I've noticed through my Site Meter that most visitors to my site use Internet Explorer 6. For those of you who do, you may want to switch to Firefox. Firefox is my browser of choice on both my Mac and my PC; it is fast, has cool features like tabbed browsing and integrated search windows, RSS support, and more. Using Firefox, visitors to my site can click on a little icon at the bottom of the browser window to subscribe to my blog, which puts a dynamically updated folder with my posts in your bookmarks folder or toolbar. You can also tweak Firefox to load pages even faster than it already does and Google recently released their toolbar for Firefox. At least until the release of Internet Explorer 7, this is definitely the way to go!
Speaking of Google, I really love their new desktop version of Google Earth. This unbelievable little program brings satellite imagery of the world right to your desktop. You can use it to map trips, track crime statistics in major U.S. cities, and so much more. It is basically a powerful extension of the online Google Maps and actually integrates with it when you need to print out the directions. Very cool!
Sometime ago, a friend at Penn State introduced me to two books by Marian Broida that bring the ancient world to life for children. These books should help Sunday or Saturday School kids put the stories of the Hebrew Bible in their ancient context. While I have since discovered there are many such books, I believe these still stand out:
The ancient cultures and civilizations of the Egyptians, Nubians, Hittites, and Mesopotamians are vividly brought to life in this excellent resource book. The fascinating history of these peoples is presented in a lively text, interspersed with instructions for approximately 40 projects about the clothing, architecture, writing, food, and other cultural aspects of the times. Easily obtained materials such as pillowcases, clay, styrofoam, and paper-towel tubes are used, and instructions are presented for making such things as Hittite shoes, a Nubian tomb, Egyptian sailboats, a Mesopotamian queen's headdress, and an Assyrian feast. Other activities include doing math, Sumerian style; reading Egyptian hieroglyphs; and playing games that illustrate travel of the times. The book will add excitement to ancient history units. (Helen Rosenberg, Booklist)
The author of Ancient Egyptians and Their Neighbors (1999) offers a companion volume about the Iron Age peoples who lived in Judah, as Israel, Phoenicia, and Philistia were known during the Iron Age. Beginning with a time line comparing important events in the three cultures, Broida explains what B. C. E and C. E. mean and provides some general background about each group. Later sections elaborate on the individual civilizations, describing history, architecture, clothing, language and writing, work, food, and religion. The author also provides directions for 35 child-friendly projects, ranging from stomping grapes into juice to making a model ship. Broida's reliance on archaeological finds and written historical records rather than religious traditions and biases makes for a stronger book. Frequent sidebars and black-and-white drawings, diagrams, photographs, and charts help to clarify and extend the information. With lists of books, articles, and websites, this will be a welcome addition to world history classes and a boon to religious-school teachers looking for new activities. (Kay Wiseman, Booklist)
Clearly, scholarship is now in crisis. Without a suitable definition for consensus, many great ideas that depend on it may have to be abandoned. The ivory tower threatens to fall like Barad-dur after the Ring is destroyed.
It now seems that scholarship has sought to achieve something it has yet to define or perhaps, even worse, as Jim West, ThD and bloghost at Biblical Theology, states, "'Consensus' is the self-illusory term utilized by scholars, academics, and politicians to bolster their own viewpoint."
Dr. Cook further notes that this has implications for global warming, which he believes is a case of hard consensus but a "FriendofRalph" thinks is no consensus at all, except among non-specialists.
This lack of consensus on consensus threatens to undermine even the very starting point of research. As Jim Davila, PaleoJudaica.com blogger, writes, "No one should pretend that a consensus is the final word. It's the starting point for your research." Consequently, scholars may not be able to engage in any further research until the bibliobloggers come to a consensus about the meaning of consensus. But, can scholars escape the circular nature of this problem?
