Where is Mount Sinai?

            The mountain preferred as the “Mount Sinai” is Jebel Musa (Gebel) because of the “imposing granite formations of this massif and the presence of the extensive plains at its base.” It has been said that in the fourth century BC, was the formalization of the monastery and basilica of St. Catherine that was erected at the foot of Jebel Musa – “The Mountain of Moses” in the middle of the sixth century BC.

The Route of the Exodus

The eastern shore of Yam Suph (the Red Sea) – Israelites watched the overthrow of the Egyptian chariots and then they paused to give praise to God. Ain Musa – “The springs of Moses” Israel’s first stop, but this site is not mentioned in any biblical text. It is a source of sweet water. Marah – “Bitter” the first stop mentioned in the text. This site is notorious for its salty, brackish water. At God’s direction, Moses cast a piece of wood into the pool, and it became sweet and drinkable. El Ati – the desert plain, after nine more miles from Marah. Elim – located in the large and beautiful valley of Ghurundel. This site had at least twelve wells to supply the people and their herds. Desert of Sin – is problematical as to its exact location. Dophkah – its meaning is smelter. This name is connected with the Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynasties. The people rested at Dophkah and Alush. Rephidim – the people found their water depleted. This led to the famous water-from-the rock -scene in Exodus 17:1-7. Also the Israelites were attacked by a roving band known as the Amalekites. It was at Rephidim that Moses was visited by his father-in-law, Jethro. Mt. Sinai – Here Israel arrived in the third month of their journey. The people remain here for eleven months and five days, during this time the Sinai Covenant was given to them with the Law and orders of service for the worship of Yahweh. Taberah – was only three days journey from Sinai. But this site is unknown as yet. Kadeshbarnea – Moses sent out the twelve spies into Canaan. Ten spies reported badly about the Promised Land. Thus, the conquest that could have been was now delayed from about 1445 until about 1407 B.C. Hor – Aaron died. Israel secured a victory over Arad at Hormah. Zalmonah – near Edom’s borders. Plains of Moab – List of sites: Iyyim, Dibon, Almon-diblathaim, Nebo, Abel-shittim, and Jordan River. The east side of Edom – Moses requested permission of Sihon, the Amorite king, to pass, but Sihon attacked Israel instead. To the north of Sihon’s kingdom lay Og of Bashan, and he, too, was soundly defeated by Moses and his warriors. Thus, Israel now controlled all of Transjordania from the Arnon Valley in the south to Mount Hermon in the north, some 150 miles apart.

I.  INTRODUCTION 

Cuneiform (Latin cuneus, “wedge”), term applied to a mode of writing utilizing wedge-shaped strokes, inscribed mainly on clay but also on stone, metals, wax, and other materials. This technique was used by the ancient people of Western Asia. The earliest texts in cuneiform script were made in about 3000 BC, having antedated the use of alphabets by some 1500 years. The latest cuneiform inscriptions date from the 1st century AD. Cuneiform writing, which originated in southern Mesopotamia, was invented probably by the Sumerians, who used it to inscribe the Sumerian language; it was subsequently adapted for writing the Akkadian language, of which Babylonian and Assyrian are dialects. Because Akkadian, the language of later inhabitants of Sumer, became the language of international communication it was studied in schools throughout the ancient Middle East, and the use of cuneiform spread to Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, and, for diplomatic correspondence, to Egypt.  

II. EARLY METHODS OF INSCRIPTION

The earliest cuneiform inscriptions were composed of pictographs. It was far easier, however, to imprint straight lines in the soft clay with a special instrument than to draw in the irregular lines of the pictographs. Consequently a stylus, suited to making tapered impressions, was invented, and the outlines of the pictographs were gradually altered into patterns composed of wedge-shaped lines, which became so stylized that they bore little resemblance to the original pictograph characters.

Originally, each sign stood for a word. Because words that could not themselves be pictured were expressed by pictographs of related objects (for example, god by a star, to stand and to go by a foot), some signs stood for several different words. Because most Sumerian words are monosyllabic, the signs were soon used as mere syllables regardless of their original meaning. Signs that had more than one reading as word signs or logograms also acquired several syllabic values. This multitude of readings is known as polyphony. On the other hand, Sumerian has many words that sound alike (homonyms); syllabic values taken from such homonyms also coincide; they are known as homophones.

The fully developed cuneiform system had more than 600 signs. About half of these could be used as either logograms or syllables, the others as logograms only. Word signs also served as determinatives to indicate the class (such as man, tree, stone) to which a word belonged. The system remained a mixture of logograms and syllables throughout its existence. When it was applied to another language, the logograms were simply read in that language. Although at times a tendency existed to simplify the script by reducing the number of logograms and the use of polyphony, the step to an alphabet, in which each sign stands for one sound, was never made in standard cuneiform; only the Ugaritic and Old Persian scripts reached that stage.

