…Thanks to the wonders of internet technology, I am sitting here in the empty ballroom of a huge Jerusalem hotel listening to the second quarter of the Redskins-Broncos game. Suprisingly close! Go ‘Skins!

…This morning we celebrated Holy Mass at the rock where the Lord Jesus agonized in the Garden of Gethsemane. The place is enclosed by an evocative Barluzzi church, which is known as the Church of All Nations. It was built by donations from various countries, including the U.S. One of the interior domes is subtly emblazoned with the seal of the United States.

The Agony in the Garden may be the most important mystery of Christ’s life for us Americans–citizens of the land of the free.

Yesterday in Bethlehem we meditated on the Incarnation. The Son of God united our humanity to Himself, remaining a divine Person. As Fr. Golas put it, the Lord Jesus never agonized about His identity. He always knew His mission, His destiny. He always knew the gracious plan of the Father, a plan for our welfare but for His woe–at least for His woe in Gethsemane.

Christ, knowing all things, freely chose to embrace the will of the Father. In the Garden of Gethsemane, He taught the world what freedom really is.

Christ never agonized about His identity. But He did agonize. He agonized so intensely that He sweated drops of His Precious Blood.

Masada on the Dead Sea

God truly became man; therefore, He wanted to live and be happy. He did not come to the garden because of some sick death-wish.

“Father, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done.”

Freedom does not allow us to avoid all pain. Our generation of Americans has forgotten that freedom is something noble for which our forefathers suffered and died.

Freedom means doing the will of the Father. Freedom means harmonizing our wills with God’s will. Freedom means trusting God. The most free person is the one who trusts God the most. Trusting in Providence is the consummate act of freedom. The great anthems of our country have sung this truth.

The Father utterly vindicated Christ’s free act of trust. Christ loved life; He did not want to die. But He obeyed the will of the Father to the end. He offered His human life–then the Father gave it back to Him…

…We also visited Masada, where the last Zealots of the first Jewish rebellion held out against the Roman Tenth Legion. The Jews committed suicide rather than surrender.

We conducted a moral analysis of what happened. We concluded that committing suicide was not the right thing to do. Fight to the death, sure. Suicide? No…

…We also visited Qumran, and we floated in the Dea Sea for a few relaxing minutes.

According to Peter Flint we can discern three literary editions of the Psalter: Edition I (Pss. 1/2 – 89), Edition IIa (Pss. 1/2 – 89 and 11QPs^a), and Edition IIb (Pss. 1/2 – 89 and Pss. 90-150). After looking at the Qumran MSS Dwight D. Swanson states that there is manuscript evidence for at least three Psalters existing simultaneously in late Second Temple Judaism: an MT-type, a Cave 11-type, and an LXX-type and suggests that it is not unreasonable to conclude that there could have been more. The MT Psalter then appears to be the latest edition of the Psalter and, he argues, that the MT-Psalter reached its final form in the late first century C.E.*

* SWANSON, D. D. (2005) “Qumran and the Psalms”, in David Firth and Philip S. Johnston (eds.) Interpreting the Psalms: Issues and Approaches. IVP. pp. 259-260

moar funny pictures

Technorati Tags: lolcat, archaeology, Dead+Sea+Scrolls, Qumran, humor, funny

In working through some bibliography recently for a conference paper proposal about מורה הצדק (the teacher of righteousness), I came across the following:

Der Lehrer [der Gerechtigkeit] ist von Gott autorisiert, die Geheimnisse der Prophetenworte zu enträtseln, denn die Worte der Propheten sind Geheimnisse (רזים [pHab] 7,5), die man ohne Auslegung des Lehrers nicht verstehen kann. Der Lehrer tritt also mit seiner Verkündigung nicht neben die Schrift, sondern er basiert auf der Schrift. Er allein hat von Gott das rechte Verständnis offenbart bekommen. Darum kann er und mit ihm seine Gemeinde nach dem Willen Gottes leben (Jeremias 141).

The teacher unlocked prophetic meaning in the community’s scriptures, and the community depended precisely on this insight to learn the proper practice(s) to which they were called through the prophets.