Mark Goodacre, recently appointed Professor of New Testament at Duke University, may point to the reason for the lack of consensus on consensus when he observes, "consensus emerges over time and is something that is the result of ... conversations over a beer." Indeed, rather than giving greater confidence to outsiders, this seems to only give cause for Jim West's cynicism. (There is a general consensus among experts and non-experts that beer impairs judgment.)
On the other hand, as Homer Simpson has so aptly commented, "Beer [is] the cause of and the solution to all of life's problems." Perhaps then, hope yet exists for the ivory tower.
At the core of Steven Feierman’s Peasant Intellectuals is the conviction that peasants are active participants in shaping political discourse. Alongside this conviction, Feierman asserts that peasants "draw upon a rich variety of past forms" to create a "new political discourse" (3). Through an exhausting study of the political and social movements in Shambaai, Tanganyika, he reveals how the traditional concepts of kubana shi (to harm the land) and kuzifya shi (to heal the land) and its concomitant theory of nguvu kwa nguvu (power against power) developed within peasant thought. He pays special attention to the ways in which these fundamental terms of peasant political discourse shaped and were shaped by political movements. These terms are the tools through which peasant intellectuals entered the public, political discourse, pursued political goals, and rewrote their political future.
The introduction to Feierman’s work is theoretically dense. He analyzes and interacts with many prominent and even not-so-prominent social theorists. Through this analysis, Feierman attempts to demonstrate that political language and symbols are not explainable within a "unitary framework" or a "binary definition" (9). Instead, political language and symbols function within a complex discourse that includes not only politics but also culture. Cultural expression acts to preserve certain forms of the language, even under the stress of counter-ideological dominance, while at the same time imbuing the content of these forms with new meaning, regardless of any contingencies. For Feierman, the significant revelation is that peasants are the authors and proponents of the discourse that arises out of the interrelatedness of political and cultural expression. Furthermore, Feierman asserts that the peasantry is able to promulgate this discourse despite their divergent, heterogeneous character. On this point, Feierman stands in sharp contrast to Gramsci, who argues that only the working class and its affiliation with the Communist Party could create, elaborate, and distribute such discourse (19).
Even so, Feierman returns to Gramsci in his attempt resolve the distinction between and the role of discursive consciousness and practical consciousness. In agreement with Gramsci, Feierman asserts that practical consciousness, and the acts that arise out of it, transform discursive consciousness. The peasantry, embracing its practical consciousness, "rejects hegemonic values" and shapes a "radical discursive consciousness" (32). It is this project, undertaken primarily by the peasantry, which Feierman traces in his history of Shambaai, Tanganyika. Feierman argues that it is the practical consciousness, revealed in practical activities such as tribute payment, the kifu group, sacrifices, and farming, that subverts colonial rule and provides a foundation for the independence movement. The practical consciousness creates the discursive consciousness that empowers TANU in its fight against the hegemony of British rule. In Feierman’s final analysis—which is a return to his sharp critique of Gramsci’s theory of the need for a centralized party to act as the "collective intellectual"—it is TANU, using the "substantial collective influence" of the bureaucracy to suppress the emergence of popular peasant organizations, that betrays the peasantry (19, 233).
Applying Feierman’s methodology to ancient history, and specifically ancient Israelite history, presents a formidable challenge. The temporal distance at which historians of the ancient world find themselves in relation to their subject makes uncovering the practical consciousness difficult, if not in most cases impossible. Most evidence to which the historians of the ancient world must appeal is representative of the discursive consciousness of their subject. Moreover, the illiteracy of the masses ensures that even this evidence reflects primarily, if not exclusively, the discursive consciousness of a dominant ideology. The biblical text, however, as a historio-cultural artifact collecting a corpus of sacred literature spanning at minimum 200 years and as much as 1500 years of cultural and religious history, is a relatively unique piece of evidence to which Feierman’s methodology can, with some merit, apply.