         The cuneiform script underwent considerable changes over a period of more than two millennia. The image below shows the development of the sign SAG “head.” 

          Stage 1 shows the pictogram as it was drawn around 3000 BC. Stage 2 shows the rotated pictogram as written around 2800 BC. Stage 3 shows the abstracted glyph in archaic monumental inscriptions, from ca. 2600 BC, and stage 4 is the sign as written in clay, contemporary to stage 3. Stage 5 represents the late 3rd millennium, and stage 6 represents Old Assyrian ductus of the early 2nd millennium, as adopted into Hittite. Stage 7 is the simplified sign as written by Assyrian scribes in the early 1st millennium, and until the script’s extinction.

1. Archaic cuneiform
 
In the mid-3rd millennium, writing direction was changed to left to right in horizontal rows (rotating all of the pictograms 90°Counter-clockwise in the process), and a new wedge-tipped stylus was used which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped (“cuneiform”) signs; these two developments made writing quicker and easier. By adjusting the relative position of the tablet to the stylus, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions.

Cuneiform tablets could be fired in kilns to provide a permanent record, or they could be recycled if permanence was not needed. Many of the tablets found by archaeologists were preserved because they were baked when attacking armies burned the building in which they were kept. The script was also widely used on commemorative stelae and carved reliefs to record the achievements of the ruler in whose honor the monument had been erected.

2. Akkadian cuneiform 

The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by the Akkadians from ca. 2500 BC, and by 2000 BC, had evolved into Old Assyrian cuneiform, with many modifications to Sumerian orthography. The Semitic equivalents for many signs became distorted or abbreviated to form new “phonetic” values, but because the syllabic nature of the script as refined by the Sumerians was unintuitive to Semitic speech.

“Typical” signs have usually in the range of about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of twenty or more (although it is not always clear if a ligature should be considered a single sign or two collated but still distinct signs); the ligature KAxGUR₇ consists of 31 strokes.

Later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary, together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs in the script were polyvalent, having both a syllabic and logographic meaning. The complexity of the system bears a resemblance to classical Japanese, written in a Chinese-derived script, where some of these Sinograms were used as logograms and others as phonetic characters.

3. Assyrian cuneiform 

Neo-Assyrian ligature KAxGUR₇ (𒅬); the KA sign (𒅗) was a Sumerian compound marker, and appears frequently in ligatures enclosing other signs. GUR₇ is itself a ligature of SÍG.AḪ.ME.U, meaning “to pile up; grain-heap” (Akkadian kamāru; karû).

This “mixed” method of writing continued through the end of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, although there were periods when “purism” was in fashion and there was a more marked tendency to spell out the words laboriously, in preference to using signs with a phonetic complement. Yet even in those days, the Babylonian syllabary remained a mixture of ideographic and phonetic writing.

Hittite cuneiform is an adaptation of the Old Assyrian cuneiform of ca. 1800 BC to the Hittite language. When the cuneiform script was adapted to writing Hittite, a layer of Akkadian logographic spellings was added to the script, with the result that we no longer know the pronunciations of many Hittite words conventionally written by logograms.

In the Iron Age (ca. 10th to 6th c. BC), Assyrian cuneiform was further simplified. From the 6th century, the Assyrian language was marginalized by Aramaic, written in the Aramaean alphabet, but Neo-Assyrian cuneiform remained in use in literary tradition well into Parthian times. The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in AD 75.

III. ATTEMPTS AT TRANSLATION

No one guessed the meaning of the wedges when early travelers found cuneiform in some of the ruins that were discovered, especially the ruins of Persepolis, in Iran. Pietro della Valle, an Italian traveler, in 1621 noticed the 413 lines of inscription on the mountain wall at Behistun in western Iran and copied some of the signs. In 1674 Jean Chardin, a French trader, published complete groups of cuneiforms and noted that the inscriptions always appeared in sets of three parallel forms. The first real progress toward reading the writing at Behistun was made by Carsten Niebuhr, a German member of a Danish scientific expedition to the Middle East from 1761 to 1767. He correctly thought the threefold inscription to be transcripts of the same text in three different kinds of unknown writing and in 1777 he published the first accurate and complete copies of the Behistun inscriptions. These great trilingual inscriptions of Darius I, king of Persia, were written in Persian, Elamite (formerly known as Susian), and Babylonian cuneiforms. The three systems of writing were used by the Persian kings of the Achaemenid dynasty to make their decrees known to three subject nations.

