Monthly Archives: September 2005

Charles Halton

Power Scribe

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Were ancient scribes merely secretaries? In some cases–probably; in other cases–probably not. A Leo Oppenheim describes instances in which scribes seem to control the flow of information that the king/high official recieves. In a few postscripts of letters we see that the author either flattered or gently manipulated the scribes that would recieve the letter on behalf of the king/high official. The authors of the letters seem to realize that the recieving scribe will be the one who decides if the letter is read to the king. Some scribes were engaged in mundane tasks like recording basic economic transactions, while other scribes might have had the ability to impact foreign policy.

A. Leo Oppenheim. “A Note on the Scribes in Mesopotamia.” in Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger. edited by Hans G. Güterbock and Thorkild Jacobsen. Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1965 (253-256).

Charles Halton

You Get What You Pay For in Philological Analysis

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Erica Reiner. “Dead of Night.” in Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger on his Seventy-Fifth Birthday. edited by Hans G. Güterbock and Thorkild Jacobsen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (1965), p. 247-251.

Erica Reiner describes her view of the proper methodology of a “successful philological analysis.” As the editor of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, she certainly speaks with authority in the area of Akkadian lexicography and philological methodology. Reiner asserts that determining the Grundbedeutung, or basic meaning, of a word is not enough—the use of language calls for a more nuanced examination:

The Grundbedeutung approach is not sufficient for successful philological analysis. Philology is, rather, a careful retracing of the fate of a word, following its changes of meaning in changing contexts and situations. Much is necessary to achieve it: a wealth of material and a painstaking search through it, a sensitive ear, and, not least, the lucky chance of happening upon an obscure or forgotten passage which suddenly elucidates the connection between an object and its name or the reasons behind a shift in meaning. Words are not abstractions but take their connotations, their meanings, from their environment, linguistic as well as situational; they do not ‘live’ in themselves, as if originally endowed with a ‘basic meaning’ from which, by some logical but rigid process, the meanings actually attested develop. Semantic development and transfer can only be illustrated from numerous contextual passages in which a shift of emphasis, or perhaps the inherent ambiguity, give rise to shifts in connotation, at first imperceptible, then progressively more pronounced, until the new meaning becomes completely divorced from the old (250).

This process of searching and examining the various contextual uses of a word in order to understand its nuances and shifts of emphasis is definitely more work than merely looking in a dictionary entry for a “basic meaning.” However, this process is becoming easier in languages such as Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek that have searchable databases. One can obtain most of the uses of a word or phrase with merely a few keystrokes (if only it were this easy with Akkadian and Sumerian!). Then, one must use a “sensitive ear” and analyze the contexts and usages.

Even though Reiner’s approach is more work, it produces a result that is more precise and nuanced than “basic meaning” methodology and is worth every bit of expended effort. After all, you get what you pay for. Or rather, the quality of results is often directly correlated with the amount of properly directed energy expended. What do you think? Any insights on philological analysis?

Charles Halton

Hot Dogs and Stock Options

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What do hot dogs and stock options have in common? Nothing. That’s the point. We are continuing our ongoing discussion of innovation with respect to the ancient Near East and the Bible with a look at thinkorswim stock option brokers.

In the world of commoditized stock brokers, this company went out on a limb and specialized in trading options. They created a customized trading platform and started an educational site to help options newbies learn the ropes. But, a great trading platform wasn’t enough. People have to be drawn to the trading platform before they will ever use it. In other words, tradeorswim had to create an emotional connection with potential customers in order to pursuade them to try out their platform.

That’s where the hot dogs come in. In announcing that tradeorswim has more commision options than ways to customize your hot dog they made people stare at the computer screen for more than half a second. What’s crazier than comparing trading options with a hot dog? It causes people stop, question, and think–it hooks the reader in. Once they got them hooked, then they could give them relevant information. Furthermore, thinkorswim took two seemingly disparate subject matters, hot dogs and stock options, and produced an interesting correlation.

Bible and ancient Near East tie in: You may have great ideas with wonderful substance, but you have to package them in a compelling way or very few people will read them. Also, certain elements in biblical studies and the ancient Near East may seem separate and uncorrelated, but maybe this disunity is in appearance only–search out the correlations that lie hidden from plain sight. The fields have a long history of brilliant scholars. There are new discoveries and innovations to be had, but you and I are going to have to work extra hard to find them–the easy pickings are few and far between.