As the multiple documents and traditions that exist in the biblical text were collected, they assumed a sacred status. This means that successive generations approached the work of preceding generations with a certain amount of reverence. While successive generations could add, revise, edit, and even take away, they still worked with the preserved documents and therefore appear not to have completely suppressed the ideology or ideologies reflected in the literature of the preceding generations. The Hebrew Bible, therefore, preserves many and often conflicting voices of Israelite cultural and religious history.
By examining the various compositional layers of the documents or the intertextuality in a given corpus, ancient historians can begin to recover the voice of religious and political movements, social classes, and even where links to oral tradition are discernable, the peasantry. These voices may have had pre-eminence at one time and were supplanted at another time; but the evidence of their existence remains in the texts. It is, unavoidably so, a discursive consciousness represented in the texts but at least it provides evidence of how common traditions, history, and practices were appropriated and given new meaning in disparate social and political climates. The Hebrew Bible has its share of political and religious language and symbols that like kubana shi and kuzifya shi shaped, were shaped by, and actually continue to shape political and religious movements and discourse.
An important task of the present-day historian is to articulate the presuppositions that have formed and contributed to their interpretation of past events. The postmodern age has rightly informed the critical mind that bias and prejudice are always present in empirical investigation and as such, it is vitally important to evaluate the intrusion that such presuppositions have upon the work of the historian. In "Marxism, Christianity, and Bias in the Study of Southern Slave Society," Eugene Genovese evaluates the crisis of method precipitated by postmodernism and then, evaluates his own work in light of the solution he offers to that crisis.
Throughout his essay, Genovese evaluates the current crisis to the possibility of historical knowledge and offers an alternative method to modernism and post-modernism upon which the historian can advance his work. One of the interesting preliminary points that Genovese makes in his essay is that while objectivity is indeed an illusion, postmodernism "quickly passes into nihilism” and offers only "flagrant mendacity as a Higher Law" (6). Genovese, therefore, rejects both the presumption of objectivity as well as the irrationality of postmodernism. As an alternative, he argues that the study of history should involve a process of empirical investigation that tests and challenges the presuppositions, or preunderstanding, of the student. Genovese further argues that a worldview must be internally and externally consistent and that should it falter on these grounds, it should be altered or even rejected. The task of the historian then is not simply to recover the discernible facts of history but also to contribute to the development and formation of a person’s worldview by testing presuppositions through empirical investigation of historical events. Furthermore, the historian must be honest in recognizing the implications that their scholarly work might have upon their world. Though the work is borne out of certain presuppositions, the honest historian should not allow it be subordinate to them.
Approaching his work from this standpoint, Genovese illustrates how his empirical investigations of southern slave society have challenged his own presuppositions as an atheist, historical materialist and Marxist as well as the presuppositions of a Christian worldview. Genovese notes that he viewed religion "as no more than a corrosive ideology at the service of ruling classes" (8). And, it is with this presupposition that he entered the task of evaluating slave life in his book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. In his empirical investigations, however, he discovered that religion exerted a powerful and positive force in the lives of the slaves:
For while much went into the making of the heroic black struggle for survival under extreme adversity, nothing loomed so large as the religious faith of the slaves. The very religion that their masters sought to impose on them in the interest of social control carried an extraordinarily powerful message of liberation in this world as well as the next (8).
In response to this discovery, Genovese acknowledges being forced to face a serious weakness in Marxist thought, namely that of religion and its relationship to society (13). Neither his own worldview nor other historical, sociological and psychological theories could adequately account for the enormous affect the slaves’ spiritual experience had in their struggle for freedom. In similar fashion, Genovese argues that his investigation raises a serious challenge to "Christians to clarify their theology" (12). He points out three significant issues raised by his studies with respect to the Christian faith: (1) the spiritual bankruptcy of theological liberalism that would deny that Jesus is anything other than God, Christ and redeemer, (2) the inability of Christians to formulate an antislavery theology, and (3) the general failure of religious historians who "separate the religion of the elite from the religion of the common people" and ignore the importance of theology (11). Genovese argues that these challenges to worldview, whether his own or the Christian’s, and the necessary self-evaluation that it demands is one of the purposes behind the historian’s task. For, while recognizing that objectivity is an illusion, the presuppositions of an investigation should still be subject to the evidence revealed through that investigation:
The current game of denying the very possibility of objective truth or of the necessity to approximate it as closely as possible thus reveals itself as contempt for the people—for the allegedly oppressed—who apparently are incapable of facing the unpleasantness and evidence of their own failings and who aspire to nothing better than to do unto others the horrors that have been done unto them (6).