In this post:

Gert Jeremias

Monday, October 12, 2009

I suppose it could well be called the most significant archeological find in history.  But then, such judgments betray certain presuppositions about the world.  For those of us who consider the Bible a sacred book with profound implications and eternal consequence, then the discovery (just over sixty years ago) of two thousand year old scrolls containing significant remnants of just about every book we Christians call the “Old Testament,” ranks right up there as a breakthrough for all time.  The treasure sat for two millennia, untouched in the caves of Qumran.

The story of the find itself near the Dead Sea is enough to fill a couple of good books (and it has).  Scholars debate some of the assumptions related to the ruins located nearby.  While the New Testament does not mention the “Essenes,” Josephus (the first century historian) does.  They appear to be a sect of Judaism, like the Pharisees and the Sadducees.  But they were a particularly separatist group, purist, ultra-conservatives, who believed that the mainstream denominations were hopelessly watered down, polluted by the world.   In their attempts to accommodate modern culture, religious leaders who ranked high on the social scale had abandoned the true faith, according to the sect.  The Essenes were vocal in their critique, and built little enclaves designed to cut themselves off from the contaminating influences of pluralism.

One of the most remote of those enclaves they located near the barren Dead Sea.  The harsh climate and intense heat and relentless sun allowed for the kind of isolation that heightened spiritual sensitivities.  They held to strict rules requiring steadfast obedience, and they revered the holy texts.  The members with the most honored skill were scribes.  They believed that the words they put on the parchment had eternal value.  They believed that calamity – a great and terrible cataclysm – was eminent.  They were determined to preserve these precious words and phrases for future generations, and protect them from a ruthless and pagan attack, sure to come.

So, they created a scriptorium in the desert heat.  They spent their days carefully copying the sacred texts.  They prepared parchment and papyrus.  Quills with tips as nibs.  Ink that would last.  They fired clay pots, jars to protect and contain the scrolls.  They dug great spaces in caves as cool, protected storage places.  Their work went unnoticed in the bustling city of Jerusalem just over the mountain.

When the Romans marched into the desert region with their legions slaughtering everyone associated with Judaism in their path, they leveled the little community of Qumran.  The fate of the occupants is unknown, though it can be assumed that those who did not escape into the desert were cut down in 70CE as the army passed through.  The troops kept only the rich cisterns as a fresh water supply.  The massive army focused on Masada, further south, where some of the most notable rebels from Jerusalem had taken control of the Roman outpost situated high on a natural and well-protected plateau.  The ten year long resistance of this brave band of insurgents would become the stuff of Israeli legend.

Remarkably, the Romans, who were determined to pillage whatever wealth they could find and destroy whatever vestiges of religious life left behind, never stumbled across those caves.  And then, even more remarkably, for the full twenty centuries that followed, as treasure-hunters of every sort from every age combed through the ancient desert hills and cliffs like the California Gold Rush, the treasures of the scrolls in clay jars tucked away in the caves built the by the Essenes were never found.

Until 1947 when a Bedouin shepherd boy tossed a stone through an opening in the ground and heard the shatter of a clay pot echo inside.  The discovery coincided with the United Nations vote that made Israel an independent nation state.

That was over sixty years ago.  That small find on the desert led to more than two hundred other scrolls.  The sheer volume of ancient scroll material is staggering.  At first, the scrolls were managed by a hand-full of hardened, unscrupulous dealers in ancient artifacts.  Soon, credible archeologists and university researches realized the enormous treasure that had been unearthed.  The best dating technologies were employed to certify the age of the scrolls.  Scholars agreed.  The scrolls were made between 150 BCE and 50 CE, putting them smack dab at the time of Jesus and the tumultuous first century in and around Jerusalem.

The story of the Dead Sea Scrolls is filled with drama and intrigue.  Perhaps for us, the greatest significance is they way in which it confirms the preservation and accuracy of the text of the Bible for thousands of years.