The Persian cuneiform was the first of the inscriptions to be deciphered. The German scholars Oluf Gerhard Tychsen and Georg Friedrich Grotefend and the Danish philologist Rasmus Christian Rask each identified several signs. The French Orientalist Eugene Burnouf finally deciphered most of the signs of the Persian cuneiform system, and the British Assyriologist Henry Creswicke Rawlinson independently interpreted the text he had copied afresh from the Behistun rock and published the results in 1846. The task of deciphering the Persian cuneiform was made easier by existing knowledge of Pahlavi, a later Persian language. The Persian is the simplest and the most recent of all the cuneiform systems. It contains 36 characters that are almost entirely alphabetic, although they are used also for certain simple syllables. In addition, the Persian cuneiform system has a word divider. The use of the Persian cuneiform was confined to the period from 550 to 330 BC. The oldest example of this cuneiform is probably an inscription of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae and the most recent that of Artaxerxes III (reigned 358?-338 BC) at Persepolis.

The Elamite cuneiform is frequently called the language of the second form because it appears in the second position of the trilingual inscriptions of the Achaemenian kings. Decipherment of it was first undertaken by the Danish Orientalist Neils Ludvig Westergaard in 1844. The fact that the same text is repeated word for word in each cuneiform of the trilingual inscriptions was of great importance in translation of the Elamite, in which no modern language or hitherto known language gave any help. This system contains 96 syllabic signs, 16 logograms, and 5 determinants. The readings of the Elamite characters are in general fairly clear, although some words are still uncertain. The Babylonian version of the Behistun text was deciphered through the united efforts of the French Orientalist Jules Oppert, the Irish Orientalist Edward Hincks, and the French archaeologist Louis Frédérick Joseph Caignart de Saulcy, and Rawlinson. The similarity of the language written in this third cuneiform system to well-known Semitic dialects was helpful in decipherment. The Behistun records gave the first clue to deciphering it, but it is now known that the Babylonian cuneiform was in use more than 2000 years before the Behistun records were inscribed. Many documents of great antiquity in this cuneiform have been found in Babylon, Nineveh, and other places near the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Babylonian cuneiform was inscribed on seals, cylinders, stone obelisks, statues, and the walls of palaces. It appears on a great many clay tablets, some as large as 22.8 cm by 15.2 cm (9 in by 6 in) and others little more than 2.54 cm sq (little more than 1 in sq). The writing is often very small. Some tablets carry six lines per 2.54 cm and must be read with a magnifying glass.

IV. MODERN KNOWLEDGE OF CUNEIFORM

Definite proof that the cuneiform signs were originally pictographs was lacking until early pictographic inscriptions could be found. The German scholar Friedrich Delitzch in 1897 opposed the view that cuneiform signs were originally pictographs, holding instead that they developed from a comparatively small number of basic signs. Combinations of such basic signs, he held, yielded in the course of time hundreds of cuneiform signs. The theory was received with mixed approval, but most scholars inclined toward the theory of pictorial origin. The principle of pictorial origin was finally established in 1913 by the American Orientalist George Aaron Barton in The Origin and Development of Babylonian Writing, which presented a collection of 288 pictographs, found in early cuneiform inscriptions and traced their development. According to Barton, the original signs were modeled after the human body and its parts and after mammals, birds, insects, fishes, trees, stars and clouds, earth and water, buildings, boats, household furniture and utensils, fire, weapons, clothing, implements of worship, nets, traps, pottery, and musical instruments. Excavations conducted by German archaeologists from 1928 to 1931 at Erech (Uruk), on the site of present-day Al Warkā’, Iraq, yielded the oldest-known examples of pictograph writing on clay tablets.

The translation of cuneiform writing has contributed greatly to present knowledge of early Assyria and Babylonia and the Middle East in general. The cuneiform Code of Hammurabi is one of the most important documents to emerge from pre-Christian antiquity. Other tablets have helped to clarify the history of ancient Egypt. A cuneiform script discovered in 1929 during the French excavations of Ra’s Shamrah in North Syria has proven to be an alphabet of consonants; it was estimated to have been in use from about 1400 to 1200 BC. The mythological texts written in this so-called Ra’s Shamrah cuneiform alphabet have thrown light on the religious life of ancient Syria and have bearing upon the reinterpretation of some aspects of the Bible. 

