I'm still digging into Psalm 102 for my upcoming SBL paper. Today I left the dusty library shelves and turned instead to a few online resources. Commentators of note include:

• Augustine (and here and here in the Confessions)
• Thomas (OK, not yet to 102, but mentioned here etc)
• Calvin (esp here and here; cf Gn 36, 25, Ex 15, 32, Lam 5, Is 16, 29, 37, 49, 51, 54, 63, 66, Jonah, Dn 2, 7, Jer 19, 31, Ps 22, 51, 72, 114, 109, and here, here, here, etc)
• Adolf Harnack on Athanasius
• Metered by Isaac Watts
• Calvin and Augustine are also here

I'll keep looking, of course.

Tags: Psalms, PhD

From what I hear the SBL session in honor of Brevard Childs is coming together well. Thus far Christopher Seitz, Gary Anderson, Richard Hays, Ellen Davis, Ephraim Radner (now here), David Peterson, and Kavin Rowe are involved. Their responses will be 7-10 minutes, from NT, Theology, OT, Reception History, and other angles.

Tags: Childs, Canon, PhD

I am slotted to give a paper in San Diego on 17 November 2007. My focus is on a few verses towards the middle of Psalm 102. Full details for the session, including links to abstracts, are as follows.

S17-108

Book of Psalms

11/17/2007
4:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Room: Windsor BC - GH

William Bellinger, Baylor University, Presiding

Daniel R. Driver, University of St. Andrews
For a Generation to Come: The Addressee of Psalm 102 in Reception and Recent Research (30 min)

Robert E. Wallace, Shorter College
Back to the Beginning: Yahweh as King, Moses as Mediator and Psalms 104-106 (30 min)

Judith Gärtner, Universität Hamburg
The Tora in Psalm 106 and Psalm 136 (30 min)

Jinkyu Kim, Nyack College
Strategic Arrangement of Royal Psalms in the Last Two Books of the Psalter (30 min)

Charles Rix, Drew University
Note the Silence: Reading Psalm 137 Through Messiaen and Bak (30 min)


Since my proposal was supposed to have a paragraph break in it, and since what else is a blog for?, and since it'll be good to keep the thing out in front of me as November approaches, here's my proposal/abstract:

In recent years, some attention has been paid to Psalm 102 by scholars interested in the canon’s final form, though in very different ways. Odil Steck, for instance, has argued not just that the psalm be read as a whole (contra an older form-critical understanding), but that its singularity be explained with reference to a body of scripture largely extant at the time of its composition. For him, the psalm arises at a late redactional phase in the formation of the canon, testifying to the confluence of distinctive prophetic and sapiential streams of tradition. Somewhat differently, Brevard Childs has discussed Psalm 102 as an instance of the authority scripture increasingly accrued in textualized form: it was “recorded for a generation to come” (19a). Despite fairly substantial disagreements in a number of areas—including about the place of intentionality as such—Steck and Childs agree that the intended audience is in the remote future. On analogy with late prophecy, perhaps, the generation addressed is not near, but distant; in Steck’s word, the psalm voices “Fernerwartung.”

The burden of the present paper is to query the history of reception of Psalm 102, particularly verse 19, to see whether there is any “family resemblance” (Childs) with these more recent interpretations. Which generations have been found in the psalmist’s purview? The results may have an important bearing on Childs’s program, which has long sought to hold the history of interpretation together with modern research (most recently, cf. The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture). If preoccupation with an original cultic context is a modern oddity, what can be said for the theory of a radicalized eschatology?

Obviously, the whole thing is kinda supposed to relate to the last chapter of my dissertation.

Tags: Childs, Psalms, PhD

It can take a while to find your legs again after a period of non-PhD-related reading. At the end of this week, with HP 7 long behind me, and a list of things to grab at the library starting Monday, I'm finding my stride again. This week I enjoyed dabbling in or pushing through:

*Brandt, Peter. Endgestalten des Kanons: Das Arrangement der Schriften Israels in der jüdischen und christlichen Bibel. Bonner biblische Beiträge 131. Berlin: Philo, 2001.
*Dohmen, Christoph. Exodus 19–40. Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Alten Testament Freiburg/Basel/Vienna: Herder, 2004.
*———. Die Bibel und ihre Auslegung. 3rd, revised edition. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006.
*Levin, Christoph. Das Alte Testament. 3rd, revised edition. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006.
*MacDonald, Neil B. Metaphysics and the God of Israel: Systematic Theology of the Old and New Testaments. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.

