The Meeting Season
A time to learn, a time to drowse, a time to mingle with colleagues from around the world
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Summer is the time for alphabet-soup scholarly conferences. Some are held annually, like those of the International SBL (Society of Biblical Literature), the CBA (Catholic Biblical Association) and the SNTS (Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas), which met last summer in Sheffield, England, San Francisco and Cambridge, England, respectively. Others meet less often. Next summer the IOSOT (International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament) will be holding its tri-enniel meeting in Leuven, Belgium, and the WCJS (World Congress of Jewish Studies) will gather for its quatro-enniel in Jerusalem. In 1990 the ICBA (International Congress on Biblical Archaeology) will also meet in Jerusalem.
Obviously, no one can attend all these conferences. Last summer we chose two: the International SBL in Sheffield, England, hosted by the University of Sheffield, and the SNTS a few days later at Cambridge University. The SNTS was celebrating its jubilee; the society of New Testament scholars had been founded 50 years earlier.
At all of these scholarly meetings the principal activity is the presentation of papers read by their scholar-authors. Some papers are good and some are not. At almost all presentations, however, many fellow scholars can be observed head down, eyes closed, breathing regularly. At any particular time—it does not matter whether it is early in the morning, the middle of the afternoon or late at night—between 15 and 30 per cent of the audience is sleeping. It is nothing to be ashamed of and virtually everyone does it from time to time. The universal nature of the activity is widely recognized and generally accepted. No need to pretend you are simply deep in concentration. There is something strangely moving—at once elevating and humbling—at the sight of half a dozen prominent scholars, all comfortably dozing while a colleague drones on.
It is still considered bad form for the chairperson to drowse, but there are signs of a change. At both Sheffield and Cambridge we saw presiding officers asleep, but fortunately in every case the bleary-eyed presiding officer awoke before the end of the talk.
This kind of nap is not a long, steady one, but rather three or four minutes at a time, then 30 seconds of wakefulness, and back to sleep again. It can be quite pleasant. And after half an hour or so, you are prepared again to listen to another paper. Moreover, one somehow awakens whenever something really interesting is said. In this respect, sleeping is a little like editing; you cross out what is uninteresting.
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Unlike the SNTS meeting, the International SBL meeting is threatened by the paucity of senior scholars who deliver papers. At the SNTS, you virtually trip over names you’ve heard about and seen on the spines of weighty tomes. Strangely enough, at the International SBL most of the leading biblical scholars from the British Isles stayed way.
One senior scholar at the International SBL meeting told me he was once asked to forego reading a paper he submitted so that a junior scholar could fill the slot. The reason: only if the junior scholar read a paper would that scholar’s university pay the expenses. It is widely recognized that the International SBL is overburdened with less significant papers by junior scholars who are placed on the program as an accommodation; that is the only way these junior scholars can get their university or college to pick up the tab.
This is by no means universally the case. Some of the papers by young scholars were brilliant and penetrating. One paper that particularly impressed was by Raymond Westbrook, of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who explained how an understanding of dowry in biblical law illuminated biblical texts in fresh ways. Another was by Jeffrey Siker of Loyola Marymount University. Siker spoke on how the Abraham stories in the Old Testament were used in early Christian theology. And there were a number of papers by the heavies—David Noel Freedman of the University of Michigan and the University of California, San Diego, on who won the bet between God and the Satan in the book of Job; and Carol Meyers of Duke University on gender roles in the household economy of ancient Israel.
The University of Sheffield’s own Philip Davies opened the program with a talk (through which no one slept) on how not to conduct an excavation. As his example, he used the case of Qumran, adjacent to the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Pulling no punches, Davies characterized excavation as “controlled vandalism” that is justified only if the results are “promptly, fully and accurately” reported:
“Archaeology is a two-stage process. The first, more interesting part, is the digging; the second, more important part, is the publishing of the data. The first stage is in fact controlled vandalism, justified only by the second stage.”
Without publication, Davies said, archaeological excavation is “criminal”:
“The most important tool of the archaeologist is not the spade, but the pen. Any archaeologist or scholar who digs or finds a text and then does not pass on promptly, fully and accurately what is found deserves to be locked up as an enemy of science. And as yet, after 40 years, we have neither a full and definitive report on the dig at Qumran, nor a full publication of the [Dead Sea] Scrolls.”