REFERENCES:

* Hans G. Güterbock – Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2007

* Ancient Texts Relating to the Bible – Cuneiform Tablet (WSRP – West Semitic Research Project)              * R. Borger, Assyrisch-Babylonische Zeichenliste, 2nd ed., Neukirchen-Vluyn (1981)

* A. Deimel, Liste der archaischen Keilschriftzeichen (WVDOG 40; Berlin 1922)   

* F. Ellermeier, M. Studt, Sumerisches Glossary

TITLE: THE LECTIONARY IN CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE

AUTHOR: LLOYD R. BAILEY

                - Associate Professor of Old Testament, the Divine School, Duke University

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

A.      ADVANTAGES OF PREACHING FROM LECTIONARY TEXTS

1.       Mandated to deal concretely with the Scriptures

2.       Pastoral restraint

3.       Continuity with the past

4.       Uniformity in the present

5.       Pedagogy

6.       A wide range of canonical materials: A balance concerns

7.       Interrelationship of canonical materials

8.       Proper selectivity

9.       Maintenance of the continuity of biblical books

10.   Stages of meaning

B.      DISADVANTAGES, LIMITATIONS, AND CAUTIONS OF LECTIONARY USAGE

1.       Biblical Text vs. Congregational Context?

2.       Cyclical repetition: Incidentals vs. central theme

3.       Congruence of lections?

4.       Unity and diversity?

5.       Improper unity division

6.       The integrity of the Old Testament

JOURNAL SUMMARY:

It is possible to distinguish between the limitations of lectionaries in theory and the limitations of actual examples. The disadvantages articulated in the article are far more numerous than they need have been. As a consequence, from the author’s critical scholarship and of respect for the diversity of the canonical witness, a reputable lectionary does not yet exist. It is especially sad that such a judgment must be made in view of all the recent energy devoted to revision.

The positive values preaching from lectionary texts are many and substantial, perhaps exceeding those of any other form of preaching. And yet, the limitations are serious enough to caution against an unfailing or uncritical usage.

The pastor is the pivot between the Scriptures and the community which finds its identity defined and sustained by those Scriptures. Ideally, both the text and the context will be known and, with humble arrogance the pastor will be able to distinguish and to propose “whether a historical hour stands under wrath or the love of God”, and then select the proper Word fro the wide range of canonical stances which our ancestors, in their wisdom, have preserved for us. In actuality, however, a number of factors will be at work to detract from the ideal. Perhaps the major issue, as the author sees it, is a pastoral subjectivity which may limit the range of the scriptural witness versus his need for the congregational context to be addressed by the proper canonical stances.  Perhaps the following compromising solution will be helpful.

a.       For regular Sunday to Sunday preaching, perhaps it is well to follow a lectionary.

b.      For special occasions it may be necessary to abandon the assigned lections entirely. One may need to construct a lectionary for the day or longer period. The chosen lections might reinforce each other either to challenge or support the congregation according to need or they might be in tension with each other thereby placing all sides in a polarized situation under the judgment of the Scriptures. 

TITLE: THE LAND OF THE LIVING

AUTHOR: MICHAEL L. BARRE

                - St. Patrick’s Seminary Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1.       The First Meaning

2.       The Second Meaning

3.       The Third Meaning

JOURNAL SUMMARY:

                In 1960 the late M. Dahood proposed that in numerous OT text Hebrew hyym means more than “life” in the ordinary sense. Rather he argued, partly on the basis of Ugaritic evidence, that it frequently has the pregnant sense of “eternal life”. In his three volumes commentary on the Psalter Dahood posited this nuance for hyym in several occurrences of the phrase ‘rs(h)hyym and its variants. In these texts he translated the phrase as “the land of life eternal” or “the fields of life”. These translation differ from the usual rendering of the phrase, namely, “the land of the living”, a rendering which construes (h)hyyma as an adjective used substantively. So interpreted the expression designates the direct opposite of the netherworld, the land of the dead. But is Dahood’s interpretation to be preferred to this? And if so, why? Why, for example, should one take (h)hyym to mean “life” rather than “the living” in his expression, when either seems possible?

In this entry, the author sought to demonstrate that the phrase ‘rs(h)hyym is more complex than meets the eye. To be sure, in a number of passages it does not mean precisely what it was always thought to mean, namely he present sphere of existence as opposed to the netherworld. But because this definition seems to fit all occurrences there was little incentive to look for further specification. He intuited that the expression held a deeper meaning. “The land of life” came to be taken in a more restricted sense in Israel, meaning the Promised Land and then the Jerusalem temple.

                “The land of life” in Israel could be equated with “paradise” is, in the last analysis, anachronistic. And yet it is important to note that even this crass interpretation is not wholly misguided. It is in the temple that one “saw” the face of God that one walked in his presence, that one experienced “life” as nowhere else on earth. In at least some occurrences of ‘rs(h)hyym the kind of life at issue is precisely eternal life. Perhaps one may go so far as to state that in this picture of the temple as the sphere of divine life one may discern the rough outlines of the later and more developed view of the afterlife.