Dr. George Giacumakis, with more than a little help from his friends, will be unveiling a state-of-the-art facsimile, the fourth of its kind world-wide, painstakingly crafted in London by the world’s foremost technicians and scholars, the twenty-three foot long Great Isaiah Scroll.  Thanks to the high-quality images of photographs taken shortly after this treasure was removed from its container over fifty years ago, the scroll looks just as it did as the scholars got their first look.  The genuine papyrus, carefully stitched just as the artisans sewed them together two thousand years ago, is clear and readable.  It contains the entire book of Isaiah.

The event will be held this Saturday night at the Great Park Neighborhood in Irvine, near the site of the proposed Museum of Biblical and Sacred Writings.

Come join us.

Copyright Kenneth E Kemp 2009

More on the Unveiling

Still fiddling with the new WordPress features.  I like this theme much more than the last and I think I’ll stick with it for a while.  Points to whoever can name the document in the header pic.

I’ve also been fiddling with the text-critical issues in Isaiah 53.  I’ve never troubled to read the LXX translation, and now I know I was the poorer for it.  There are some fascinating changes, but the one that’s really piqued my interest is the LXX reading that clearly indicates a taw at the end of verse 8, thus producing the translation εἰς θάνατον. I’m not reading any secondary literature on the subject at the moment (part of the assignment) and I still have lots of other texts to finish reading, including both Isaiah scrolls from Qumran and a quick look over the Vulgate (as much as my non-existent Latin can manage at least), but what seemed at first like a clear case of later Christian interpolation does not seem so clear-cut to me now.  More anon.

Also, what did I do to my back!?  I’m like a friggin cripple here!

SEELE_01 (Lorenz Kiel) zu Kaworu: “Ja. Der Apokryphenkodex ist in die Gesetzestexte übergegangen. Die Zeit den Vertrag zu erfüllen rückt näher”.

Eine weitere sehr unklare Aussage, die viele Rätsel über die gesamte Basis der Geschichte aufgeben, auf die Evangelion basiert. Von daher kann auch hier nur erneut spekuliert werden. Es könnte sein, dass Lorenz Kiel sich hierbei auf das Genesisapokryphon aus den Schriftrollen vom toten Meer bezieht (Schriftrollen von Qumran). Wir alle wissen, dass viele der Prophezeihungen in Evangelion aus eben diesen Schriftrollen stammen, und von SEELE entsprechend instrumentalisiert werden. Doch mit der Erwähnung des Begriffes “Apokryph” an sich lässt sich die Sammlung der Schriftstücke eventuell auf einige wenige ausschlaggebende reduzieren. Der Begriff “Apokryph” stammt aus dem griechischen, und bedeutet soviel wie “verborgen” oder “geheim” (stellenweise auch mit einem klaren Bezug zum Begriff “Apokalypse”). Diese speziellen Texte wurden nicht im Kanon der Bibel aufgenommen, und gelten deshalb als nicht ganz so geläufige Schriften (und wurden von manchen auch als “Irrlehre” abgetan, beziehungsweise haben sie nicht den gleichen “heligen” Status wie andere Schriften). Es liegt nahe, dass möglicherweise versteckte oder erst zu entschlüsselnde Botschaften und / oder Prophezeihungen enthalten sein könnten – die in diesem Falle von SEELE entschlüsselt wurden. Die perfekte Vorraussetzung für eine sinngemäße Verwendung in Evangelion, denn wir haben hier einen sehr deutlichen Realitätsbezug > niemand könnte wiederlegen, dass die Ereignisse so wie sie in Evangelion stattfinden nicht tatsächlich einmal Realität – zumindest diesen Schriften nach – werden könnten.

Eine Frage bleibt jedoch: was es mit den “Gesetzestexten” auf sich hat. Während der “Vetrag” höchstwahrscheinlich auf den Vertrag von SEELE und LILITH abzielt (u.a. das Projekt zur Vollendung der Menschheit), bleibt unklar; welches diese scheinbar “aktuellen” Gesetzestexte sein könnten.

(c) Ikarus 2009 – Do not re-use without permission ! But you could participate…

The weekly Review of Biblical Literature list of new reviews was received today, a few days later than usual.

