Are believers better exegetes than non-believers?
Charles on his blog BibleX has a fascinating quote, which suggests that the believer might be a better exegete than a non-believer:
“There are differences of opinion among scholars about whether being aloof and detached is a better way to read ancient texts without bias, or whether being profoundly interested and passionate about getting at the truth about a text better propels one toward the goal of understanding the Bible. In my view, as long as you can take into account your own predilections, the latter orientation is more likely to produce an accurate result, not least because the person actually cares about the outcome and is willing to go the extra mile to get to the bottom of things…” Ben Witherington III, Is There a Doctor in the House? An Insider’s Story and Advice on Becoming a Biblical Scholar (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 128.
As a Reformed Christian, I believe that both non-believers and believers are capable of reading and exegeting the text well. God has, after all, given all people the ability to think and make logical conclusions based on the information that is available. Furthermore, presuppositions are a challenge and potential hinderance for everyone who approaches the text, and they become more problematic the more one denies their existence and the more extreme one’s position is, whether it be fundamentalist or emphatically anti-Christian.
Nonetheless, there is something profound about realizing that it is Christians who have the most invested in the text. As such, we should be the ones working the hardest to read it well – as a means of honouring the One who orchestrated the text. As a means of challenging our presuppositions so that we can read it well, we ought to be listening well to non-Christians who question the standard Christian rhetoric. At the same time, we should also question scholarship that adamantly tries to deny or minimize the Christian traditions in reading a text, as this denial indicates a rejection of the importance of the text and its own internal claim for meaning within the Christian tradition.
The Dangers of studying Ezekiel
Somewhat recently Douglas Mangham placed on his blog the following quote from the Talmud about studying Ezekiel:
“The rabbis taught: It happened once that a certain child, who was reading in his teacher’s house in the Book of Ezekiel, was pondering over ‘Hashmal, and there came out fire from ‘Hashmal and burnt him, and they sought in consequence to conceal the Book of Ezekiel. (b. Hagigah 13a)”
Mangham goes on further to say: “The rabbis prohibited anyone under age 30 from studying Ezekiel because of this incident. One needed to be sufficiently mature in the study of Torah before they would expound the secrets of Ezekiel 1, especially the divine chariot. So if your Bible reading plan takes you through Ezekiel, be careful and you may want to implement the buddy system. Never read alone. Just in case.”
Seeing as I spend much of my time studying the book of Ezekiel, I had to smile at the warning. At the same time…
A group of pastors in the area also recently preached on Ezekiel. I heard that some of the older and more experienced pastors pulled out of the preaching series. They did not feel that they could take on the book of Ezekiel.
It makes me wonder sometimes who I am to say something about Ezekiel- or even if I’ll like what I discover in the book. It is a dangerous book – it presents a God who is complicated and doesn’t relate to His people in ways that we expect. In that way, it challenges our assumptions, but I don’t see that so much as dangerous – instead it seems healthy. What good is a biblical understanding that is never challenged and never grows? And what do you really have on a God who is simple to understand?
I have been approved to present a paper on Ezekiel 10 at the upcoming Society of Biblical Literature Meeting (July 2011) in London during the Ezekiel section.
The following is the summary for my presentation:
The Vision in Ezekiel 10: Chaos in the Message
The vision in Ezekiel 10 presents a chaotic picture of cherubim, wings and wheels with the glory of the LORD and the person of Ezekiel found in the middle of the chaos. The chaos is illustrated further in the syntax of the passage in the Masoretic text. This is shown in verses 9-13 and verses 15-19. In verses 9-13 it is frequently not clear when the third masculine plural pronoun relates to the wheels and when to the cherubim. In verses 15-19 the identical verbal form of (way)ya’amod is used in verses 18-19. In verse 18, the subject appears to be the same as that of the previous verb: ‘the glory of the LORD’. Verses 19-20 are an expanded version of verse 15, with ‘the cherubim’ being the clear subject. The question then is what the repeat of (way)ya’amod, with no identified subject, is doing at the end of verse 19. These examples raise questions about coherence, redaction and rhetoric in the text: questions which have not been systematically addressed by the literature. My argument is that by seeing the mainline in this text as being made up of not just one mainline but of multiple mainlines, one can see a rhetorical pattern in the text that also takes the syntax into account. Furthermore, this complexity in syntax, instead of hindering the reader, can actually reinforce the message of the text, which presents a confusing and complex vision.