TITLE: SOME NEW TESTAMENT METONYMS FOR GOD

AUTHOR: S. VERNON MCCASLAND

                - University of Virginia

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1.       The Blessed

2.       Power

3.       The Most High

4.       Majesty

5.       Creator

6.       Heaven

7.       Father

8.       Master

9.       Lord

10.   Lord of Lords

11.   King of Kings

12.   Potentate (Sovereign)

13.   The Name

14.   The Glory

15.   The Throne

JOURNAL SUMMARY:

                Looking back over the terms given above as names for God, it is a simple matter to pint out why they are metonyms. The author discussed each name accordingly: The Blessed is derived from the quality of blessedness associated with God in his own true being or from the fact that he is universally praised or blessed by his worshippers. Power is one of the most obvious of the attributes ascribed to God. Potentate, King of Kings, Lord, and Lord of Lords reflect man’s belief in the sovereignty of God over everything he has made. The Most High refers to the exalted position of God with respect to his creation. The Name as a metonym is associated with the very old belief that the essence of a being inheres in his name. The Hebrew emphasis on the family with the father as its head naturally led them to think of God as the diving Father. In a similar way, the important institution of slavery suggested the idea of the heavenly Master. The Creator as a metonym is simply God’s attribute or function as the maker and author of all that is. When Heaven is used as a metonym, it is an example of substituting the place for its inhabitant. Throne is substituted for the person who sits on it. Glory and Majesty are attributes of the divine King. A simple test which can be applied in such cases, to determine whether a word is a metonym or not, is to read the passage substituting God for the word or phrase in question. If the word is a metonym, the meaning of the passage will usually be clarified when God is substituted.

                As indicated, most of the metonyms noted here have good parallels in Hebrew and Jewish writings, but especially in apocryphal and rabbinic sources. The only conclusion which the author draw along this line is that the NT writers used a theological vocabulary which they had learned in Judaism. The kinship is mainly, as we should expect, with writers of approximately their own period.

                   Reader-response criticism is a group of approaches to understanding literature that explicitly emphasizes the reader’s role in creating the meaning and experience of a literary work. More specifically, it refers to a group of critics who study, not a literary work, but readers or audiences responding to a literary work. (Norman Holland, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss – 1960’s and 70’s) 

Kinds of Reader-Response Theorists

1.       Individualists (David Bleich)

- Those who focus upon the individual reader’s experience.

                2. Experimenters (Richard Gerrig)

                                - Those who conduct psychological experiments on a defined set of readers.

                3. Uniformists (Wolfgang Iser)

                                - Those who assume a fairly uniform response by all readers.

Reader-Response: Various Views

1.       Psychoanalytic

- The reader responds to the core fantasies and the symbolic groundwork of the text in a highly personal way; the real meaning of the text is the meaning created by the individual’s psyche in response to the work.

                2. Hermeneutic

- The reader decodes the text according to his world-view, his horizons, yet with the understanding that the text may be operating within a different horizon, hence there is an interaction between the world of the text and the world of the reader.

                3. Phenomenological

- The text functions as a set of instructions for its own processing, it lies between the reader and the text: it is the result of the dialectic between work and reader.

                4. Structuralist

- Decoding the text depends largely on the competence of the reader in responding to the structures and practices of the text and which operate implicitly which the competent reader can make it explicit.

                5. Political or ideological

- The reader himself will have ideological convictions and understandings as well, often unrecognized, as is the nature of ideology, which understandings will condition and direct the reading and the application of the reading.

                6. Post-structuralist view

- Meaning is indeterminate, is not ‘in’ the text but in the play of language and the degree of principles in which the reader is immersed: hence the reader constructs a text as he participates in this play.

The Role of Reader-Response Criticism in the Study of the Bible

               Reader-response criticism in the Biblical context is about readers as opposed to authors, what happened to the texts after the authors had finished with them as opposed to what was in their mind or what was going on around them when they wrote them.

                There is a new notion that the reader’s response of a text is more important than the text itself, and even that a text doesn’t really exist until somebody reads it.  “The bare text is mute”.  It is like the philosophers’ old question: If a tree falls in the forest and no-one hears it, does it make a sound? A text without a reader has no meaning.  It is the readers of a text that give it meaning.   In a sense the reader creates the text as much as the author does. 

