My wife and I are back in Cincinnati now–we spent the last week in Austin, Texas seeing family and friends. We had a fantastic time and I really enjoyed being back in my old stomping ground. My brother builds very nice and large houses so we went around and looked at his projects. They were all spectacular. We ate too much, enjoyed great conversation, and visited stores and the new Blanton art museum. But now back to Assyriology and biblical studies.
As promised, here my comments concerning Duane’s discussion of the development of Hebrew with respect to Late Bronze Age Canaanite.
I probably was not as clear as I should have been with my statement:
I also agree with the largest changes in Hebrew occurring between CBH and LBH and Amarna Canaanite’s similarity to CBH–especially in Amarna’s use of waw’s.
which led Duane to say:
I have decided to reflect upon that issue here. Perhaps I am setting up a straw man but I think the underlying presupposition of this comment is that Classical Biblical Hebrew developed out of Late Bronze Age Canaanite. This presupposition is at best problematic.
I would not say that Classical Biblical Hebrew developed out of Late Bronze Age Canaanite. As Duane has discussed in his post it is very difficult to reconstruct the precise development of ancient languages. Furthermore, I agree with Duane that languages develop with a combination of many different influences, both internal and external. In my mind Hebrew is Hebrew (I get more specific than this, keep reading) and we can point to some particular analogues that appear in other languages, whether they are lexical or syntactical. These analogues might indicate some kind of contact, either direct or indirect, between these languages or these similarities could have arisen independently. Each situation needs to be judged on it’s own.
Therefore, I would rather treat languages as they stand and not say that x language evolved from x. I am very comfortable saying that x feature in x language has an analogue in x language, but except for certain instances, it is very difficult to trace the precise development of languages. Furthermore, I like to discuss languages–and title languages–based on geography. Even though ancient languages like Aramaic share commonalities amongst the various dialects and such, regions tend to have their own particularities. Furthermore, some languages have syntactical and lexical features of one language while it is written in a script that has similarities to another language. This adds another layer of complexity when we apply general categories to specific languages.
I am not saying that we never use general titles like “Aramaic” and only refer to specific geographic names, such as the language that is found in Sam’al and only refer to it as “Sam’alian” rather than “Aramaic.” But, the categorizations of these languages are still in debate and are not always clear-cut. It might be more cumbersome, but it is a bit “safer” to say something like–Sam’alian with analogous features to Aramaic. By saying this you are not committing yourself to implying that Sam’alian “developed” from or “is” Aramaic and you are also leaving open the possibility of other influences upon Sam’alian.
Even though this terminology might be more specific, it is awkward. The general categories of Hebrew, Aramaic, etc. can be retained but we should keep in mind the diversity and complexity that is involved in all these languages/dialects/idiolects, etc. Even for Hebrew, as Duane alluded to, there are various attempts to determine dialects such as Israelian Hebrew, Judahite Hebrew, etc. Even within Israelian Hebrew some advocate “sub-dialects” such as Ephraimite, Galilean, and Gileadite Hebrew.
I am very sympathetic for these movements, but I admit for example that it is sometimes hard to draw clear lines between Ephraimite Hebrew and Galilean Hebrew because we don’t have large amounts of a wide array of texts from these areas that include samples from many genres. For more on this subject, see Gary Rendsburg’s “A Comprehensive Guide to Israelian Hebrew: Grammar and Lexicon.”
Everyone knows the production of the Nutcracker, in fact, you have probably been to several yourself. You may think you know the Nutcracker, but think again. The Wall Street Journal has a piece in which they embark on a quest for the historical Nutcracker.
You know the lead dancer, the sugar-plum fairy, right? Maybe you don’t. With some engaging historical research the Journal had this to say about the so-called “sugar-plum.”
But how many individuals nowadays staging, performing in, or attending “The Nutcracker” realize that this sweet-sounding item has no connection to the fruit we know as a plum, nor to granulated sugar, which seems to sparkle on many notions of sugarplums dancing in the heads of those pondering the ballet.
Perhaps required reading for anyone planning to converse knowledgably at annual “Nutcracker” performances should be “The Nutcracker Ballet,” Jack Anderson’s 1979 book (no longer in print, but available used). On pages 188 and 189, the author helpfully gives a recipe for Barley Sugar, a boiled product and the basic ingredient for making sugarplums. The end result is a sweet, chewy, rounded little morsel: Think Gummy Bears, without the electric colors and teddy-bear features.
Furthermore, a Tchaikovsky scholar has just completed some sobering research for all those ballet directors who have a penchant for mythologizing. Apparently, the fantastic happenings in the Nutcracker should not be reduced to mere delusions or night-dreams, but celebrated and enjoyed as real events.
