Hide Your Reading Glasses! Dr. Jim’s been published again.

EEK!

That’s right, some of the stuff I’ve been working on is now available.

First of all, I have two short articles in the new Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, edited by Daniel Patte. One is on the Deuteronomistic History and the other on the Book of Kings.

For those heading to Atlanta, SBL will be having a session on the Dictionary.

 

Variety of Historical and Cultural Contexts for Biblical Studies:
The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity
9:00 AM to 11:30 AM  11/21/2010
International South   HYATT

More importantly, I have two proper essays in a new collection.

Ehud Ben Zvi and Christoph Levin (eds.)

The Concept of Exile in Ancient Israel and its Historical Contexts
(BZAW, 404; Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010).

The collection is the proceedings of two meetings, one at the University of Alberta in Edmonton AB in 2008 and the other at Ludwig-Maximillans-Universität in Munich (2009) which were held as part of a larger research collaboration across different departments of the two institutions. These meetings were held as workshops dedicated to the problem of the exile in prophetic literature.

Here is the TOC, lifted shamelessly from De Gruyters site. (Hey, this part of the ebook is a freebee)

Christoph Levin, Introduction.

Jan Christian Gertz, Military Threat and the Concept of Exile in the Book of Amos.

Martti Nissinen, The Exiled Gods of Babylon in Neo Assyrian Prophecy.

Kirsi Valkama, What Do Archaeological Remains Reveal of the Settlements in Judah during the Mid Sixth Century BCE?

Christoph Levin, The Empty Land in Kings.

Juha Pakkala, The Exile and the Exiles in the Ezra Tradition.

Hermann Josef Stipp, The Concept of the Empty Land in Jeremiah 37:43.

Ehud Ben Zvi, Total Exile, ␣Empty Land and the General Intellectual Discourse in Yehud.

Ehud Ben  Zvi, The Voice and Role of  a Counterfactual Memory in the Construction of  Exile and Return: Considering Jeremiah 40: 7–12.

Jakob Wöhrle, The Un Empty Land. The Concept of Exile and Land in P.

Reinhard␣Müller, A Prophetic View of the Exile in the Holiness Code.

Reinhard  Müller, Images of Exile in the Book of Judges.

Francis Landy, Exile in the Book of Isaiah.

Francis Landy, Reading, Writing, and Exile.

John Kessler, Images of Exile: Representations of the “Exile” and “Empty Land” in the Sixth to Fourth Century BCE Yehudite Literature.

Here’s a pair of extracts from my two contributions, and the kittie that announced the impending volume some months ago on this blog:

Myth of the Exilic Return: Myth Theory and the Exile as an Eternal Reality in the Prophets.

This paper deals with M. Eliade, J. Z. Smith and Wendy Doniger along with a discussion of the Exile as a mythic trope in the Hebrew Bible alongside creation/expulsion and the “Combat Myth” and the closing of Amos.

In returning to my roots in this essay, I will explore some aspects of the prophetic corpus’s constructions of the exile and restoration as mythical conceptions that seek to return one to primordial origins. These origins are not a paradise, however, but contested territory in which divergent myths clamour for attention and serve as a locus for thought (p.296).

What we have then, is really two competing mythologies in Amos, and, I would suggest, in many other biblical passages as well. One is of an eternal expulsion and death; the other is of the capacity to bring order and life once again to the cosmos. The two myths coexist within the ancient Judean symbolic universe. There is never a perfect resolution of their incipiently problematic tensions, just as we have with the multiple creation myths. Nor should we expect there to be (pp. 305-306).

Playing with Maps of Exile: Displacement, Utopia, and Disjunction

At the early stages of preparing this paper for presentation in Munich I was reminded of a story told by my friend and colleague, Tom Robinson, about a class he was teaching on early Christianity. He was distributing a map of the areas bordering the Mediterranean Sea when one inquisitive student asked “What’s the map’s scale?” Tom answered, “One to one, full scale. Be careful when you open it.”Perhaps I should have taken that advice to heart myself since in this paper I will be opening up Second Isaiah, which, of course, has its own full-scale interpretative problems, and most scholarly work charting Isaiah has labelled huge expanses of territory: “Here there be dragons”.  The maps I will be talking in this paper have little to do with cartography or geography, and so I should apologize that I will not attempt to reconstruct the original Baedecker’s guide to ancient Mesopotamia. Nor can I offer advice on the best hostel on the road from Babylon to Jerusalem. My title was inspired by the seminal address of Jonathan Z. Smith that became the eponymous chapter of his book of 1978, Map is Not Territory.

…

What biblical scholars call the “Exile” is itself part of a “map” constructed by interpreters to find their way through the mass of biblical materials and the data about the ancient world in which these documents were produced. It is this difficult terrain that comprises the “territory” of biblical scholarship. For its part, the Bible contains many passages relating to the real, imagined or threatened deportation and displacement of Israelites and Judeans from the land claimed to be given them by a deity. Each of these passages is itself the result of a “mapping” process that relates religious and ethical concerns to political and military fortunes and the belief in a divinely sanctioned homeland  (pp. 275-76).

And  don’t forget the comparison between Second Isaiah and “Cargo Cults”. That threw the audience for a loop.