The radical notion that a text without a reader doesn’t really exist was a reaction to formalism, to the idea that a text has a single meaning which it is the task of literary critics or interpreters to discover. It was a swing from one extreme to another, a swing away from the single minded preoccupation with the text, however sacred, to a concentration on its readers. This is relevant to biblical studies which have been totally dominated for centuries by the historical critical assumption that research is about getting as near as possible to the one and only original meaning of the text.  Put it this way:  “meaning is what happens to readers during the reading process”.   So to discover the meaning of a text, a new emphasis is required on the reading process and the interaction between reader and text.

Opponents of reader-response theory of course maintain that all this leads to complete subjectivity.   But here again it has become increasingly evident to many that there is no such thing as an objective fact.   Even the so-called scientific facts depend on the observer’s frame of reference.  It is virtually impossible to get anywhere near objective facts – let alone one single meaning of a text describing those facts.   It is very hard to argue that a text can have one single objective meaning.   What the Church or biblical critics call the original meaning of the text is as subjective as any other meaning.    

We need to recognize that everyone comes to the text with presuppositions, even the most objective historical critic and emphasis immediately switches from the text to its reader.  The theory that the text isn’t there if there is no-one reading it, does not really exist on its own, might also at first sight seem to be a problem for the doctrine of sola scriptura and reformation calls to go back to the Bible.  What do they mean if the Bible does not really exist? Again a moment’s thought shows that both the orthodox Catholic doctrine of scripture which cannot be interpreted on its own, without the Church, and Calvin’s notion of the “inner testimony of the Holy Spirit”, essential to the process of reading scripture, were early pieces of reader-response criticism, motivated by a concern for authority.

The main problem for biblical scholars, however, is the idea that readers are more important than the text.   There are plenty of examples of biblical interpreters seeing their work as a dialogue or encounter with the text. Commentaries of all types focus on the text, whereas according to reader-response theory the focus must rather be on the readers and what they make or have made of the text.  In reading a commentary on a text, we hear the voices of its readers including the author of the commentary far more clearly than the voice of its author.   That is what biblical critics have found hard to swallow. We must at least look carefully at the following questions:  (1) who is reading the text? (2) what presumptions do they have?  (3) what do they make of the text? and (4) what effect does the text have on them?  

 1.       Who are the readers?

We would probably be thinking of the professional guild of biblical scholars, biblical scholars, and students of English literature, theologians or the like. Another important set of readers is the Church. We need to consider the ordinary flesh and blood non-specialist reader of the text.  It is the ordinary reader that matters most because there are always going to be more of them than there are members of any specialist group.

 2.       Their Presuppositions

What kind of baggage do readers bring with them when they approach the text? Thanks to the influence of feminism, liberation theology, and other ideologies, it has become normal practice for writers at the beginning to declare their bias.   This means of course that the reader can put the book down if he doesn’t agree.  But it also means that the author is free to say the text means whatever he wants it to mean, provided no claim is made that the meaning is the original meaning or the only meaning or anything other than the meaning arrived at by a reader with her particular presuppositions. Thus the process creates a satisfying unity in the mind of the reader, in tune with his personality, a unity not in the text but created by the reader in his response to it.  

 3.       The Meaning

It is fundamental in reader-response criticism is that readers contribute something to the meaning of the text.   They have a creative role in the process, parallel to that of the author, some say, more important than that of the author because in the case of most literature, including the Bible, we do not have access to the author’s mind except through the text which can only be perceived by its readers. Faced with gaps in the narrative the reader instinctively seeks to fill them in.

Example 1

Who is God talking to in Genesis 1 when he says, “Now let us create humankind”?   Who is he talking to in Isaiah 40 when he says (using a plural imperative):  “Comfort my people!”?   Why is Isaac not mentioned after the sacrifice in Genesis 22 (He doesn’t appear again for two chapters)? 

Example 2

       The variation in the word used to describe Jonah’s big fish:  it appears three times as masc. dag and once as feminine dagah.   Modern critical readers ignore the variation, or explain it as a scribal error.  The rabbis found two separate fishes in the text, one male and one female, which make an even more interesting story.  Another option was to find not a distinction of gender, but of style or degree:  it was the same fish but in the verse introducing Jonah’s Psalm, where he is described as praying in its belly, the form was selected to highlight the miraculous or legendary nature of the fish.  

To deal with the variation, these three reader-responses devise strategies – three very different ones based on, respectively, textual criticism, fantasy and stylistics.  