Ezekiel 23 – Thoughts on its explicitness
I was recently pointed to David Ker’s blog entry on Ezekiel 23 – a passage I find fascinating on account of its rather shocking nature. In my analysis of Ezekiel, chapter 23 being a long chapter, it cost me at least a week’s work, and with its explicitness, it wasn’t pleasant work. That the word of God would use such a jarring language for his people is something that has stuck with me. It gives me pause as to what depths God’s people had sunk to so that this was a way to reach them – and it gives me pause to what God’s people are up to now that makes us so often ignore this passage and the messiness in it.
The following is a brief excerpt from David Ker’s thoughts on Ezekiel 23:
“…When I was a little boy in Sunday School this was one of our favorite chapters. My buddies and I, we gravitated to this chapter, verse 20 in particular, and snickered. How did we even find the verse? Maybe like dirty jokes, naughty bits of the Bible are passed down from older boys to the younger.
The language of Ezekiel 23 is wildly inappropriate for a sacred text. Would Ezekiel 23 pass Paul’s “whatsoever things” test in Philippians 4:8?
The context of this chapter is a long and detailed denunciation of Israel and Judah for their idolatry imported from Egypt and their political alliances with neighboring countries. Note well that this isn’t a story told by Ezekiel, this is him verbatim reporting “the word of the Lord.” So God is talking here and he uses some really shocking sexual vocabulary. Breasts are squeezed. Men’s genitals and their functions are described in vivid imagery….”
Publishing to what end…
In a desire to publish more in different places and different ways, I’ve semi-committed to helping out with Logos project of an online Bible dictionary.
To read more about the project Chris Brady does a great job of raising questions of whether the project is a good one – and whether the compensation is reasonable.
I’m using the project as a means to get me more used to writing lots again and to have an incentive to do some research on a number of topics that are related to my own research; publishing in English and making connections with Bible software folk are also positive things.
I’ll let you know how it goes. I do have to say that I’m a bit disappointed with my contact in the project thus far – the amount of interest extended regarding my knowledge and interests makes me question whether it is actually valued – or if it is only my willingness to commit to cheap labour that is valued?
Religion and Tourism
I had a conversation this evening over religion and tourism, in response to a recently seen book on this topic. When I first put the two words together, I couldn’t help but think of how the hotels in Bethelehem are full at this time of year. If you’re going to travel, why not celebrate Christmas by making a pilgrimage to the place where it was all supposed to begin?
My own experience with and contemplation on the concept of religion and tourism actually relates mostly to the area of short-term missions. Having spent some time working with different mission organizations and having done some training for missions, I was frequently enough confronted with the question of how useful short-term missions actually are. The term ‘religious tourism’ was sometimes used in disdain to describe short-term missions – the only ones who seem to get any significant benefit from the mission trip are those who have gone on the trip: they’ve made good memories, felt good about themselves, and been exposed to a different world. The effectiveness of the help given, the value of the money spent (often significant amounts for the transportation of the volunteers), and whether the volunteers actually learned anything significant from the experience – these things are all questionable. Nonetheless, short-term mission experiences can be positive – and the ‘tourism’ involved is not necessarily negative. Being confronted with other cultures, other ways of doing religion, asking questions about the value, purpose, and/or effectiveness of the trip are all positive things.
But short-term missions, even as it raises questions about religion and tourism, is merely a small subset when it comes to religious tourism. According to wikipedia, “Religious tourism, also commonly referred to as faith tourism, is a form of tourism, whereby people of faith travel individually or in groups for pilgrimage, missionary, or leisure (fellowship) purposes.” When doing a quick search online via google, a report on students studying in Israel and a link to a monastery are among the top ten results. The question of how tourists, religious or not, relate to religious sites is also high among the results posted.