With a little French practice thrown in each day, it starts to feel like I'm making headway again. I've been saying I'll be done in a year for how many months now?

Tags: PhD

Brevard Childs died on Saturday, 23 June 2007, in New Haven. He sustained injuries from a bad fall in a few days earlier from which he was unable to recover. Born 2 September 1923, he was 83 years old.

The following brief biography is excerpted from Gerald Sheppard, "Childs, Brevard (B. 1923)," in Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters (ed. Donald K. McKim; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 575-584. The correction in the first line is courtesy of C. R. Seitz.

Childs grew up in Southern Presbyterian churches [sic—He was baptised Episcopalian in Columbia SC. It was only when he moved north to Queens (a consequence of his father's ill health) that the family attended the Presbyterian Church. He and Ann attended an anglican church in Cambridge.] and studied at the University of Michigan (A.B. and M.A.). After serving in the army in Europe during World War II, he earned his B.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary before pursuing a doctorate at the University of Basel, Switzerland. At Basel Childs studied Old Testament with Walther Eichrodt, among others. In addition to his studies in Basel, he took advantage of Near Eastern scholarship at Heidelberg University.

In Basel Childs met his wife, Ann, who had attended some of Karl Barth's lectures with him. This was an exciting period for theological study. Besides the vigorous table talk among the visiting and local students, inexpensively published journals of essays and debates between theologians, biblical scholars and historians further stimulated the intellectual atmosphere.

At the University of Basel Childs completed his dissertation on the problem of myth in the opening chapters of Genesis just at the the time when Walter Baumgartner replaced Eichrodt as the senior Old Testament scholar. Creating consternation at the time, Baumgartner informally refused to accept the methodology of Childs's dissertation, so Childs had to change his plans in order to undertake a full revision, now informed by a new grasp of form-critical analysis. That obligation helps explain why Childs became one of the leading tradition historians in North America. The revised dissertation, Der Mythos als theologische Problem im Alten Testaments (1953), was never published, though Childs circulated major portions of it under the title A Study of Myth in Genesis 1–11 (1955) among his wide network of English-speaking scholarly friends.

In 1954 Childs began teaching Old Testament at Mission House Seminary and in 1958 accepted a teaching position at Yale Divinity School...

Childs was the Sterling Professor of Divinity at Yale University, where he remained an emeritus professor for the duration of his life.

I met Childs breifly at his house in Cambridge last spring. He and Ann spoke fondly of their student days in Europe in the early 1950s, and Childs remembered in story his many “unforgettable teachers,” including von Rad, Zimmerli, Cullmann, Bornkamm and Barth. (Compare the prefaces to Myth, Memory, Exodus, and especially to IOTS, NTCI, OTTCC and BTONT.) Due in part to this training, he was able to bridge the gap between German and Anglo-Saxon scholarship as few ever have. His passing is marked with sadness not least because he was one of the last Old Testament specialists to control the entire field, Old and New. His readers frequently note how very much more he read than the rest of us.

Childs' work is among the most misplaced of any biblical scholar since Hermann Gunkel, except that in Gunkel's case the methods associated with him (Gunkel did not exactly approve of "form criticism"), at first controversial, soon won almost unanimous support. Childs wrote at a time when a broad consensus had ceased to be a possibility.

Childs spent a lifetime confronting the dissolution he experienced. As he explains in the preface to his landmark Introduction to the Old Testament at Scripture (1979),

Twenty-five years ago, when I returned home from four years of graduate study in Europe, the area within the field of the OT which held the least attraction for me was Introduction. I supposed that most of the major problems had already been resolved by the giants of the past. Even allowing for the inevitable process of refinement and modification, could one really expect anything new in this area? I was content to leave the drudgery of writing an Introduction to someone else with more Sitzfleisch.

Two decades of teaching have brought many changes in my perspective. Having experienced the demise of the Biblical Theology movement in America, the dissolution of the broad European consensus in which I was trained, and a widespread confusion regarding theological reflection in general, I began to realize that there was something fundamentally wrong with the foundations of the biblical discipline. It was not a question of improving on a source analysis, of discovering some unrecognized new genre, or of bringing a redactional layer into shaper focus. Rather, the crucial issue turned on one’s whole concept of the study of the Bible itself. I am now convinced that the relation between the historical critical study of the Bible and its theological use as religious literature within a community of faith and practice needs to be completely rethought. Minor adjustments are not only inadequate, but also conceal the extent of the dry rot.