4.       The Impact

What a text does is the same thing as what it means. Ethical issues raised by particular readings of the Bible are a central concern, for example, in ideological criticism, liberation theology, feminism, and so on.  Some readings have a benign effect on their readers; others encourage racism or colonial oppression or the like. The opinions of ordinary people and non-specialists on the meaning of the text are as important as those of the literary experts.   It is imperative however to ensure that readers of the Bible, including biblical scholars, are aware of what they are doing, and, on the other, to enable people, especially the marginalized and oppressed, to read the bible in a way that does not disadvantage them.

 It is virtually impossible to arrive at one final critical evaluation of a text, given the multiplicity of readings, each dependent on the reader’s own horizon of expectation.  This may be an uncomfortable conclusion to reach,  so accustomed are we to the modern assumptions that (a) the aim of biblical scholarship is to find one single correct or true meaning, and (b), with all our modern discoveries and techniques, we in the modern world are more likely to achieve that than anyone else in the past.   But as we have seen, whether we like it or not, the objectivity of modern scholarship has been questioned, texts have more than one meaning, and different meanings are largely due to differences in the reader’s hermeneutical stance or horizon of expectation – whether the reader is a trained Hebraist, a renaissance artist or a Mexican peasant.    Given the opportunity to consider a variety of different readings of a text, we may evaluate them using aesthetic, theological, ethical, ideological, and academic or other criteria, reflecting our own hermeneutical stance.   Furthermore, we are mostly members of an interpretive community of some kind where a consensus is reached on what is acceptable, academically and ethically, and what is not.  

                Let me now end from a quote in a movie, “When a newspaper reporter finds out that what really happened is different from the legend, he says, “It ain’t news.  This is the West.  When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.”    This is not the west and we are not just talking about legends.  The ground zero of reading, of theory is how many dead bodies are left at the other end of the hermeneutical process, how many spirits impoverished and how many filled.  Interpretation of the Bible always matters in a way that doesn’t apply to films.  But there is a sense in which our series does take the advice of that reporter seriously.   Modern biblical scholars till now have seen their role as a largely negative one.  It was their role to say “That’s not what really happened… that’s not what the original Hebrew means…”   In so doing they have undervalued centuries of reception history, 2000 years of creative interaction between text and reader which has left us with a rich source of material on the meaning of the Bible.    It is surely time to redress the balance and, even though we know quite well that it is different from the fact, “print the legend”. 

TITLE: TYPE, PLACE, AND FUNCTION OF THE PRONOUNCEMENT STORY IN PLUTARCH’S MORALIA

AUTHOR: JOHN E. ALSUP

                - Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1.       Objections

2.       Corrections

3.       Commendations

4.       Inquiries

5.       Descriptions

6.       Quests

JOURNAL REVIEW:

                A study of Plutarch’s Moralia provides examples of the six types of pronouncement stories discussed in the “Introduction” to this volume. In this article representative examples are quoted, with brief explanation. Attention is also given to the redactional activity of Plutarch as he makes use of pronouncement stories in the context of his essays ad comments upon them. Plutarch’s use of pronouncement stories indicates his positive valuation of them as vehicles of education communication.

                This study of the pronouncement story in Plutarch’s Moralia has shown the importance of an exacting standard of interrelationship between stimulus and response, narrative, structure, and the kinds of tension and resolution which exist in the genre. Furthermore, with regard to the hortatory element it became apparent that the pronouncement story is normally concerned to broaden the base of appeal beyond the lauding of the hero type per se to include the person and conduct of the reader. Biographical interest, in fact, seems to be somewhat relative since Plutarch does not always honor this as redactor and the original form of the pronouncement story rarely – witty/caustic descriptions excepted – highlights this element in comparison with the ideal behavior or attitude which the key figure personifies. The hortatory element, be it expressed in approval, recommendation, and information or in disapproval, condemnation, and correction, is pervasive enough in virtually all of the pronouncement story to call it a nearly constant ingredient.

                Since the hortatory element is so pervasive, one need not expand the classification grid to include another type, namely a “warning” or “strong admonition” type. Where the intensity of the recommended action or attitude is sufficiently pronounced, it merely serves as a special accent of composition. The longer one reads Plutarch the more one is impressed by the stature as ethicist, philosopher, theologian, and teacher. The pronouncement story he has collected in the Moralia serve his compositional purposes. Comparison with the pronouncement story of the gospel tradition is a step to be taken with care and precision. The allotted space for this article prohibits a thoroughgoing confrontation.

We live in a time where we are very fortunate to have so many English Translations of the Bible. There was a time when the English speaking world didn’t have a Bible they could read in their native tongue. People usually only heard the Bible read in church, by someone who had studied the Scriptures in their original languages of Greek/Hebrew.

English Translations come in many varieties. These range from very literal, word for word translations from the original languages, all the way to paraphrases that read just like a magazine or newspaper. Some translations follow a ‘thought for thought’ philosophy when translating the text, and some follow a ‘word for word’ philosophy when translating the text.