On the one hand, it is for me a fascinating topic to think further about. But, on the other hand, I wonder exactly where the discussion would go – and whether it would lead to any specific results or just general ponderings. After all, I’m a religious person – when I am a tourist, I don’t stop being less a Christian – and that affects all of what I do and how I look at things. Furthermore, a significant population of the world is religious to some degree and those who travel to their land/area are confronted, at least somewhat, with the religion that is there. Lastly, significant numbers of the sites of interest to tourists are connected to religions. A side point here is a question on what role religion plays when some of Europe’s churches have become more museums and cultural artificacts than religious buildings.
In any case, the discussion will continue around the dining table here.
Getting published
After working towards my Ph.D. for a number of years, I’m finally getting around to being published in my field. It feels like a confirmation – not just of the work I’ve been doing in the past few years, but also of my abilities and of my desire to join in conversation with others.
There is one ironical thing about the publishing, though. The publication is in dutch. I’m a native english speaker – and I’ve known/spoken dutch for only four years, mostly informally (as the academic stuff has been primarily English). So publishing in Dutch doesn’t seem like the most obvious way to begin, but I’m discovering that sometimes the conversation partners you’re given aren’t the most obvious ones. Perhaps it is also because it is not the obvious conversation partners that I have something extra/special to contribute.
The relevance of Redaction Criticism?
Having received much of my theological/biblical education in fairly conservative circles, I’ve noticed that I have certain assumptions in relation to redaction criticism (a short, adequate definition of redaction criticism can be found on Wikipedia. I’ve come to suspect that these assumptions come into conflict with the assumptions made by others who have had a different background.
During university, I’m pretty certain that I heard about redaction criticism and why it could be helpful. But growing up in a conservative Christian background with a limited understanding of what inerrancy in the text meant, I’m fairly certain that very little related to redaction criticism really registered.
In Seminary, we focused on exegesis and reading the text (itself). We wouldn’t have used those exact words – it seemed fairly obvious in these circles what exegesis involved. Questions about the authenticity of the text were discussed in relation to textual criticism in the New Testament, but seeing as the Old Testament had an established text (the Masoretic), this seemed somewhat irrelevant (although there was mention of how the Dead Sea Scrolls helped show where certain things might be missing in the text). We focused more on language and literary methods – with a bit of form criticism mixed in for good measure – all with the end goal of asking why the text was relevant to the person listening in the pew. We might have asked about the intention of the author, one small part of redaction criticism, but otherwise redaction criticism was generally ignored, and I understood it as being generally poor scholarship that was rather irrelevant to understanding the text.
And then I came to a secular university in Europe. All of a sudden, redaction criticism moved from being something I ignored to something that everyoned assumed was a relevant part of understanding the text. After the initial shock to the system, I started to recognize that my ignoring redaction criticism led me also to ignore valid questions about sections of the text whose writing and grammar did not seem to fit the established rules. Taking the text seriously meant looking also at the potential problems within the text; the unexpected repetitions, the switch in participants, illogical verbal tenses, and addition/subtraction of words helpful for understanding. These were all questions raised by redaction criticism.
Yet, some of my initial suspicions of poor scholarship remained. As much as I value the questions related to discrepancies that generally raised through redaction criticism, the solutions to these problem areas often feel a bit subjective. The answer to the problem often seems to be that it was the result redaction, a problematic solution as it doesn’t solve the question of why (or how) the redactor(s) left these problems in the text. And how does it help the reader? Well, the reader is advised to try to get into the head of the (long-dead) author/redactor, a rather speculative task. Or the reader is advised to take the redacted parts less seriously, looking for the original and paying attention to the evidence of other voices in the text. Unfortunately, there is limited consensus about what is a problematic section in the text and what is not, causing there to be very few areas in the text where a majority of scholars agree about what is redacted. That there are such a wide range of suggestions for what is redacted causes me to question how subjective the criteria is, and it makes me wonder how valuable it really is.
But in the end I feel I’m missing something about the value of redaction criticism, a value that seems to be an intrinsic assumption to many people involved in biblical work in continental Europe (and other places). It seems to be considered an important part of understanding the text, as it is important to understand the voices that are layered into the text. And to some degree, I can understand this desire to be objective about the text; it seems the best way to take the text seriously. But then wouldn’t one want to take the text that we now have, that has been affirmed by the Jews and the church for thousands of years, instead of a text we think is redacted? And in terms of looking objectively at the various voices in the text, I’d have to argue that the text itself wasn’t intended to be objective: the text was written to proclaim a message and, as such, certain voices are purposely silenced. Thus, taking the text seriously means also taking it seriously on its own terms.