Major controversy followed the publication of IOTS in 1979. Few were won over to the new approach, and a handful (some very prominent) insisted that an allegedly incoherent method stood in need of reconstruction. On the other hand, at a Yale lecture in the early 1980s, Rolf Rendtorff asked Childs to translate for the audience his reaction to IOTS: Es war als fielen mir die Schuppen von den Augen.

This anecdote is related by Christopher Seitz, who prominently among Childs' students has defended the sanity of the canonical approach (for the Rendtorff story see Seitz's essay in Canon and Biblical Interpretation, p84). Much like Gunkel's reception at an earlier time, however, it proved easier to assume that the challenge to the reigning order signaled more chaos than creation. As Machiavelli once wrote, "the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions."

Seitz is close to the mark, I think, when he writes of a later book (1992): "Childs's Biblical Theology may prove to be a book in search of an audience, and for that reason it will be judged by the widest variety of readers as learned but unsatisfactory and by an even smaller audience as the most brilliant proposal for theological exegesis offered in recent memory, but one unlikely to gain the sort of foothold necessary to transform the church in its use of scripture."

It is still much to early to assess the significance of Childs' long and productive career. I know a few who place themselves in the second, smaller group—some who have passed through St Andrews in recent years. I myself came to the controversy late, and I maintain hope that many more in my generation will avail themselves of the immense learning and insight on offer in Childs' work. Like me, more may come to wonder about the contents of the book (on the NT again!) Childs never had the time to complete, or failing that, to recognize the complexity and enormity of the task he undertook as a Christian exegete.

The funeral service will be held this coming Saturday, with and family and close friends in attendance.

At this time our thoughts and prayers are with Ann, the family, their close friends. Brevard Childs is lamented for the acumen and memory that passes with him. His personal warmth, gentleness, and charity make the loss sadder still. May his memory be for a blessing.

Tags: Childs, PhD

Listed here are links to other online mentions of Childs' passing. Some include personal reminiscences. I have artificially set the date and time back, obviously, and for a time I will add links as they multiply.

In the Blogosphere

Stephen Cook :: Prayers Requested for Prof. Brevard S. Childs
Kevin Wilson :: In Memorium: Brevard Childs
Stephen Cook :: Sad Announcement :: Loss of True Giant :: More Details
Kendall Harmon :: Brevard Childs RIP :: including a comment by Ephraim Radner
Jim West :: Brevard Childs has Died
Airton José da Silva :: Sobre Brevard Childs, que faleceu ontem
Benjamin Myers :: Brevard Childs
Christopher Heard :: R.I.P. Brevard Childs
Charles Halson :: In Memoriam, Brevard Childs
Graham @ Leaving Münster :: Brevard Childs - Rest in Peace
Michael Westmoreland-White :: R.I.P. Brevard S. Childs (1923-2007)
Scott Clark :: Brevard S. Childs
Jim Davila :: Brevard Childs
Justin Taylor :: Brevard Childs (1923-2007)
Andy Goodliff :: Brevard Childs (1923-2007)
Claude Mariottini :: Brevard Childs
Peter Matthews :: Brevard Childs 1923-2007
Henry Neufeld :: In Memory
Jason :: Brevard Childs Died
Michael J. G. Pahls :: Brevard Springs Childs (1923-2007)
Richard Floyd :: Personal Reflections on the Death of Brevard Childs
*I have ceased to update blog posts. If you want to add another, please paste the URL in the comments.*

Official Notices and Obituaries

Frank Brown :: Yale Divinity School Announcement
Georg Steins :: Universität Osnabrück (posted on this site)
Christopher Seitz :: SBL Obituary, Brevard S. Childs 1923-2007 (excerpted here)

Tags: PhD, Childs

I've just complete a (bloated) 20K word chapter on Childs and midrash, part of which I'll be presenting in a seminar next Wednesday. I've titled the section I'm presenting "The Mystery of Israel" (a phrases from Biblical Theology in Crisis).

The full title of the piece is something like: "Midrash, Kanonbewußtsein, and the Mystery of Israel."

It's good to get underway again.

Tags: Childs, PhD, Midrash

I ran across this list of some audio recordings of Childs that are not on my bibliography. I saw some of these in another bibliography once (I forget which just now) and couldn't be bothered to add them to mine. Maybe later.