Qumran was excavated by Roland de Vaux, a French Dominican father who died in 1971 without publishing a final report. Father de Vaux interpreted the site as an Essene “monastery.” Davies questioned whether the site could accurately be characterized as a monastery. The “most significant” fact in the identification of the site as a monastery, said Davies, was that the excavation was “led by a Domonican monk”:
“The picture that forms again and again behind many descriptions of the site is one of a medieval religious community, meeting for prayer, writing manuscripts, doing a little agriculture, eating in the refectory, having council meetings, and so on. And, of course, washing themselves all the time in those cisterns.
“It would be very odd indeed to find anything like a Christian monastery before the end of the second century C.E., and whether there was ever such a thing as a Jewish monastery I simply don’t know; this question never seems to have occurred to those who so described Qumran. The structures there, at any rate, were interpreted with this idea of a monastery already in mind.”
Many other conclusions reached by de Vaux can and should be questioned, said Davies:
“Despite widespread belief to the contrary, there are, in several major areas, no grounds for a consensus about the archaeology of the site. De Vaux’s conclusions remain open to question, but will hardly be questioned widely until his evidence and argumentation [are) fully set out.”
One exciting sign of the times was the amount of attention at the International SBL meeting to women’s perspectives. Women were prominent not only on the program but also in the program. At least 16 papers were devoted to women in the biblical world. This constituted very nearly 20% of the papers.
Women and women’s issues were almost but not entirely, absent from the SNTS program. The most prominent exception was the presidential address by the Society’s new president, Morna Hooker, of Cambridge University. Her address, however, was devoted to an interpretation of the Greek phrase pistis Christos, which appears often in the New Testament: Does it mean “faith of Christ” or “faith in Christ”—or both? Hooker concluded that the phrase refers to aspects both of Jesus’ own faith in the Father, as well as the believer’s faith in Jesus.
One of the few references to feminist questions at the SNTS was Joseph Fitzmyer’s paper on the meaning of the Greek word kepaleh, usually translated “head,” in Corinthian’s 11:3. This famous text states:
“…But I should like you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.”
Fitzmyer, with his customary clarity and careful scholarship, convincingly demonstrated that contrary to the interpretation of some feminist exegetes, kepaleh can mean to have “authority over” or “responsibility for.” In short, this interpretation of the word in 1 Corinthians cannot be excluded on semantic grounds. “This won’t make the feminists happy,” he added, “but there it is.”
Both the International SBL and the SNTS were warm, welcoming, collegial gatherings. The city of Sheffield hosted a reception in the elegant, high-ceilinged hall of the 04419th century municipal building, where the SBL participants were each greeted personally by the Lord Mayor and the Lord Mayoress of Sheffield wearing their chains of office. The Lord Mayor, incidentally, is a woman, and the Lord Mayoress is her daughter.
The final banquet was held in Cutler’s Hall, an elegant club established by the guild of steel fabricators for which Sheffield is famous. As we dined in luxury, the University of Sheffield’s David Clines reminded us of the harsh conditions of the workers in these mills, who lived dreary, demeaning lives and died young. They did not give up easily, however, and were in the forefront of the English labor movement.
Cambridge University was an extraordinarily gracious setting for the SNTS meeting. So many participants attended—over 450—that there was no place big enough for a banquet of all the participants. But in the evening we were treated to organ recitals and choral concerts in chapels of three of the University’s colleges—Kings, Jesus and Robinson—and receptions at “quads” blanketed by some of the most beautiful green grass ever grown. When asked the secret of this achievement, one Englishman replied, “It’s quite simple. Just plant some good grass seed and when the grass comes up, mow and roll it once a week for 400 years.”
Summer is the time for alphabet-soup scholarly conferences. Some are held annually, like those of the International SBL (Society of Biblical Literature), the CBA (Catholic Biblical Association) and the SNTS (Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas), which met last summer in Sheffield, England, San Francisco and Cambridge, England, respectively. Others meet less often. Next summer the IOSOT (International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament) will be holding its tri-enniel meeting in Leuven, Belgium, and the WCJS (World Congress of Jewish Studies) will gather for its quatro-enniel in Jerusalem. In 1990 the ICBA (International Congress on Biblical Archaeology) will also […]
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