We typically use the NIV which is somewhere in the middle between a literal translation and a thought for thought translation. The NIV is a great translation but at times can be a little cumbersome and still uses some archaic language that does not sufficiently communicate the meaning of the text. Some of us at the church have been reading the New Living Translation (NLT). We have found it to be a very faithful and accurate translation and one that is very easy to read and doesn’t leave you scratching your head to often wondering what the author is trying to communicate. That’s what good translations do…. they communicate the meaning of the text. Meaning is central.

I am amazed by the spiritual energy that is expended on this. I can’t help, but think that the real motive behind the debate FOR SOME is to provide a reason for division and exclusiveness from the rest of the Body of Christ. The debate certainly seems to come from the legalistic, “we are the only true church” side of Christianity. I have to believe that some pastors are thinking: “If I can convince you that the KJV Bible is the only true Bible, then you will stay in my church rather than go to someone else’s church that uses ‘modern’ translations based on the Alexandrian texts.” Having spoken with some of those pastors, I believe that this is a fair statement of their true motive. It is sad when we have to manipulate people or create scare tactics to get people to remain in our churches.

I became aware that there were conflicts among the messages preached by different Christian ministers. Amazingly, all the conflicting preachers and teachers claimed to base their doctrines on the Bible. After all, could you imagine some Christian preacher who stands up and says that his message is in direct conflict with the Bible? Of course not! So, how could it be that all Christian preachers claim to be Biblically based, yet come up with different doctrines? It’s confusing, especially for someone just beginning to look seriously at Christianity. So, what do we do with the Bible? Do we just discard it because so many have come up with conflicting interpretations? Surely, we can do better than that.

The Bible is probably the most studied and analyzed book ever written. It would be stupid to just throw away that heritage. On the other hand, we can’t just blindly accept what someone has written about the Bible. What we face today is usually about the same that others have faced before. We can and should use the knowledge of those who lived and are living the life of faith to get a better understanding. It’s not that we should discard the thoughts of those that have walked this path of faith before us, but rather we should try to understand how they arrived at their interpretation. Formal theories about interpretation of the Bible fall under the companion disciplines of hermeneutics and exegesis. Fancy terms like those can frighten people sometimes, but really all we are talking about is reading and understanding a text. All of us do that all the time.

All of the principles of interpretation should be used on where it should be used. We should be using these principles not to contradict each other but rather to enhance a part that can be better explained by a specific principle. What we should always seek to do is get the intended meaning of the original author and be able to experience it.

TITLE: The Characterization of God in the Fourth Gospel

AUTHOR: D. Francois Tolmie

Faculty of Theology, University of the Orange Free State, Bloemfontein 9300, South Africa

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

I.                    Introduction

II.                  Characterization: Theoretical Issues

III.                The Characterization of God in the Prologue (John 1:1-18)

IV.                The Characterization of God in John 1:19 – 12:50

V.                  The Characterization of God in John 13:1 – 21:25

JOURNAL SUMMARY:

The way in which God is presented in the Fourth Gospel has not received much attention in research. In comparison to the number of studies devoted to Jesus, the number of studies devoted to God seems almost insignificant. In this journal, the author addressed the way in which God is portrayed in the Fourth Gospel in terms of a narratological approach. The fact that the Fourth Gospel is presented in a narrative form is emphasized and, accordingly, it is analyzed in terms of a narratological model. This journal will basically tackle the way in which God is portrayed; the process whereby God is characterized in the Gospel received the most attention.

Characterization is one of the aspects within a narrative text that may be used by the implied author as part of an overall textual strategy. In the Fourth Gospel, this strategy is aimed at guiding the implied reader deeper into faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and thereby sharing eternal life. If the characterization of God in the Fourth Gospel is analyzed from the perspective of the implied reader, the following pattern can be indicated: In the prologue, God is characterized primarily in terms of his relationship to Jesus, whereas the possibility of a unique relationship between God and human beings is also mentioned. In Jn 1.19-12.50, the characterization of God is dominated by a characterization in terms of his relationship to Jesus. In Jn 13.1- 17.26, God is characterized much more often in terms of his relationship to human beings, although he is never called the Father of the disciples. In the last section of the Fourth Gospel, 20.17 constitutes the climax of the characterization of God when, towards the end of Jesus’ hour of glorification, he is called the Father of the disciples for the first time. In this way the implied author shows that God’s Fatherhood is extended, via Jesus, to human beings. However, in order for this to happen, it was necessary that Jesus should be ‘glorified’.