Papers

Professor John Barton (Oxford): Prophecy and Theodicy (Presidential Address)

Professor David Clines (Sheffield): Psalm 23 and Method

Dr Helen Kraus (Oxford): The Story of Andrew and Zoë: Gender Issues in the Septuagint Translation of Genesis 1–4

Dr David Firth (Calver): David and Uriah (with occasional appearances by Uriah’s wife): Re-reading 2 Samuel 11

Dr Hywel Clifford (Oxford): The Sense and Significance of Isaiah 43:10bβ

Dr Elizabeth Hayes (Bothell): From Lowth to Kugel and Beyond: A Cognitive Linguistics Approach to Conceptual Categories and Biblical Hebrew Parallelism

Dr Trevor Dennis (Chester): Unravelling the Mytheme of the Two Sons: Returning to Genesis from the Lukan Parable of the Father and the Two Lost Sons

Professor Susan Ackerman (Dartmouth): Women and Music in Ancient Israel

Dr Paul Joyce (Oxford): The Prophets and Psychological Interpretation

Dr Andrew Mein (Cambridge): Ezekiel 16 in Christian Interpretation

Abstracts

Professor John Barton (Oxford): Prophecy and Theodicy (Presidential Address)

One of the major concerns of the classical prophets was to show that the disasters they foretold for Israel were morally justified by the sins of the nation. This means that they had a primary concern with what would now be called theodicy, with demonstrating (in the words of Lamentations 1:8) that ‘the Lord is righteous’. But the histories are also written with this aim, as are many of the Psalms, and even some of the priestly legislation, if Mary Douglas is correct. The importance of theodicy in the wisdom tradition is widely acknowledged. Thus theodicy might be a candidate for the position of the Mitte of the Old Testament, which has been much discussed in works on Old Testament theology. At the same time as providing a satisfying account of what holds the Old Testament together, however, this hypothesis creates problems for the modern reader, for whom history and human life in general do not seem to be adequately accounted for in terms of divine reaction to human action: the world does not appear to most of us to manifest moral regularity. So we are left with a problem in assimilating the Old Testament’s message, while still being able to see it as resting on profound thinking about human life.

Professor David Clines (Sheffield): Psalm 23 and Method

The interpretation of the psalm was approached through the use of seven different literary hermeneutical methodologies available today, viz. rhetorical criticism, deconstruction, gender criticism, materialist criticism, postcolonial criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, and intertextual criticism. It was argued, among other things, that the image throughout the poem is consistently that of a sheep and a shepherd, that the ultimate fate of the sheep deconstructs the underlying oppositions in the poem between life and death, and that the sheep is feminized and infantilized and a victim of solipsism, as well as representing the situation of a postcolonial people.

Dr Helen Kraus (Oxford): The Story of Andrew and Zoë: Gender Issues in the Septuagint Translation of Genesis 1–4

The problems of Bible translation formed the topic of this paper, which took as its example gender issues in the Septuagint version of Genesis 2:7–4:1. It compared Hebrew and Greek semantic domains, examined specific renderings and asked what cultural influences may have been at work. Looking at linguistic links (such as that of Hebrew humanity with the earth), it attempted to identify what has been ‘lost in translation’, but also what has been ‘gained’. Further examples of ‘losses’ are the heat of the breath of God (2:7), the possibly divine aspect of the ‘helper’ (2:18), the architectural detail of the creation of woman (2:21), the association of nakedness with knowledge (2:25; 3:1), and the suggestion of eroticism in the wife’s relationship with her husband (3.16). ‘Gains’ seem to come about from the translators’ decision, often where Hebrew semantic domains are extensive; for example, God’s method of anaesthesia inducing ‘ecstasy’ rather than sleep (2:21), the ‘carnal’ aspect of flesh (2:23-24), stressing the physical process of childbirth (3:16a), and the woman turning to her husband as Lord (3:16b). The paper did not imply that the Septuagint translators sought to give new meaning to the text — quite the contrary — but urged an awareness of cultural resonances.