Considering the relevance placed on redaction criticism, I feel like there must be a logical glitch in my argument and problems with redaction criticism, but I’m not sure where it is.
Intellectually Flabby
If you don’t exercise enough, you get out-of-shape (i.e., flabby). I feel a bit like that’s been happening with me intellectually. It’s not that I do nothing; it’s just that I don’t have all that many deadlines, and I’ve spent a lot of time in the last while away from my own research. I have been thinking, but it’s been about other things.
I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten lazy; as well, I’m super easily distracted and content to do little for longer periods of time. The following description that I found on Alan Jacobs’s blog, text patterns, resonates with me:
these days
Tom Bisell, from his book Extra Lives, an extended defense of the art of the video game and the value of spending large chunks of your life playing them:
Once upon a time, I wrote in the morning, jogged in the late afternoon, and spent most of my evenings reading. Once upon a time, I wrote off as unproductive those days in which I had managed to put down “only” a thousand words. Once upon a time, I played video games almost exclusively with friends. Once upon a time, I did occasionally binge on games, but these binges rarely had less than fortnight between them. Once upon a time, I was, more or less, content.
“Once upon a time” refers to relatively recent years (2001-2006) during which I wrote several books and published more than fifty pieces of magazine journalism and criticism — a total output of, give or take, 4,500 manuscript pages. I rarely felt very disciplined during this half decade, though I realize this admission invites accusations of disingenuousness or, failing that, a savage and justified beating. Obviously, I was disciplined. These days, however, I am lucky if I finish reading one book every fortnight. These days, I have read from start to finish exactly two works of fiction — excepting those I was not also reviewing — in the last year. These days, I play video games in the morning, play video games in the afternoon, and spend my evenings playing video games. These days, I still manage to write, but the times I am able to do so for more than three sustained hours have the temporal periodicity of comets with near-Earth trajectories.
I remember writing paper after paper while working on my master’s degree(s) in the United States; it wasn’t always easy nor were they always of the highest quality but I was ‘in shape’ to do that. And I worry about fossilizing, about not moving forward in my knowledge. I don’t think that’s happening (except perhaps with my dutch knowledge), but it’s enough of a concern that I’m looking for some extra exercise (intellectually) this summer.
A variation of this post was originally posted at “so this fits how?“
Part of my work for the WIVU last year included determining the mainline in the text for each of the chapters. That meant determining what clauses moved the story/discussion/dialogue further and what clauses were merely supporting and/or interruptive material. To make it a slightly less subjective activity, some of the ways to determine what fit into the mainline included: a repetition of verbal forms, repetition of person, gender, and/or number, logical connections (e.g. conjunctions and prepositional forms), and general connections between all of these elements.
If you have experience in creating clausal outlines of texts and/or trying to determine the mainline in texts, you will know that clausal outlines for narrative texts are easier than those for poetical texts. In narrative texts, there is a fairly obvious main verbal form (wayyiqtol), and clauses not containing this form are generally not included in the mainline. This makes clausal outlines for narrative texts fairly objective.
Poetic texts are much different. Many clauses do not have verbal forms and determining where clauses break is problematic. Moreover, there are often sudden shifts in verbal forms and in person, gender, and number. Furthermore, many ideas and concepts are repeated, making it difficult to see what might be the main ideas and what would be subordinate. On account of all these things, determining mainlines in poetry is often quite difficult. One might even choose, as many do, not to use the same syntactical concepts for narrative as for poetry – in this situation, the discourse should be seen in terms of parallelism and not in terms of a mainline.
After trying to sort out the mainline in the text of Ezekiel and coming across the apparent impossibility of doing that in some chapters, I came up with the hypothesis that, in some texts, there was more than one independent mainline. And those mainlines weave through each other at times. This allows one to take the syntax in the text seriously (and how different verbal forms and different participants interact), while also taking seriously the repetitions and parallels in the text. At the moment this hypothesis seems the best means I know of for providing a systematic and objective means of reading the discourse in the text.
Hopefully I’ll be posting some examples of how this works soon.