The Yale site hosts an array of unpublished material from Hans Frei (see here for the full Yale holdings), among others, if you haven't discovered this yet (noted in Mike Higton's recent book). Very helpful.

Tags: Childs, PhD

This moment is brought to you in part by Sony Ericsson.

Earlier this week I read through an unpublished dissertation on Childs, one which is cited surprisingly often cited in the literature on Childs. Our library didn't have it, so I had to get it through Inter Library Loans. It came as microfiche.

Technology Moment 1: This bit of analog technology permits a person to store large amounts of information—in this case 250 odd sheets of double spaced typing paper—on small, transportable bits of plastic. Thus, after waiting a few weeks for processing, a post-card sized letter shows up which, when combined in the right way with an apparatus that is only slightly larger than six or so bound dissertations stacked one on top of another, allows the interested party to read the material in question.

It's very convenient, except that the blotches and imperfections in the film are magnified along with the words you want to read. The lighting mechanism is uneven and fairly noisy (fan), too—imagine sitting next to an old overhead projector if you've never had this technology experience before—though the fan helps drown out distractions, and the whole machine can keep you slightly warmer in a cold corner of some library. I also appreciated the fact that it was impossible for me to stick post-it notes anywhere in the text, which is now an obsessive habit.

Technology Moment 2: I took a few notes as I went along, but I didn't really feel like copying down a paragraph that conveniently summarized a (simplistic) thesis. So I whipped out my phone—a recent upgrade which takes low-grade photos—and snapped this (bottom half of page 197, you can just make out):



The audio equivalent would be, I suppose, using your phone to record a 78 on a turntable. The analog feels pure, somehow. Seems to offer something salutary, as nostalgia does. (I felt like an old-school researcher!) In this case, the blotches help redeem the content.

PS, Now that I've resized the thing for the blog, and written about it, it would actually have been faster to copy down the paragraph by hand.

PPS, On the other hand, if you multiply the extra time taken by the physical space I've taken (not counting the physical space that was already being taken up by camera phone or computer), you multiply by 0. The negation of time by space is one of the broadest appeals of the digital revolution. It is also its menace. Blogging is the attempt to counteract the felt diminishment in size by running the other term as close to infinity as possible. Almost zero times almost infinity is still something, right?

On a metaphorical note, if you wonder why I'm not in the blogosphere much lately it's because I'm reviewing my multiplication tables, working with whole numbers that do not exceed the sum of my (very physical and library-chilled) digits.

Tags: PhD, Humor

Martin Amis reminded me recently that good reviews stand on their own. You do not have to read Harold Bloom on the Jahwist before you can appreciate Chris Seitz's response. Pacy frequently points to superficiality, but not always, as Seitz gives us occasion to observe:

The disturbing superficiality of the discussion here and at other points gives the book a kind of "sound-bite" quality, like a half-hour TV program on how to perform brain surgery.

Read (and enjoy) the full review to find out how complex questions of theological exegesis can be as much as to see how The Book of J, "at the cost of slaying both Moses and God," purchases "a Yahwist who turns out to be nothing more than the mirror image of two clever 20th-century readers."

Tags: PhD

My supervisor, Nathan MacDonald, has an article by this title in the latest issue of Vetus Testamentum (the journal, not the site). Here's an abstract:

It is generally accepted that the first speech of Moses in Deuteronomy (i 1-iv 40) is not of one piece, and that a clear distinction needs to be recognized between the rhetorical parenesis of chapter iv and the narrative recapitulation in chapters i-iii. This analysis has even proved determinative for scholars interested in the final form of the biblical text, despite the recognition that the chapters are portrayed canonically as Moses's first speech. A lack of substantive thematic connections between the two parts of the speech prevents any attempt to trace unity across the whole. This article argues that the consensus on the literary history of these chapters may be more problematic than commonly thought. Further, it is proposed that common to both the narrative and the parenetic sections of Moses's first speech are the complex interrelationship between the themes of divine presence, human obedience, election and the land.

If you or yours has a subscription to Vetus Testamentum, you can read the full article here.

Tags: PhD

I updated the Childs bibliography to reflect all the titles by Childs that are available online. So far I know of four books and four articles. Please let me know if you find others!