Dr David Firth (Calver): David and Uriah (with occasional appearances by Uriah’s wife): Re-reading 2 Samuel 11

Drawing on Gerard Genette’s theory of narration, the paper explored the ways in which information relevant to the interpretation of the events described in 2 Samuel 11 is progressively disclosed through the balance of 2 Samuel 12–20 so that subsequent disclosures force a re-reading of chapter 11 in terms of plot and purpose. Attention to these details, as well as the dynamics of the plot itself, indicate that rather than being a case of sin and attempted cover-up the whole of the chapter records a sustained attack by David on a perceived rival.

Dr Hywel Clifford (Oxford): The Sense and Significance of Isaiah 43:10bβ

The interpretation of Isaiah 43:10bβ has varied according to the characteristic interests of its readers. The Arian claim that the sentence contradicts the temporal connotations of father and son was refuted in early Christian orthodoxy by assertions of the Son’s co-eternal unity with the Father (e.g. Quodvultdeus). Medieval rabbis similarly deflected the unwanted literalistic inferences that God is not eternal or that there might have been another creator god by responding that God alone is the eternal creator (e.g. Kimchi). Most moderns read the sentence as a prophetic polemic against Babylonian theogony (Enuma Elish I.9ff.), that Yahweh has no parents or offspring, given the widely accepted exilic context of Isaiah 40–55 (e.g. Stummer). Since these three very different readings all treat the sentence in isolation, an integrative interpretation was therefore proposed: (1) its language recalls the famous idol polemic within Deutero-Isaiah (esp. 44:10); (2) while it echoes ‘first’ and ‘last’ (41:4; 44:6; 48:12), the sentence’s rhetorical accent, as a negative counterpart to the positive ‘I am He’ (cf. 43:11-13), is rather more exclusionary and personal (i.e. ‘before me’, cf. ‘besides me’); and (3) its purpose, as with the pericope, is to provoke Israel to believe in Yahweh alone as active in national history. The distinction between sense and significance allows for both this interpretation (history) and the others (Christology, creation, theogony), provided that their different approaches, the literary and the atomistic, are borne in mind.

Dr Elizabeth Hayes (Bothell): From Lowth to Kugel and Beyond: A Cognitive Linguistics Approach to Conceptual Categories and Biblical Hebrew Parallelism

Recent cognitive linguistics research offers a fresh paradigm for revisiting Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews in order to reassess his categories from a conceptual perspective. This paper argued that Lowth’s tri-partite method of categorization is supported by a cognitive linguistics analysis. The cognitive linguistics approach used in this paper claims that categorization is fundamental for human reasoning and that prototype theory offers a fresh way to assess the criteria for analysing and describing Biblical Hebrew parallelism. Because this is the case, we can see that both Lowth’s original categorization of Biblical Hebrew parallelism and James Kugel’s recent response — there is one kind or a hundred, but not three — have each captured certain aspects of this fundamental cognitive process. While Lowth first notices two distinct categories, and then discovers a plethora of examples that fit neither, Kugel notes the overarching nature of the ‘neither’ category, and argues that all examples are actually members of that category. Furthermore, Kugel insists that the parallel lines are processed sequentially and that the B line in some way enriches the A line. Additionally, Conceptual Blending Theory offers a unique resource for analysing and describing the complexities of parallel line forms, thus opening the way for further research.

Dr Trevor Dennis (Chester): Unravelling the Mytheme of the Two Sons: Returning to Genesis from the Lukan Parable of the Father and the Two Lost Sons

