Dr. Platypus

The latest post by Peter Enns explores the connection between Adam’s story and the story of Israel, and in the process explains where Cain got his wife:

Look at it this way. The word “adam” is ambiguous in Genesis. Every commentator notes that sometimes “adam” represents humanity (so I will use the lower case); other times it is the name “Adam” (upper case) representing one man. What does this back and forth mean? It means that Adam is a special subset of adam.

The character “Adam” is the focus of the story because he is the part of “adam” that God is really interested in. There is “adam” outside of Eden (in Nod), but inside of Eden, which is God’s focus, there is only “Adam”—the one with which he has a unique relationship.

The question in Genesis is whether “Adam” will be obedient to “the law” and stay in Eden, thus continuing this special relationship, or join the other “adam” outside in “exile.” This is the same question with Israel: after being “created” by God, will they obey and remain in the land, or disobey and be exiled?

I’m still perturbed, however, that nobody ever  seems to worry about where Seth got his wife!

John Hobbins has a great roundup of posts discussing the “10th-century” wall recently discovered in Jerusalem (and related finds). For those (like myself) who strongly suspect there is something fishy with how ancient chronology has been put together, there is little chance that this find is actually from the Solomonic era, although it does (like the Qeiyafa inscription) point to an era only a few generations removed from the United Monarchy.

At any rate, a little more light seems to be shining on the “dark age” of early Iron Age Israel.

Jeanie Miley has some very kind words to say about Formations adult Bible study curriculum, of which I am the editor:

For years we have used the FORMATIONS study material, written by moderate Baptists across the country.  The lessons are edited and printed by the publisher Smyth and Helwys.  I have been so impressed by these current commentaries on the prophets,  written by Brett Younger, that I ordered copies for each member of the class.  Brett has an unusual ability to peer into the biblical material and connect it with contemporary culture.  He has made the ancient material in Malachi, Micah, Habbakkuk and Zephaniah come alive for us.

Interesting article about the personal names in the opening chapters of Genesis by Richard S. Hess over at The Bible and Interpretation. I wish I knew more about onomastics than I do. The Medieval Names Archive does a fantastic job of tracking the naming practices of the period roughly AD 500–1500, and there are several online sources for information about ancient Rome. If something comparable exists for the ancient world, I would appreciate a heads-up.

Claude Mariottini has written a couple of interesting posts, pondering whether Moses had a cleft lip and/or was left-handed. The verdict on both questions is “not enough evidence,” but the reasoning process, and especially the midrashic material in Claude’s second post, is very interesting.

My CHR 101 students must be living right, because BioLogos.org has just posted a video lecture by N. T. Wright on “Meaning and Myth,” in which the renowned biblical scholar discusses Genesis 1–3 and what it can mean to claim that this texts is both “mythic” and “God’s word.”

This will be very helpful background material for next Tuesday’s discussion. I’ll probably be plagiarizing from it rather blatantly.

Interesting insight from Ken Shenck about the nature of biblical prophecy—and a lot of what passes these days for “speaking prophetically.”

There is a psychological dynamic among much of American Christianity that pushes us to want to “call sin sin,” to “call out the sinner,” to “speak truth to power.” But my observation is that much of this dynamic is a pronouncement of judgment, much like Jonah at Ninevah. In other words, it is not proclamation for change. It is just enjoyable venting….

But truly Christian prophecy is prophecy for change and is as different from this sort of child-level telling off as what God had in mind for Nineveh differed from what Jonah had in mind. God will one day pronounce a summative judgment on all flesh, a final verdict. But especially for Arminians, almost all prophecy on this side of eternity must at least be hopeful formative prophecy, prophecy that longs for change in those to whom we speak.

This is definitely going into my introductory lecture on the prophetic tradition this spring.

The Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription is once again in the news. According to a recent report by the University of Haifa, Gershon Galil has deciphered the text, written in ink on a small piece of pottery shard, and concluded that it is written in an archaic form of Hebrew. The inscription is dated to the tenth century BC, the era traditionally assigned to Israel’s United Monarchy. This makes the Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription—discovered barely a year ago—the oldest surviving example of written Hebrew.

For the original text (in modern Hebrew characters) and analysis, see John Hobbins’s supremely helpful introduction. Here is Galil’s decipherment:

1′ you shall not do [it], but worship the [Lord].
2′ Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an]
3′ [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and]
4′ the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king.
5′ Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger.

The text’s call for social justice is reminiscent of later biblical texts such as Isaiah 1:17, Psalms 72:3, Exodus 23:3, and others.

Several bibliobloggers take Galil to task for reaching the unsupported conclusions that this find “indicates that the Kingdom of Israel already existed in the 10th century BCE and that at least some of the biblical texts were written hundreds of years before the dates presented in current research.” (James McGrath’s blog is a good place to start.) This is certainly true of the second point: at best the inscription indicates that writing was not unknown in tenth-century Israel. It says nothing about any biblical texts. Tony Cartledge sums up the matter rather succinctly:

The inscription reflects thoughts similar to sentiments expressed in a variety of biblical texts, and that certainly suggests something about the antiquity of important notions about social justice in Israel, but it doesn’t begin to prove that Deuteronomy or any other biblical books that mention widows and orphans had been completed by that time.

But what about the first point, that the Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription indicates that there was already a kingdom of Israel in the tenth century? Its provenance in a fortress along an ancient Judean highway at least suggests “some sort of organized Hebrew presence” (Cartledge). The exhortation in line 4 to “rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king” seems rather explicit, however. Either this is Israel’s king, David or one of his earliest descendants, or it is a completely different kingdom—existing at the same time and in the same place, and for which we have no documentary evidence whatsoever.

In the end, I concur with Claude Mariottini who concludes,

Those who accept a minimalist view of the Bible will say that the inscription proves nothing or that one is reading too much into Galil’s translation of the inscription. However, the evidence seems to indicate, at least to me, that in the tenth century there was a king in Israel and writing was occurring outside Jerusalem.

Update: Check out John Hobbins’s The Lowdown on the Qeiyafa inscription, as well as the resources to which he links.

Before you answer, check out this video:

I must confess, I didn’t realize that manna takes the form of communion wafers.

(H/T: Michael Bird)

The Ten “Lost Tribes of Israel” were mentioned briefly in class yesterday. Claude Mariottini has today linked to an interesting article about the place these tribes eventually inherited in Jewish folklore, and also provides a number of links to his own thoughts on the subject. (And no, I still don’t think they’re the British!)