UPDATE: So there's far more Childs online than I ever imagined! So far I've got 4 books, 12 articles, and 33 reviews. New links to all of this are now up. Check it out, then, if you're working on Childs, thank me profusely. Or if you notice any omissions or mistakes, let me know.

UPDATE: OK, this is getting insane. I now have four books, nineteen articles, and forty (!) reviews. The reviews are particularly impressive. As far as I know, the last review Childs wrote was in 1992, and the first was in 1958. I count 52 reviews here, which means 77% of his reviews are online. Did I say that was before 1992?! Along the way, I discovered about a dozen other reviews that I had not know about (I'll post them tomorrow). That will push the final mark for reviews online to 81%. Who are these people!?

Tags: PhD

I was browsing the online text of the three SEAD essays (see previous post), and I soon discovered that the online text is not always identical to the printed text.

For example, "Sheer rot!" is deleted from third-to-last paragraph of the essay "Discrete Witness" in the printed edition (p62). It would be interesting to know if there were other such omissions!

Tags: PhD

For a while now I've lamented the loss of three papers Childs gave in 1997, which until recently had been available online. They have been printed in a volume titled The Rule of Faith:


Though I now own this volume, it's convenient to have the text in a searchable format. Today (I don't know why not before) it finally occurred to me to look on the WayBack Machine. Sure enough, the essays are still there. If you're interested, browse the full text of:

Childs, Brevard. "Jesus Christ the Lord and the Scriptures of the Church." Pages 1-12 in Rule of Faith. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishers, 1998.
———. "The Nature of the Christian Bible: One Book, Two Testaments." Pages 115-125 in Rule of Faith. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishers, 1998.
———. "The One Gospel in Four Witnesses." Pages 51-62 in Rule of Faith. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishers, 1998.

I've updated the Childs bibliography with the same links. They're all on the same page, so you'll have to scroll down for two and three.

I was also pleased to see that other essays by three St Mary's professors are there, too, by Chris Seitz, Richard Bauckham, and Trevor Hart.

Tags: PhD

James Luther Mays has been (among other things) reviewing Childs for a long time. He has a review of IOTS in the HBT volume of 1980, and as I've just discovered, he also has a review of Childs' 2004 Struggle which is available online. Read the review here.

To select just one comment:

It is obvious from the structure of the book that in Childs’ view the principal issues and practices of Christian hermeneutics were developed in the patristic period, debated and refined in the medieval, and blurred in the modern as the genre of the literature as scripture began to lose its defining role in the presuppositions of its interpreters.

I especially agree with the first clause. I think Childs gets his hermeneutic from the patristic period very early on—at least by 1972—and I also think most of his critics still fail to see the full significance of this. That's what I'll be arguing, anyway.

While I'm at it, here are two other online reviews of Struggle, via RBL: see here and here.

Tags: PhD

I also just discovered that Mark Brett's and Paul Noble's books about Childs are available at Google Books, too. I'm preparing to write on these titles. The other major reconstruction of Childs, by Steins, is not available online. However, if your German's up to speed you can see an article he wrote after the book which summarizes the main points, here.

Tags: PhD

As if you needed James to tell you that I'm a sporadic blogger! That's largely why I moved from blogspot to .Mac, where I can post content and then leave it alone for weeks on end. Kind of him to recommend this site anyway.

So I picked up John Barton's (or at Wiki) Reading the Old Testament again yesterday and am now reading it for the second time. It's proving to be an interesting exercise in that it was one of the first books I read at St Andrews, before I'd decided to definitely pursue the PhD. (The book is now in a second, expanded edition—first 1984, then 1996—but I do not have this available to me yet.) It was in a course with James, as it happens.

I've been working in Childs quite a bit since that first reading, and one of the things that seems so clear to me now is how much Barton takes Barr's 1980 criticism of IOTS on board. Barr worried that the fundamentalists would misuse Childs. Barton's case of the "disappearing redactor" similarly blurs the distinctiveness of Childs' actual position with the likes of G Wenham (cf. "The Coherence of the Flood Narrative," VT 20, 1978), and even worse, with "fundamentalist opponents of non-conservative biblical criticism" for whom, "when the magic box that contained the redactor is opened, not only is the redactor gone, but Moses himself has stepped into his shoes: a very frightening prospect indeed for a higher critic of any kind" (p57 in 1984 edition, but apparently the same in 1996).

As Fergus Kerr quipped in a seminar last week, it is always very instructive to ask who or what a thinker is afraid of.