Charles Halton

Innovative Research–An Ongoing Discussion

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Innovation is not a fad–it’s the lifeblood of the academic profession. If you don’t produce innovative ideas, new ways of packaging information in more intuitive or efficient manners, or further refine existing ideas, you won’t get published. But, even more important than that, you won’t advance the field forward. If the field stagnates, students won’t need you. Anyone can go to Google, Amazon, or the library for stale information. But, if you imaginatively apply innovation to your discipline, students will seek you out, they will knock down your door, they will storm the college just to get the opportunity to experience your perspectives and to develope their own innovative lifestyle.

For example, take the phenomenon of Karl Barth. During his time at Basel the university’s theology department exploded with new students. The school started offering classes in English because of overwhelming demand. Take a look at Basel now and it has only a mere fraction of the students it did in Barth’s day. There are doubtless many factors in the enrollment decline, but the lack of an innovative and compelling scholar is surely a big part of the equation.

One of the primary goals of this site is to foster innovative research and teaching concerning the ancient Near East and the Bible, but many principles that we will discuss can be applied to any discipline. Innovation is essential in every field and in many areas of life. Furthermore, many other areas besides our speciality areas have much to say about innovation and we would do well to listen to them. Innovation is a mindset, a way of thinking, a pattern of life. This mindset must be nurtured and self-consciously grown.

In order to develop and grow an innovative approach to ancient studies you HAVE TO expose yourself to other ideas, disciplines, and ways of thinking outside your specialty. You can no longer remain an isolated specialist. We are all specialists–must be because of the information overload that we experience today–but we must also branch out and expand our perspectives beyond our field.

One fantastic fountain spring of innovation is the business world. If they don’t innovate, they don’t sell services, products, or experiences, they don’t meet financial obligations, they close down, they don’t feed their kids dinner. They MUST innovate–they don’t have endowments to support stagnating ideas. Therefore, take a look once in a while at what the most cutting edge companies and individuals in the business world are thinking and doing (and hey, if you are studying Neo-Babylonian economic texts it may help you with that as well). Here is a place to start: Tom Peters is a business consultant calling for a re-imagination of organizations, leadership, etc. Click here for his site.

What do you think?

Charles Halton

Evidences that Humans are the Same

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Humans are the same. They just come in different shapes, sizes, colors, languages, and time periods. They all have hopes, dreams, joys, pains, struggles and delights. Check out an ever-growing list of humorous reminders that the human condition has not fundamentally changed during recorded history. Click on the “Evidences that Humans are the Same” link in the Pages section, or just click here.

Charles Halton

Passionate Teaching

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So, you want to teach Bible and/or ancient Near East related material? There is a lot more to teaching in this discipline that merely mastering chronologies and memorizing verb paradigms. The ancient Near East is a complicated time period: languages that are very different from what most modern speakers are comfortable with, histories that are incomplete and mysterious, cultures that might seems strange or foreign to the modern student, many competing opinions and theories… In other words, if not taught correctly there is plenty of potential to overwhelm students and cause them to give up and move on to greener pastures that offer more certainty or less frustration. Or, one could overly focus on dry chronologies and source criticism and bore the class to tears.

So, how does one teach a substantive class that does not reduce ancient history to merely edutainment while also keeping the students engaged, upbeat, and inspired? One way, maybe even the most fundamental way, is through passionate teaching. The teacher must first be in love with the subject matter before the students can be. Your love for the discipline should penetrate to the core of your being. Your passion for guiding students on their quest in the ancient Near East should be such that you would undergo physical pain if you were locked out of the classroom and kept away from students. If you don’t love teaching then chances are the majority of your students will be bored, overwhelmed, or not learning to their full potential. If you feel that teaching is a drag and a waste of time that pulls you away from research, then pack your bags, go home, and find a foundation or a patron that will pay you to lock yourself in a library and pump out papers, but, for the sake of you students, please don’t step into a classroom.