As usual, here are the three books (based solely on the subject matter,  not the assessment of the reviewer) that I want in the U of L library. Each wins a lolcat.

In the past 3-4 weeks I’ve been giving these awards,I’ve never had a winning author complain, surprisingly enough.

Joseph A. Fitzmyer
Guide to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6885
Reviewed by Shayna Sheinfeld

~~~~~~~~

William H. Jennings
Storms over Genesis: Biblical Battleground in America’s Wars of Religion http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6155
Reviewed by Michael D. Matlock

~~~~~~~~
Lori Anne Ferrell
The Bible and the People
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6947
Reviewed by Seán P. Kealy

~~~~~~~~

The other reviews:

L. Stephanie Cobb
Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6862
Reviewed by Jan Willem van Henten

J. Edward Crowley and Paul L. Danove
The Rhetoric of Characterization of God, Jesus, and Jesus’ Disciples in the Gospel of Mark
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=4991
Reviewed by Seán P. Kealy

Ellen F. Davis
Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6922
Reviewed by Philip F. Esler

F. Gerald Downing
God with Everything: The Divine in the Discourse of the First Christian Century
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6676
Reviewed by Michael Lakey

Lori Anne Ferrell
The Bible and the People
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6947
Reviewed by Seán P. Kealy

Julie Kelso
O Mother, Where Art Thou? An Irigarayan Reading of the Book of Chronicles
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6854
Reviewed by Susanne Scholz

Matthew J. Marohl
Faithfulness and the Purpose of Hebrews: A Social Identity Approach
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6586
Reviewed by Renate Viveen Hood

Alexander I. Negrov
Biblical Interpretation in the Russian Orthodox Church: A Historical and Hermeneutical Perspective
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6866
Reviewed by Peter Penner

Etienne Nodet
The Historical Jesus? Necessity and Limits of an Inquiry
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6670
Reviewed by James West

Julia M. O’Brien
Challenging Prophetic Metaphor: Theology and Ideology in the Prophets
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6847
Reviewed by Bo H. Lim

Mikeal C. Parsons
Acts
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6963
Reviewed by I. Howard Marshall

Ilaria Ramelli and David Konstan
Terms for Eternity: Aiônios and Aïdios in Classical and Christian Texts
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6984
Reviewed by Jan G. van der Watt

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ed.
Theological Interpretation of the New Testament: A Book-by-Book Survey
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6967
Reviewed by Erik Heen

Job is, as St Jerome understood well, the slipperiest of the biblical books. It is also one of the rare moments when the Hebrew Bible truly approaches literary and philosophical greatness. In this it ranks alongside the Epic of Gilgamesh as a treasure from the ancient Near East. Its complexity scares me, which is why I have a monograph worth of drafts still sitting unpublished on my hard drive. As a corollary of its complexity, it fascinates me that so many generations of readers have felt compelled to close down its ambiguities and to redeem its horrors: for the god this book offers us is truly a monster. No wonder there is so little evidence of its authority in the sectarian scrolls from Qumran (except perhaps in the Hodayot) or in the New Testament (except perhaps in Romans), no wonder the rabbis debated its meaning so vigorously, and no wonder its reception history is one that reflects the endless attempt to own its meaning. Job becomes patient, he becomes a type of Christ, and so on.

Marc Chagall's 'Job's Despair' (1960)

I have here the modest aim of offering a footnote to Deane Galbraith and Philip Davies, via a slight detour through a revisionist approach to the personality of Adolf Hitler. In a recent interview in Der Spiegel, Birgit Schwarz has suggested we need to reconsider Adolf Hitler’s conviction that he was an artistic genius. This is the theme of her book Geniewahn: Hitler und die Kunst (Böhlau, 2009). For Schwarz, Hitler’s conviction that he was a genius misunderstood by those who rejected his art was at the centre of his worldview. Along with his deep inner conviction he needed a community of admirers, of which Josef Goebbels was a fine example, to bolster this delusion. This delusion of genius carried with it the conviction that Hitler was above morality and thus permitted to do anything: “The genius has outstanding ideas, and they must be implemented, even if they are completely amoral.”