Willingness, therefore, to subject oneself and one’s views to the evidence allows the historian to refine their worldview and engage in further study from a more informed standpoint. In this way, history, and other disciplines like it, pursue objective truth, testing it through (subjective) empirical investigation and thereby, contributing to an improved worldview that can stand with the evidence.
In coming to terms with the implications of his own work then, Genovese has demonstrated a way beyond the impasse created by the postmodernist attack on objective truth. Empirical investigation cannot proceed from objectivity, as postmodernists have so ably pointed out, but it can pursue it. In fact, it is to that pursuit that humans have been driven to undertake empirical investigation. By studying history, nature, religion or any other aspect of our universe, humans are seeking knowledge and truth. If the investigator is willing to face the implications that their studies necessitate, the task continues to be a viable one. This commitment to honesty and integrity is the means by which the historian can successfully contribute something of value to areas he studies. It is also the reason that Genovese has contributed so much of value to the study of southern slave society, Marxism and not least of all, Christianity.
Disclaimer: This article was originally written and submitted Sept. 28, 2000 for an undergraduate course in History. Genovese was a formative influence on my historical thinking, thanks to one of my professors, Richard Vaudry, and I still agree in large part with Genovese and this critique. That said, in my years since writing this critique, I have developed a much greater appreciation for the postmodern agenda and some of its leading thinkers.
Beentjes, Pancratius C. "Prophets in the Book of Chronicles." Pages 45-53 in The Elusive Prophet: The Prophet as a Historical Person, Literary Character, and Anonymous Artist. Edited by Johannes C. De Moor. Leiden/Boston/Cologne: Brill, 2001.
Van Rooy, Harry V. "Prophet and Society in the Persian Period According to Chronicles." Pages 163-179 in Second Temple Studies 2: Temple and Community in the Persian Period. Edited by Tamara C. Eskenazi and Kent H. Richards. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 175. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994.
In the article "Prophets in the Book of Chronicles," Beentjes' stated aim is "to find out if, and in what context, the Chronicler makes use of classical prophetic texts" by examining "one of the fourteen prophetical speeches" in Chronicles (47). His subsequent analysis, however, never seems to actually show a sustained interest in this aim and the conclusion addresses a completely different problem—that of the literary character of the prophets in Chronicles and the presence of the Chr’s "own theological convictions and accents" in their speeches (53). This incongruity in aims is characteristic of the lack of focus at various other points in the paper and makes it difficult to assess Beentjes’s contribution.
On the whole, Beentjes appears to argue that the Chr does use classical prophetic texts but selects and transforms the texts (48). Beentjes puts this argument in its sharpest relief in his presentation of parallels between Azariah’s speech and five different prophetic texts: 2 Chr 15:3 // Hos 3:4; 2 Chr 15:5 // Zech 8:10; 2 Chr 15:5 // Amos 3:9; 2 Chr 15:7 // Zeph 3:16; and 2 Chr 15:7 // Jer 31:16 (51). These parallels, though short, are compelling arguments in favour of the Chr’s use of classical prophetic texts. Japhet, I & II Chronicles, even expands the list, suggesting that, in addition to these five passages, there are also citations and allusions to Hos 5:15-6:1; Ez 38:21; Hag 2:22; Zech 11:6, 14:13-14; and Isa 9:18-20 in this text (716). Beentjes shows that none of these parallels are direct quotes, with the exception of Amos 3:9, and so, he argues, this reveals the Chr’s own distinctive use of "authoritative words from tradition" (51-52).
