Thursday, December 30, 2004

Biblical Archaeology from Scratch I: Fake Epigraphy

In the wake of the epidemic of forgeries that have made their way into our database about ancient Israel, Ed Cook puts it well: "It is not an overstatement to say that biblical archaeology may require a generation of disciplined, rigorous re-examination of all unprovenanced epigraphic material in order to be regarded again as a scientific discipline."

The basic problem is 1) it is not hard to forge ancient inscriptions. Some knowledge of ancient languages and a half-decent forgery lab, of which there are apparently several, is enough. 2) There are massive (6 or 7 figures) rewards for doing it. 3) It is very hard to conclusively prove forgery, partly because of the way that media and scholarly debates work. They form around an adversarial, "on the one hand, on the other hand" approach. As the "debates" around the health effects of smoking and the certaintly of global warming show, it is always possible to get an expert to argue your point of view. Authority in the modern media environment can be very diffuse.

This is something that my fellow Hopkins grad Christopher Rollston, one of the most skilled and thoughtful epigraphers around, has been thinking about for some time. He's come up with the best methodology I've seen for dealing with it.

One take-home point: always, always say whether your text was excavated or not, and always ask. It can be pretty disturbing to read stuff by good scholars where they don't, or where they shrug their shoulders.

For more, see his “Non-Provenanced Epigraphs I: Pillaged Antiquities, Northwest Semitic Forgeries, and Protocols for Laboratory Tests” in Maarav 10, and “Non-Provenanced Epigraphs II: The Status of Non-Provenanced Epigraphs within the Broader Corpus” (forthcoming in Maarav 11).

Next: why this may not really be the problem at all.

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Serving the Word

This blog gets its title from a heartfelt and illuminating ethnography by the anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano, Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench. It's a study of two flavors of literalist exegesis: Fundamentalist Christian biblical interpretation and "strict constructionist" Constitutional law (think Anthony Scalia and Robert Bork).

I'm writing a critique of it for the University of Chicago's Interdisciplinary Christianities workshop. Here are some notes on what sounds like a riveting paper that was delivered there last year by my friend Alex Golub who is now suffering the slings and arrows of lubricious Hawaii).

The beginning of my critique: Crapanzano's book is basically about hermeneutics on the ground. A hermeneutic is a way people get meaning from language. The book gets its kick from the conflict between two kinds of hermeneutics: his (secular, academic) and theirs (Fundamentalist or merely Conservative, but always literalist). His account of hermeneutics begins with Schleiermacher , a 19th-century German philosopher. But what if you began it with the kind of texts Crapanzano's Fundamentalist Christian subjects actually read and think about? What if you began hermeneutics with the book of John? The formation "literalism" might crack under the weight of this wilder semiotics.

As a philologist, I'm committed to paying a great deal of attention to ancient texts and the ways they tell you to read them. I'm planning to argue that if you look at the accounts of language implied in some ancient (John, as well as the first Jewish mystical treatise, Sefer Yesirah) and early modern (Reformation, esp. the Sacred Panegyrics of the Jesuit scholar Emanuele Tesauro) texts, Crapanzano's hermeneutics may come to seem too narrow and brittle to encompass the things modern Fundamentalists do with sacred language.

The bulk of the paper explores this with a look at the Aramaic language, and non-language, of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. Can we call a religious artifact like this an "interpretation"? It's certainly literalist. Where did it come from historically, what does the viewer participate in by watching it, and what kinds of problems does this raise, both for literalism and literalism's critics?

A fine can of worms. This is what I do to relax from editing alphabetic cuneiform texts and reading Isaiah? Anyhow, time to go read some Schliermacher.

Vernacular Revelation

These are the lines along which I am planning my book, which is mostly done.

In the Renaissance, the translation of the Bible from the sacred Latin into the common tongues of the day was politically explosive: divine revelation now spoke directly to the people. Vernacular Revelation will argue that this is how the Hebrew Bible itself was created, as the first vernacular literature designed for wide distribution. Thousands of years before the first national languages were written down in Europe, a common language was forged by Israelite scribes in order to create a new audience—the people of Israel. This book expands on the past 20 years of research in anthropology, political science and history to show the invention of Hebrew language and literature not as a socially constructed fiction but as a cultural achievement that produced new political possibilities.

Vernacular Revelation attempts to rethink the Bible in light of recent findings in the history of writing. Discoveries in the 1980’s and 90’s demonstrated the extreme antiquity of the alphabet and the fact that there was not originally just one alphabet, but multiple competing alphabetic systems. This means that the use of the Hebrew alphabet was a deliberate and meaningful choice. Hebrew did more than just transmit information: it was a vehicle of political symbolism and self-representation. Old and sometimes bitter debates over whether the Bible is history or ideology can give way to productive new ones over the relationship between the Bible’s written form and its political power.

Vernacular Revelation suggests new avenues for Biblical scholarship, arguing for the need to move beyond modern scholarly ambitions of “seeing through” the Bible’s conditions of production. 19th and 20th-century Biblical philology focused on reconstructing the conjectural sources behind the text, but resulted in a stalemate since the sources are neither preserved to us nor provable. I wish to find a way past that stalemate: while building on the most solid results of source criticism, the book will argue that philology is most reliable, and illuminating, when it works from actual contemporary documents. By comparing Biblical documents with related ancient texts in Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Babylonian, this book will document distinct ways in which Hebrew was a powerfully self-conscious political language. It was the first successful example of a new project: a local, culturally specific form of writing, opposed to the placeless, universal lingua franca of Babylonian cuneiform.

The book will explore the enduring political stakes of Biblical writing. Texts in Hebrew assumed, and promoted, a source of power previously unknown in written literature: “the people” as the protagonist of religion and politics. The Bible created an audience that could read about itself in its own language. By documenting how this new readership was produced, the book hopes to exemplify how philology can address vital new questions asked by scholars of history and anthropology.

Margins of Writing

The margins seem like a fine place to begin. In fact, I believe that's where everyone begins, historically speaking.

If writing is the sine qua non of history, this conference is about how people gained the tools to make history. It focuses on the ancient Near East, from Israel to Babylon to Anatolia, but chews on some very broad questions, including ones posed by India and China (thanks to the University of Chicago's John Kelly and Sheldon Pollock, who will be our resident comparativists).

It's hosted by Chicago's venerable (for the US, anyway) and quasi-legendary Oriental Institute, and will feature some of my friends and neighbors from the third floor, such as the Hittitologist Theo van den Hout and the Sumerologist Chris Woods.

The conference is my main academic task this year (other than writing a book on the language of the Hebrew Bible and the politics of ancient Israel--which I'll describe later--and finding something good to do for next year) . Non-academic tasks include getting 8 hours a week of exercise (running, rock-climbing, swimming, biking, ice-climbing...I'm taking suggestions!) , taking good care of the dog, and enjoying the company and wisdom of those around me.