The Yahweh of the book of Job is a Genie in the Hitlerian sense. That is, he is utterly amoral by virtue of being an artistic genius above the banalities of the human world in which puny, scabby little Job finds himself mired. This is how he answers Job in Job 38:1-41:26. “Will you condemn me that you may be justified?,” asks Yahweh in 40:8. He asks this in the context of asserting that because he is such a genius that he can create the marvellous cosmos, from the morning stars to the dumb ostrich, he is in no way bound by the kind of morality Job understands. In this I suggest Deane Galbraith is slightly missing the point by suggesting that Yahweh “simply demands obedience without justification.” That, perhaps, was always to be read between the lines of Job 23:12, but the focus in the Yahweh speeches is on Yahweh’s genius, not Job’s obedience. Job submits after a fashion to this dreadful god, but his obedience is not quite the point. It is that to whatever little world of justification Job may feel himself to belong, Yahweh is too much of a genius to worry about it. He can treat Job as a pawn in his cosmic game of oneupmanship with the Accuser without scruple.

But to leave the matter there would be to do an injustice to another genius, the greatest of all ancient Hebrew poets, from whose stylus this masterpiece has proceeded. (S)he was a genius in our sense of an extraordinary talent, not in Hitler’s. This is obvious, given that her name and personality have vanished behind her creation. This creation has much to teach us in the ethical sphere. If there truly exists a god such as the one portrayed in Job, He has nothing to teach us about ethics. As Job himself learns, true ethics begins when we face one another and acknowledge our common humanity (Job 21:5). Here Philip Davies is far too simple in his rejection of the Hebrew Bible. The problem lies as much in the sphere of textuality and the nature of Scripture as in the sphere of ethics in sensu stricto.

Marc Chagall's 'Job Prays' (1960)

Davies’ reflections have much to commend them. It does seem prima facie that it is ridiculous to suggest that the religions of the world have given humans ethics that bestow value on human life: frequently the effects of these traditions have shown the opposite. The “divine command” approach to ethics so fundamental to the Hebrew Bible and to many communities of its readers is arguably not a question of “ethics” at all. For a start, it is inseparable from ancient Near Eastern treaties, in which people were compelled under threat of torture, genocide, and exile (see Deuteronomy 28 for a particularly edifying example) to obey the suzerain king. Such treaties offer the framework for biblical ideas of covenant, and are the reason biblical ideas of covenant are inseparable from ancient Near Eastern notions of kingship. The Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible was created in the image of an ancient Near Eastern despot. If we focus on “codes” of law in the Hebrew Bible, we are more or less lost with respect to ethics. As in Job 1-2, we are surely unable to serve Yahweh gratuitously, because if we fail to serve him he will afflict us with blight and mildew (or at any rate a gruesome skin disease).

But is this all? It seems to me at least that part of the purpose of the book of Job is precisely to deconstruct the covenant on which such a hideous and inadequate moral code is based. It deconstructs it by exposing the unspeakable deity at its root. If, however, we shift our attention from Job 38:1-41:26 and look at the dialogue, we see an attempt to negotiate an approach to ethics that is based not on obeying the random precepts of a capricious (and generally invisible) deity, but rather on attention to the suffering of the Other. Job commands his friends to look at him and be appalled (Job 21:5) – that is, engage with him as he is, rather than explaining his place in an irrelevant and dehumanizing ethical system that buys divine righteousness at the price of human dignity. An ethic that begins with Job 21:5 cannot be a matter of a code of law but must be negotiated in the mess of human life.