For the rest of you who aren't particularly bothered what one OT guy said about another, I hope your weekend is as sunny as ours is shaping up to be.

Tags: PhD

Eleven days ago I was going to call this post "Where I've Been: One Week Ago", but now it's already 2 weeks since I was making my way back from Cambridge. This has been one hectic spring. However, I've landed on my feet this Friday afternoon, and I have enough time left in it to write a quick post about my trip south before I have to dash off to a "retreat" in Glen Esk this weekend.

Cambridge is amazing. Or at least it is if you're into books. I'd heard about Tyndale House as the third best biblical studies library in the world, and as (according to the Duke of Edinburgh) the best kept secret in Cambridge. I've not yet been to the Ecole Biblique or the Vatican library, nor do I know Cambridge well enough to confirm or deny either of these claims. But I can say this: I was very glad to get a day desk at the Tyndale House library so I could read into the night, and have a home base for the week. The people there were kind and helpful. Yet impressive as its holdings are for a specialist library, its real advantage is in being just three blocks away from the Cambridge University Library, and with the Divinity Faculty Library directly in between.

I've never experienced anything like it. In the morning I'd read an important-looking source that I'd found the day before. In the afternoon, I'd dash from library to library, tracking down promising leads from the footnotes. In the end I spent a small fortune on photocopying, and I put my hands on dozens of books that I normally would have had to wait weeks to get through inter-library loans. I'm still a little dizzy.

I also spent part of an afternoon with the Damascus Document and a few other manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah. I was pleased that I could still read most of what I'd read with Jim Davila one year ago.

Of course, the whole purpose of the trip was to meet Brevard Childs, who was in residence there at the time. This privilege will almost certainly surpass the others in my memory. I've been a bit puzzled what to say about that afternoon in this post, though. I've decided to keep my comments rather limited.

Two things impressed me about his demeanor. First, he was impressively magnanimous towards scholars with whom I know he disagrees. Second, he remains a remarkably agile thinker for an octogenarian. In the end I felt I'd come into contact with an era of scholarship that no longer exists. He trained in Germany under that robust generation of post-war Old Testament scholars (he sat under both Eichrodt and von Rad). And more than simply offering reminiscences of days gone by, I sensed that I was in the presence of the person who keeps that tradition alive, probably more than anybody else still living.

The only other thing I should mention about the trip to Cambridge is the colleague who accompanied me. My thanks to Gary for making the trip lively and memorable in the evenings, at mealtimes, on the train, and for exploring the University Library's special collections in tandem.

OK, I'm off.

Tags: Personal, Childs, PhD

Two weeks ago, I read some books in preparation for a research trip to Cambridge (last week—I'll post on that soon enough).

I finished a monster book, and read two journals dedicated to reviewing it.

Upon completing it, I thought I might change the exegetical focus of my thesis to Deuteronomy. I've not made up my mind on that one yet.


Then I read this:

It's a good deal more approachable than IOTS, particularly if you're not invested in the questions of critical scholarship. It rehearses some of the same themes, but topically this time rather than book by book.


Finally, I read:

Magisterial comes to mind. It's the sort of thing one could only write towards the end of a very impressive career, I think. It forms a real challenge to OT scholarship, and I have the feeling I'll be wrestling, or struggling, for a long while yet to know what to make of it, in practical terms.


You can see where these titles fit in Childs' career here.

Tags: PhD

The blog's been fairly quiet lately, I know. But that means I've been busy with other things, not excluding research.

I've progressed a little further in my reading of Childs, for one thing. I recently finished his Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (London: SCM Press, 1979), as well as the two journals completely dedicated to reviewing it (one JSOT, the other HBT, both in 1980), and have moved into the mid-1980s.

There's obviously quite a lot to be said about such a mammoth volume, so I won't even try to sum up now. However, there's one great line I want to quote. In response to the accusation that his use of the term "canon" is "imprecise, unanalytical, and encompasses a variety of different phenomena"—an accusation made as early as 1980—Childs gives this reply:

"I feel that the complexity of the process being described within the O.T. has been underestimated, and that one is asking for an algebraic solution to a problem requiring calculus."

Well put!

Now if you're working thorough some of Childs yourself, I should warn you that IOTS may not be as hard as calculus, but it assumes a pretty sizable background knowledge of critical discourse on the OT. OTTCC (Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context, SCM, 1985) might be an easier place to start.