There is, however, nothing really substantial in making this point nor is it really surprising. Beentjes is more or less pointing out that the Chr is an author—a fact that is apparent enough and also true of every other author and text in the Hebrew Bible. Should we expect the Chr to use direct quotations from Hosea, Zechariah, Amos, Zephaniah, and Jeremiah for the direct speech of another messenger or prophet of a different name (and a different era)? I would think not. But, should we expect the Chr to draw on the language of the prophets? Of course. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to make too much of the similarities; there are, after all, limited ways to express the conventional concepts and ideas expressed by Azariah and many of the other prophets in Chronicles. The intertextuality of prophetic texts amongst themselves and also with Deuteronomy reveals the extent to which prophecy shared a common horizon of language. It is not surprising that the Chr should imitate this language in constructing the speeches of prophets; actually, one wonders if the Chr, as a member of a community that clearly studied these texts, had simply internalized the prophetic voice through constant reading and re-reading. Perhaps, the parallels are almost accidental.
In any case, Beentjes fails to provide any significant implications for this thesis; in the final analysis, he simply appeals to Schniedewind. Inexplicably, he brings in Schniedewind’s distinction of "prophets" and "messengers" in Chronicles, and, quoting Schniedewind, suggests that the Chr’s use of classical prophetic texts aimed at "inspired interpretation of authoritative text ... for the post-exilic community." Beentjes then concludes his essay with three statements that he has not proven or even really addressed in his paper: (1) the prophets of Chronicles are invented, (2) they are literary and not historical persons, and (3) the speeches are "the most appropriate place to look for the Chronicler’s own theological convictions and accents" (53). Whether right or wrong, only the third point—and then only briefly on pp. 49-50—has any basis from within the article itself. Actually, all three seem to point back to the introduction where Beentjes briefly summarizes scholarship that proceeds his own analysis. One would have expected the conclusion to make an explicit statement that the Chr used classical prophetic texts with the appropriate qualifications pertinent to his opinion on the matter as well as some sort of a statement of relevance of this point to understanding the book of Chronicles. However, this is not the case.
It is worth pointing out one more problem with the paper. The title of the paper is "Prophets in the Book of Chronicles." Yet, Beentjes only really examines one prophet, Azariah, whom he actually points out at the end of his article is not a prophet but rather an "inspired messenger" (53-54). Furthermore, Beentjes makes no attempt to link his discussion of Azariah’s speech to any of the other "fourteen prophetical speeches" or any other appearances of prophets in the book. Certainly, there is little to take from Beentjes article that would help in understanding, e.g., the role of Nathan in 1 Chronicles 17. "Azariah’s Speech in the Book of Chronicles" would have been a much more appropriate title for this paper.
In contrast to Beentjes, Van Rooy, in his article "Prophet and Society in the Persian Period According to Chronicles," provides a much more thoroughgoing and insightful overview of the phenomenon of prophets in Chronicles. Some of his insights include:
"In Chronicles an attempt is ... made to connect Levites and prophets." This is perhaps the most provocative of Van Rooy’s insights. He argues, based on passages such as 1 Chr 25:1-3, 1 Chr 25:4-6, 1 Chr 26:28, 2 Chr 20:13-23, 2 Chr 20:14-17, 2 Chr 29:25, 2 Chr 34:30 // 2 Kgs 23:3, and 2 Chr 35:15, that Levites performed prophetic functions and that many of their cultic functions "worked through prophetic inspiration" (176).
"Prophets are transformed into historians in Chronicles" (174). Van Rooy, with reference to Blenkinsopp, asserts that the references to prophetic works in regnal summaries suggests "the idea that prophets were regarded at that point as writers of historical books" (174).