For this we need not simply a text but a community of readers, and this is where the problem lies with Davies. He reifies the text in a manner more akin to some (by no means all) of the advocates of theological hermeneutics to which he is so implacably opposed. Scripture only exists, however, in its recognition as such and in its consequent use in the context of an interpretive community. We receive Scripture through the lens of Talmud (in Judaism) or apostolic tradition (in Catholic and Orthodox Christianities). While these traditions provide frameworks that are used to limit the meaning of Scripture, the availability of Scripture to an infinite readership means that its meaning cannot be controlled. There can be no “biblical values” without a community to pick and choose from the smorgasbord of biblical options, yet at the same time there can be no limit on a given reader’s reclamation of Scripture from those who would construe such “biblical values” as the hermeneutical key to scriptural interpretation. More simply, Scripture can be taken to mean (almost) anything; consequently it actually means nothing. The range of possible construals is radically open.

Back to ethics. Job 21:5 can be construed as the key to the deconstruction of the ethical system that the Job of the prologue had taken as read. In the canon of the Hebrew Bible as a whole, it is perhaps Leviticus 19:18 that has that honour. This is because to command someone to love their neighbour as they love themselves is to command something that cannot really be codified. While “love” in the context of ancient Near Eastern treaties tends to be a matter of unquestioning obedience, what might it mean to love one’s neighbour in that sense? The radical openness of this command, not to mention its resistance to definitive codification, is arguably what made it so central to the ethics of the synoptic Jesus and of the Hillel portrayed in b. Shabb. 31b, as well as the command on which much of the work of Emmanuel Levinas could be construed as an extended commentary.

So readers make Scripture, and readers make biblical values. Davies is right that it is to some external set of values that such readers in fact make appeal when they attach themselves to “biblical values.” But it is in the engagement between readers, interpretive communities, and the sacred texts that are constituted by them that such values emerge, and in this more complex sense it could just be asserted that “religion” (on some level) has, by an extended process of extrapolation, given us ethical values we can live by.

Qumran, die erste Station unserer Tour.

Die Landschaft kurz hinter Jerusalem

Der erste Höhepunkt ist bereits die Fahrt durch die grandiose Landschaft zwischen Jerusalem und dem Toten Meer.

Da wir noch tanken mussten, weiß ich jetzt auch wie israelische Rasthöfe aussehen. Sehr bunt, und seeeeeeeeeeehr touristisch. Inklusive Nippesverkauf durch die örtlichen Beduinen. Und ein Kamel fürs Fotoarchiv ist auch vor Ort. Die “only ten shekels” hab ich mir gespart und heimlich fotografiert…

Das dazugehörige Kamel ("only 10 shekels" - wie habe ich diesen satz satt! )

Eine typische israelische Raststätte, mitten im Nirgendwo

Nur ein paar Minuten, dann geht es auch schon weiter. Immer noch grandiose Landschaft. Schnell ist auch die Höhe des Meeresspiegels erreicht. Trotz massiven Protests der Touris (inclusive mir) wurde an dieser Stelle aber leider kein Photostop eingelegt. Egal, von jetzt an ging’s immer bergab. Frei nach Hildegard Knef

Wer es nicht weiß: Qumran ist der Ort, an dem Ende der 40er/Anfang der 50er die berühmten “Schriftrollen vom Toten Meer” gefunden wurden, die ältesten bekannten Handschriften der Bibel. Doch nicht nur das, in den darauf folgenden Jahren wurde eine komplette Siedlung freigelegt. Dies gilt es nun zu besichtigen. Nach einem kurzen, überflüssigen Film im Besucherzentrum, geht es hinaus ins freie. Es ist kurz vor halb neun, Qumran liegt 325 Meter unter dem Meeresspiegel. Unerträgliche Hitze. Unermüdlich arbeiten wir uns voran. Es ist schon faszinierend. Vor mehr als 2000 Jahren hat dieser menschenfeindliche Ort vor Geschäftigkeit gebrummt. Irre.

Ein kleiner (wirklich kleiner) Teil der Ausgrabungen in Qumran

Eine der Höhlen, in der die Schriftrollen gefunden wurden

Auch die Landschaft rund um Qumran ist faszinierend. Felsen, Schluchten, im Rücken bereits das Tote Meer. Schön. Und mittendrin, ein Kibbuz. Hab leider nicht rausgefunden was dort produziert wird.

Vorsicht an der Bahnsteigkante...

Nach einer knappen dreiviertel Stunde, viel zu wenig um alles zu sehen, geht es dann auch schon weiter. Richtung Masada. Dazu mehr, im dritten Teil…

Der Kibbuz, das Tote Meer und Ich