What does God do in Genesis? He creates and destroys; comes close and expels; accepts and rejects — all that and more before we reach the end of chapter 7. Those early chapters establish a pattern in the imagining of God that is crucial for the development of the theologies of the whole Bible and that remains its dominant orthodoxy. Amongst the many ambiguities and obscurities in the story of Cain and Abel it is clear that God accepts the younger brother and rejects the older, and the theme of God’s favouritism towards a younger son is played out further in the stories of Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, and Joseph and his older brothers. That favouritism would seem to be driving events, although Sarah, Rebekah and Jacob, and their feelings also have their part to play. The Lukan Parable of the Father and the Two Lost Sons (commonly known as the Parable of the Prodigal Son) seems to follow the mytheme of the two sons to an outrageous degree. However, the punch-line comes not in the middle, but at the very end, in the words of the father addressed to the elder son: ‘Child, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours’ (15.31). As Bernard Brandon Scott has made plain, at that point the mytheme of the two sons is effectively unravelled and its strands are left to blow away in the wind. The parable would have us perform some radical reworking of the tales of Genesis that weave the mytheme, and of their theology. The New Testament writers did not succeed in rising to that challenge, and even Luke himself did not quite come to terms with the parable’s vision. The theology of a God who accepts one at the expense of another was too deeply entrenched, as indeed it still is in the contemporary Christian Church.

Professor Susan Ackerman (Dartmouth): Women and Music in Ancient Israel

Women took responsibility for many kinds of musical performance in ancient Israel. This paper considered specifically women’s roles as ritual musicians and more specifically still explored three arenas of women’s ritual music-making in pre-exilic Israel: (1) women as ritual music-makers in conjunction with various life-cycle rituals (funerary rituals, young women’s coming-of-age rituals, and, perhaps, marital rituals); (2) women as ritual music-makers upon the occasion of the celebration of the autumn festival of the ingathering, or Succoth; and (3) women as ritual music-makers who celebrate the victories of the Israelite god Yahweh in holy war. In the exilic and post-exilic period, however, women’s responsibilities as ritual musicians seem to erode considerably; several exilic-era Isaianic texts, for example, divorce women from their traditional role as heralds who sing out the news of Yahweh’s victories in holy war. The paper suggested that this diminution of women’s music-making responsibilities is the result of certain levitical clans’ assuming of the role of professional cultic musicians within, at least, post-exilic Jerusalem and its temple.

Dr Paul Joyce (Oxford): The Prophets and Psychological Interpretation

This paper illustrated psychological issues ‘behind the text’ (by reference to the long debate over the mental health of Ezekiel), ‘in the text’ (verses including Ezekiel 18:19; 23:34; Amos 5:18; 6:3) and ‘in front of the text’ (the psychology and personality types of readers and interpreters). It reviewed questions of method in interdisciplinary work, and then reflected on the relationship between psychological biblical interpretation and ‘mainstream’ Old Testament study. Far from being a recent, ‘trendy’ development, psychological interpretation has antecedents in pre-modern theologians such as Augustine and Ignatius Loyola; moreover, in the modern period historical criticism flourished in the very era in which Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was doing his groundbreaking work. Among shared features noted were the quest for aetiology and the application of a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’. There has been a steady succession of contributions to psychological interpretation of the Bible (including in the postmodern context), and yet such work deserves more attention. The paper closed with a call for the integration of historical and other critical questions within psychological interpretation, and for a pluralist approach that rejects all forms of reductionism.

Dr Andrew Mein (Cambridge): Ezekiel 16 in Christian Interpretation

For many contemporary readers the treatment of women in the book of Ezekiel has proved the most problematic aspect of a highly problematic prophet. In recent years the prophet’s extravagant use of sexual metaphor has come under considerable scrutiny, but little work has been done on the history of these texts’ reception. This paper therefore examined the interpretation of Ezekiel 16 in four commentators from the patristic and early modern periods: Origen, Jerome, Calvin, and William Greenhill. All four repeat or re-imagine Ezekiel’s polemic so that it is relevant to their own age. For Origen and Jerome, an allegorical understanding of idolatry aligns it with heresy, while for Calvin and Greenhill idolatry itself is the danger to avoid. As they replay the images of the text to meet their own crises, it is no surprise that they also reinforce the basic hierarchical view of gender relations that is implicit in the text. An important respect in which they differ from one another is the degree to which they choose to make female sexuality an explicit focus of their interpretation, with Calvin in particular exploiting the text’s potential to describe the perceived faults of real women.