But I wouldn't want to turn you away from IOTS either. He adumbrates a remarkable reconstrual of the results of critical research, one that is still only seldom appreciated. And in view of the full scope of his career, the degree to which he achieves his goal (stated clearly in the first pages of the 1980 HBT response to reviewers) of doing enough footwork to earn the right to do full-on biblical theology, both OT and NT, is simply astounding. He's established himself as a giant who can only be compared with the likes of a Gunkel or a von Rad.

And if you've read past all that, I'll announce now that an introduction has been made on my behalf and I'll be traveling to Cambridge to interview the octogenarian in the first week of April. I'm jittery with excitement, and maybe too much coffee.

Tags: Childs, Canon, PhD

I don't suppose you've ever been sitting at home on an evening, quietly reading away, when you're struck by the urgent need to read part of Jubilees. That's exactly what happened to me last night, and I was pleased to find Peter Kirby's Early Jewish Writings online, disappointed that his link to the text had rotted, but was happy again to find a different host of the R. H. Charles translation. (The advantage of this site over the link provided on Wikipedia, which appears to be the new destination for Kirby's link, is that it has page numbers, so can be cited in a pinch.)

My emotions have stabilized this morning, back at my desk, now that I have have the O. S. Winermute translation (in Charlesworth, Vol 2) for comparison. Still, I feel somewhat chastened at the thought of: (a) the link rot I must have caused when I rashly deleted my old blog at the start of this month, and (b) the upkeep involved in making a good web page. Kirby's page is still an impressive online resource, but the internet is a volatile medium. And given the limits of public domain, understandably even with translations of ancient texts, online resources like these are almost invariably out of date.

Ah, the joys and perils of the world wide web.

Tags: PhD

Carla informs me of two upcoming Enoch events (posted on g-megillot), both involving Gabriele Boccaccini.

First: "A New Generation of Enochic Studies," at the University of Michigan, May 2-4, 2006

Second: The Fourth International Enoch Seminar, in Camaldoli, Italy, July 9-11, 2007

I wouldn't be able to make the first (if it's even open to me), but the summer following sounds like a great reason to go back to Italy. I would be excited to hear from anybody attending the U Michigan conference in a few months.

Boccaccini's recent work with Enoch is turning out to be a hot potato, it seems. Two titles of his are on my current reading shelf as they pertain to the Enochic Judaism course I'm auditing this semester:





Tags: PhD

My copy of the new Nickelsburg/VanderKam translation of 1 Enoch arrived in the mail this morning, just in time to reread The Book of the Watchers (chapters 1-36) before my course in Enochic Judaism at 2.00 pm.



Jim Davila mentioned the translation recently (here). Grant Macaskill (lecturer for Enochic Judaism) has been showing us marvelous things out of Nickelsburg's 1 Enoch commentary (Hermeneia, 2001), but until I get a bit more serious about working on 1 Enoch, this volume remains out of my price range. The paperback will be a good substitute for the meanwhile.

So far, I like the headings that outline the text according to the authors' analytical readings. It makes it easy to find my way around as I'm getting to know the text. Also, the cover photo of 4QEn^c i 6 looks really good next to my new copy of Rosenthal's Grammar of Biblical Aramaic, which I'm also finding my way around in at present, and which features a photo of 4QDan^b.

Tags: PhD

That last post was pretty long, which might mean it was a waste of time considering the fact that almost nobody's reading my resuscitated blog yet. But I guess it's OK if somebody's cyber-thoughts remain private for once.

Anyway, the site that hosts the Scott Swanson article (cf. the long post) has more than just the one piece. There are several other resources on typology.

Bible Research is edited by Michael Marlowe, self-described as "theologically … conservative and Reformed." I consider myself neither, but there appear to be enough points of contact with my understanding of biblical theology that I shall have a second look. Some other night.

Tags: PhD, Figura

Today I posted a summary of Chapter 2 of my thesis, Georg Steins’ Intertextual Alternative to Brevard Childs [page no longer exists, but see research overview now; —DRD, 07.2007], along with some implications of my results for future research.

As I added the links, I kept wondering about the wisdom of making my work so public at this point in time. Does it matter that this site says "© 2006 D. R. Driver" at the bottom of every page? Am I vulnerable for criticizing well-established scholars in an informal context? I'm not exactly handing out my work, but I am making the scope of my research relatively plain. I would w