"The Chronicler calls only one person a prophet in every king’s reign. Other prophetic figures receive titles such as seer" (175). This point has a bearing on our discussion of 2 Chronicles 25 where the Chr employs the terms "man of God" and "prophet." Van Rooy’s evidence confirms that the two titles are a reflection of a common Tendenz in Chronicles and differentiate the "prophet" as a different person from the "man of God" and also implies that the "prophet" was probably a position in the Chr’s view formerly associated with royal court.
"They [Prophets] were the guardians of the theocracy" (175). Van Rooy goes on to connect this role with the Chr’s doctrine of reward and punishment. The prophets, in effect, preserved the reign of God by subjecting the actions of the king to a system of reward and punishment.
Van Rooy argues that the change in the depiction of prophets from the DtrH to the ChrH reflects a change in the role of prophets in the respective communities behind the production of these texts. In addition, Van Rooy suggests that the Chr’s depiction of prophets might also stand in opposition to a movement in the Persian period that began to associate prophecy with apocalypticism.
OakTree Software, Inc. 498 Palm Springs Drive, Suite 100, Altamonte Springs, FL 32701, 2001. http://www.accordancebible.com. (877) 339-5855.
"Essential" is an adjective that definitely applies to this Accordance-compatible add-on CD-ROM. The Essential IVP Reference Collection is a great collection of seventeen reference works:
The collection is available direct from OakTree and direct from InterVarsity Press for an amazingly low price of $144 or even lower if you find it on sale; and, at Amazon.com for a price of $122.40. Consider this... the print editions of the first five dictionaries in this list sell for $30-50 each. To say you get value with this collection is an horrible understatement.
While all of these resources are evangelical Christian in orientation and so quite conservative, the scholarship is excellent and usually balanced. Still, users should be aware that conservative, often dogmatic thinking pervades some of the texts, which may frustrate or please depending on your theological orientation. One of the primary rationales behind Hard Sayings of the Bible, e.g., is a harmonization or justification of biblical contradictions, inconsistencies, and errors as a defense for the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy.
The dictionaries in this collection are tremendous resources due to their specific foci, which makes them valuable to users who may already own Bible dictionaries for Accordance, even owners of Anchor Bible Dictionary and/or the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. The entries in these dictionaries are often unique, collecting and summarizing scholarship otherwise available only in a variety of disparate journal articles and monographs not readily accessible to most people. It is very convenient to have this information in a searchable, Accordance-compatible format.
This collection also goes a long way towards filling a noticeable void that had existed in the Accordance library, i.e. the lack of quality, contemporary secondary resources. The Bible Background Commentaries and the New Bible Commentary provide up-to-date commentary on Scripture that will benefit any Bible readers. Unfortunately, the Bible Background Commentaries do not properly cite the ancient Near Eastern parallels and literature that are used to contextualize the biblical text. This, however, is not OakTree’s fault.
The New Bible Atlas is a great complement to the Accordance Bible Atlas. The Accordance Bible Atlas, though clearly an unparalleled resource, does not provide very attractive pictures for printing and PowerPoint presentations. The maps in the New Bible Atlas, on the other hand, are excellent for this purpose. There are also numerous maps that provide information unavailable in the Accordance Bible Atlas, e.g. climatological maps, resource maps, sub-terranean maps, maps of palaces and other ancient Near Eastern buildings. Each map is supported by short articles and in some cases pictures.
Finally, many users may want to know how OakTree’s implementation of the Essential IVP Reference Collection compares to the edition available in Logos Series X. Obviously, the content is the same but, notwithstanding the differences in the core programs, OakTree has added considerable value to their edition with extensive hyperlinking that does not appear in the Logos version. The hyperlinking makes it easy to negotiate through a study session and move back and forth through related articles and concepts with greater versatility. This is typical of OakTree’s commitment to creating added-value texts. In short, users can rest assured that they are getting great resources at their best.
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