An example of passionate teaching gone wrong: A good friend of mine and fellow ancient Near East student (although his intrests are more in Egyptology than Assyriology) is an outstanding pianist. In fact, he contemplated becoming a professional concert pianst before he decided to pursue Biblical Studies and Egyptology–and yes, he is that good. My friend got to know a world class Hebrew Bible scholar who teaches at a very high profile North American institution. This scholar privately confided to my friend and lamented the fact that he was “stuck” teaching Hebrew Bible. He felt trapped because he thought he was too old to change professions and he said that if he were as good a pianist as my friend that he would not hesitate to abandon teaching and take up piano. How excited about Hebrew Bible do you think this person’s students are? Do you think they are learning up to their full potential? I doubt it. I’m sure that it must be very trying to feel trapped into a profession that one no longer, or never, did enjoy. I sincerely hope that this person can find something that he truly enjoys so that he can flourish and thrive in gladness and enjoyment. I hope that he finds this outlet soon–both for his sake and for his students’.

One of the most fundamental elements of outstanding teaching is a passion for both the subject matter and for the vocation of teaching. If you have this passion then wear it on your sleeve. A passion for Bible/ANE and teaching that remains bottled up will be almost as good as no passion at all. In order for your students to find the material as fascinating and stimulating as you do, your passion must be more infectious than bird flu. Students who take your class should be swept up by your interest in them and the material. If your passion is infectious then those students who are already motivated by the material will be pushed to new heights in their study and research and those students who are neutral or disinterested will hopefully find the class at least tolerable and you will probably convert some of these disinterested students into passionate ancient historians as well.

Charles Halton

Moving from Scripture to Doctrine

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Summary: Elmer A. Martens, “Moving from Scripture to Doctrine,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 15.1 (2005) 77-103.

Elmer Martens argues that in order for the transition from biblical exegesis to doctrinal formulation to proceed more smoothly and effectively, systematic theologians must communicate with biblical theologians and vise versa. Both disciplines have much to contribute to one another and the church would greatly benefit through the cooperation of these fields. Martens avocates three implications from the partnership of biblical and systematic theology. First, biblical and systematic theologians must think outside of their restrictive disciplines. Second, the two disciplines should self-consciously and intentionally move toward an interdependence of the two disciplines. Third, joint publication efforts including both disciplines should be attempted.

Martens anticipates a key objection to his plea. Here is his answer:

If there are voices favoring this two-way partnership in moving from Scripture to doctrine, there are also certain to be protesting voices. So steeped are we scholars in our specializations that we dispair of keeping abreast of our own subspeciality, let alone becoming literate in related disciplines. Even so, my conviction is that the time has come to work less at the deepening of our individual wells and to put our energies into connecting our separate wells with other wells for the common good of both church and society. Otherwise, for all our digging, the sustaining water of the gospel will not ever reach the thirsty (90-1).

Charles Halton

Review: Statistical Analysis of Genesis Sources

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Richard A. O’Keefe, Critical Remarks on Houk’s ‘Statistical Analysis of Genesis Sources,’ JSOT 29.4 (2005) 409-437.

This essay critiques the methodology of Cornelius B. Houk’s article which appeared in JSOT in 2002. Houk argues on the basis of statistical analysis of syllable-word frequency that eleven distinct authors contributed to the composition of Genesis.

One critique of Houk’s methodology that O’Keefe gives is the process of determining the sections of the text of Genesis that are compared to one another. Keefe states:

There is a cirularity here. The artile begins with a partitioning of the text according to ‘the judgments of source criticism.’ The questions put to the data do not seek alternative groupings; the test results correlate with source criticism because of the way the tests are constructed, not because the data have nothing suprising to tell us…If we are given a group of students and separate them into tall ones and short ones, it comes as no surprise if the tall ones turn out to be significantly heavier than the short ones (412).

Another critique that Keefe presents is Houk’s assumption that statistically significant differences among text groups indicates different authorship and vice versa. One must take into account several factors that may lead to differences between passages–some of these differences can arise from a single author. For instance, Keefe states:

Houk’s own tables show between-genre differences comparable to between-author differences.
Any authorship study needs to be sensitive to at least statistical, linguistic, and literary issues. Before attributing any effect to authorship, one must be sure that the effect is present, is not attributable to straightforward linguistic causes, and is not attributable to literary considerations (424).

Direct speech is particularly prone to variations from the expected norm of linguistic usage. O’Keefe asserts that direct speech “should be expected to vary with the age, sex, ethnicity, and emotional state of the character speaking (424).” Therefore, if one encounters a speech by Abimelech and it seems different from other passages one cannot automatically assume that this speech was composed by a different author. Maybe the author was making Abimelech sound like a foreigner.