Other required reading for those who want to be confidently conversant with the seemingly over-familiar ballet might be “On Meaning in ‘Nutcracker,’” a 1984 essay in the British journal Dance Research by Tchaikovsky scholar Roland John Wiley. In his article, the author notes that “the fantastic events” of the ballet, from the middle of act one onward, are “not Clara’s dream.” Whether one calls the ballet’s little heroine Marie, as Hoffmann and Balanchine did, or Clara, as the Russian ballet’s original libretto chose to do, to fully honor the world that the ballet’s creators set out to depict, choreographers should not treat the kingdoms of snow and of sweets visited by the ballet’s girl character as merely the fanciful dreams of a naïve child.
I hope you can enjoy the Nutcracker a bit more now that it you know its real history.
Eisenbrauns just added a new book to their website that will be of value to everyone interested in Northwest Semitic inscriptions. This volume includes drawings, transliterations, translations and short studies and bibliographies of about 100 Late Punic texts (just about the entire corpus)–a very handy volume. Furthermore, Eisenbrauns is selling it for $29 which is not a bad price for a volume like this.
It is true that Late Punic is indeed late from an ancient Near Eastern perspective (begins at the destruction of Carthage at 146 BCE), but it is still important from a linguistic point of view even if your interests do not extend this far chronologically (mine happen to though). Punic was in use for quite a long time. St. Augustine even speaks of the importance of knowing Punic.
Late Punic Epigraphy
An Introduction to the Study of Neo-Punic and Latino-Punic Inscriptions
by K. Jongeling and Robert Kerr
Mohr Siebeck, 2005
x + 115 pages, English
Paper
ISBN: 3161487281
Your Price: $29.00
www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~EIS~~I~JONLATEPU
Duane Smith is extending our discussion concerning literacy with a great post on the relationship of the language of the Amarna correspondence with that of Hebrew. It is a really good post that you’ll want to take a look at. I’ll try to give my response to it later, but now I only have time to mention that I would not say that “Classical Biblical Hebrew developed out of Late Bronze Age Canaanite.” I will mention quickly that Stephen A. Kaufman’s article “The Classification of the North West Semitic Dialects of the Biblical Period and Some Implications Thereof” in The Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies: Panel Sessions, Hebrew and Aramaic (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1988) 41-57 is helpful as we discuss ancient “languages” and “dialects.”
Harvard had previously announced that it was adding a religion or “Faith and Reason” course to its core-curriculum requirements for all undergraduate degrees. This week it reversed this decision. The university’s Task Force on General Education instead recommended adding a “What it means to be a human being” course to the curriculum. This course certainly sounds interesting and a worthy addition, but I do think that a religion course would also be beneficial. We see the far reaching effects of religion in its various manifestations on a daily basis in our own lives in the workplace and home, as well as on the national stage as politicians trumpet their devotion on the campaign trail. Religion is also a major piece of international diplomacy and conflict.
Therefore it was surprising for me to see Harvard’s own Steven Pinker, professor of psychology, make incredibly irrational conclusions in his objections to adding either a religion or faith and reason class to the core curriculum:
Second, the juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like “faith†and “reason†are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have to help students navigate between them. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith—believing something without good reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these. Imagine if we had a requirement for “Astronomy and Astrology†or “Psychology and Parapsychology.†It may be true that more people are knowledgeable about astrology than about astronomy, and it may be true that astrology deserves study as a significant historical and sociological phenomenon. But it would be a terrible mistake to juxtapose it with astronomy, if only for the false appearance of symmetry.
Pinker makes several misjudgments in this statement:
I think Harvard would do well to add a religion course to its core curriculum. It would help prepare their students for the world in which they live–a world that contains many opportunities and pitfalls bound up in religious ideas.
What do you think?
Duane Smith has a great post on a seal that has a text in a rather odd orientation vis-a-vis the iconographic depiction. He applies this evidence in the discussion of literacy/illiteracy in the ANE. I happen to think that the western Semitic peoples were a bit more literate than the traditional viewpoint today. I think that the alphabetic script employed in west Semitic languages opened up the language to more readers than syllabic cuneiform in Akkadian or logograms in Sumerian or hieroglyphics in classical Egyptian. Rick Hess has argued along these lines from some recent discovery of abcedaries. But see Ian Young’s response in Vetus Testamentum 55:4 (2005) 565-8.
James Spinti announced that Eisenbrauns has added a new wish-list feature to their website. You can see my nascent list here:My Wish List at Eisenbrauns. I’m also a big fan of the Christmas themed site right now–check it out.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal in which he argues for education reform. He quotes a statistic from a study group that will release its findings today:
Only 18 out of 100 high-school freshmen will graduate on time, enroll directly in college and earn a two-year degree in three years or a four-year degree in six. Just 18!
Furthermore, Bloomberg compares the (I am assuming that throughout his essay he not speaking of higher education) education system in the United States to the troubled domestic auto industry–pouring mounds of cash into a bloated and inefficient system.
Here are the changes that he recommends:
The choice is clear, but the challenge will not be easy. It will require a top-to-bottom rethinking of our school system, one that insists on a performance-based culture of accountability that is oriented around children, not bureaucracies. It will require us to offer higher teacher salaries to attract more of the best and brightest, and to offer financial rewards to the most successful teachers. It will require us to set and uphold high standards, encourage innovation and competition, and end social promotion — the harmful practice of advancing students to the next grade despite their poor academic performance. And it will require us to invest in early childhood development and distribute funding more equitably.
