely do I bother my first-year students with the names of specific scholars, and even less frequently do I ask them to identify these individuals on tests. There are only a handful that I mention prominently in class: J. Astruc (who doesn’t really count as a biblical scholar, per se), J. Wellhausen, M. Noth, F. M. Cross, and Bernard Duhm. H. Gunkel used to be on the list when I did more in that class with form-critical study of the Psalms, but that has gone by the wayside in recent semesters. I include ibn Ezra, and test students on his contribution, to subtly make the point that a number of our modern critical theories about authorship are refinements of medieval Jewish insights rather than the mere products of fevered German liberal imaginations.

Kevin P. Edgecomb wrote:

Yes, you’re right. I wasn’t counting Ibn Ezra. It’s a line I hadn’t realized I’d drawn. That’s a very good point, Chris!