Finally, O’Keefe states that Houk failed to adequately double-check his research methodology. After Houk attained his results–results that confirmed his hypothesis–Houk did not rigorously test his methodology to make sure that his analysis was correct. O’Keefe advises:

The hardest thing of all is to remember that when we do get the right answers, it’s still true that we may have made a mistake. We still need to probe the data for evidence that we might have got it wrong. We must put questions to our data that give nature the chance to tell us about the unexpected (434).

O’Keefe provides us with valuable advice and warnings as we comb the biblical text, or any text for that matter, for statistically significant differences that might lead to conclusions concerning authorship (I might add also syntatical, genre, literary, dating, and stylistic conclusions as well). Statistical analysis is a wonderful complement to traditional biblical research. Statistics yield hard and fast data along with a methodology that can be replicated and checked. Statistics moves us away from vague feelings or hunches, but statistical analysis is only as good as the data, the method of analysis, and the interpretation of the results. There is still plenty of room for ambiguity even within statistics.

O’Keefe also warn us against circular reasoning as we construct research methodologies and opinions. He brings a sharp critique of Houk because Houk set out to prove multiple authorship of Genesis. As Houk segmented the text of Genesis, he did so according to the conventional thought of source criticism, which itself asserts multiple authorship of Genesis. You prove multiple authorship of Genesis by assuming multiple authorship of Genesis and working that assumption into your research structure. This circular reasoning resides not only with Houk but with many other researchers and even possibly within entire disciplines of thought such as source criticism itself.

As we reflect upon O’Keefe’s advice and warnings, the most valuable aspect of his work may not be the additional scrutiny with which we judge other scholarship with–but in fact, the additional scrutiny with which we judge our own conclusions and methodologies. As O’Keefe states, we are only human and are prone to error. Therefore, we must constantly re-evaluate our own positions and the way that we arrived at them to ensure that we are not employing faulty data, methodologies, or conclusions.

Charles Halton

What is a researcher of the ANE?

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Erica Reiner presents an insightful picture of A Leo Oppenheim in her introduction to Oppenheim’s Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (xii-xvi). She states that even though Oppenheim gained fame as a philologist, he preferred to refer to himself as a cultural anthropologist. In his pursuit of the culture of ancient Mesopotamia, he was deeply interested in social, economic, and scientific aspects of the culture. Oppenheim published works on ancient beer brewing techniques and glass making. In order to understand these themes Oppenheim gained a respectful competency in these areas of science and technology along with his knowledge of the history and languages of ancient Mesopotamia.

This raises interesting questions: What should we call researchers of the ancient Near East? Are they historians, philologists, cultural anthropologists, theologians, astronomers, sociologists, ecologists, mathematicians, architects, economists, meteorologists, or geographers? With which areas of study does a researcher of the ancient Near East need to be familiar?

At times the study of the Bible and ancient Near East can be overwhelming. There are many languages that one must be able to work with, many cultures that are distinct yet interact with one another, harvest cylces must be understood, political relationships need to be deciphered… In order to deftly work in the field, one must simulatenously be a generalist and a specialist. The niche that a researcher/teacher has carved out for oneself must be thoroughly understood, yet a general understanding of the other disciplines must be present as well.

For instance, in order to understand glass making one must be able to read the texts and the specialized vocabulary that describes making glass. An knowledge of trade routes of raw materials and finished products, the scientific and technological processes, and the archeaological record must be known as well. At times this might seem like a daunting task–an overwhelming flood of information that one must be familiar with and navigate through–and it is. It’s not easy, but its worth it. Studing this time period a challenge that yields rich rewards. Furthermore, think of all the truly rewarding things in your life–how many of those take little effort?

As Erica Reiner has pointed out, studying the ancient Near East involves a lot more than just a mastery of philology. One must integrate the advances of a host of other disciplines into their own study and research. Don’t get overwhelmed at this; just consider it a joy that you are able to venture outside your narrow slice of the world and see what other scolars in other disciplines are thinking. Not only does this give us insight into the ancient Near East, but it will also enrich our own lives by exposing us to diverse fields and new ideas, and thereby combating a tendency of myopia and stifling introspection.