I am in general agreement with many of his proposals, although I would want to see the specifics of implementation before I would whole-heartedly agree. For example, I agree that we should link compensation to teacher performance but measuring this performance is very difficult. Measuring instruments of this fashion might provide a disincentive for good teachers to teach troubled students as well as provide an incentive to teach for a test instead of teaching what students really needed to learn in order to succeed in their careers and personal lives. I also agree that teachers should be paid more because many good teachers opt for more lucrative careers leaving many students with teachers that couldn’t find employment in other sectors of the economy. However, the money for pay raises must come from somewhere. Lastly, I don’t think just moving money between school districts to provide “equity” is the answer. There have been many studies that disprove the direct link between money spent per pupil with educational success in the lives of these students.
I think we also need to think about fostering the proper culture in our schools in which everyone including teachers, administrators, and students are exited and motivated to learn and teach well. Some of the traditional models of education should be rethought in order to provide a more interactive learning environment for high school students. Colleges are getting very good at providing internship opportunities for their students with prospective companies, maybe we should try to expand this to the last two summers of high school education.
Lastly, the purpose of education should be recast as well. The mentality that I see so often is that the goal that students and teachers work toward is either passing a test or gaining admittance into a certain college. Education is ultimately not about these things–it’s about giving students the tools, motivation, encouragement, and vision to fulfill their dreams. If both teachers and students viewed each day of school as one more opportunity to fulfill their dreams we would see some very different schools.
What are your thoughts?
On one of my posts there was a comment about the unmistakability of the New Testament concerning the virgin birth (my post was on the discussion of betulah and almah on the TV show Studio 60). I am quite traditional in my view of the virgin birth–that is I believe that it was a virgin birth, for reasons that will be clear shortly. But, in the spirit of scientific inquiry I thought we would take a look at this question.
The British evangelical scholar, Gordon Wenham, wrote a fine essay in 1972 in which he persuasively argues that the Hebrew word betulah means simply “a girl of marriageable age” and not necessarily “virgin”1.
Most modern translations also take this view, but there are inconsistencies. For instance, the ESV is inconsistent in their translation and notation methodology–in Ex 22:16 they translate betulah as “virgin” in the text but then give a footnote that reads “or girl of marriageable age.” Then, in Lev 21:14 the text reads “virgin” while the footnote reads “Hebrew young woman.” But in most cases they translate “virgin” without a footnote.
In the New Testament two words are typically used that are associated with virginity: parthenia “virginity” Lk 2:36; and parthenos “virgin” Mt 1:23; 25:1, 7, 11; Lk 1:27; Ac 21:9; 1 Cor 7:25, 28, 34, 36-38; 2 Cor 11:2; Rv 14:4. I would argue that parthenos has a very similar meaning to betulah, that is, “a girl that is eligible to marry.”
Parthenos has this meaning in classical Greek; see this quote from Louw and Nida:
a person who has not as yet married (and possibly implying virginity) — ‘unmarried person.’ ‘concerning the unmarried, I do not have a command from the Lord’ 1Cor 7:25. Some scholars interpret parthenos as referring not only to those who have never married, but also to widows and widowers who have not remarried. The meaning of ‘unmarried persons who are not necessarily virgins’ is well attested in Greek from classical times.
The NIV and ESV consistently translate parthenos as virgin except in Acts 21:9 in which they translate the phrase thugateres parthenoi as “unmarried daughters.” The King James Version translates parthenos as “her” in 1 Cor 7:38. Furthermore, the ESV translates epei andra ou ginsosko as “since I am a virgin.” While the translations are consistent in their translation methodology of parthenos for the most part, there are uneven patches.
I would view the words used in both testaments as referring primarily to women of marriageable age. In these cultures women were expected to remain chaste until marriage. In all of the New Testament references to Mary there is no textual reason to assume that she was not a virgin before she conceived Jesus–the objection to the virgin birth would have to come from philosophical and worldview perspectives.
But, I went through this exercise because the lexical issues involved are not as cut and dry as some people might believe. It is my opinion that theology comes from morphology and not the other way around (yes, I have heard of the hermeneutical spiral and I agree with it, but you get my drift). We must be honest about the facts at hand.
I accept the virgin birth because of these reasons: the cultural expectations of the day were that women remain chaste until marriage, there is no textual reason to reject Mary’s virginity, my worldview allows for the possibility of supernatural events, and church history and tradition overwhelmingly favor a virgin birth. But, notice that I do not rest my argument on the definition of betulah or parthenos because the semantic range of these terms includes people who are of marriageable age who are not virgins. Finally, notice as well that I do not exclude the virgin birth because of the definition of these words as I have heard many people do–the semantic range of these terms includes both possibilities for both sides of the argument over the virgin birth. Therefore support for either position must come from other places.
