This semester in one class we have been reading Genesis through Kings. Another context has focused on the formation of literacy and the formation of the Hebrew Bible. These two contexts came together in an interesting way. The Genesis through Kings class observed that one finds an anti-institutional undercurrent in the text. Judges 9 Jotham’s fable makes clear the problems with a monarchy. However, the editors of the book that eventually became Judges consistently bring the reader back to the phrase “because there was no king in Israel.” Such a reference indicates that there is a lackluster apology for the monarchy in the present form of the book of Judges. Juan Valdez captures some of the sense that every polity found in the Hebrew Bible is de-constructed.

The social and historical background for this de-construction of power seems to be the colonial status of the editors of the Hebrew Bible in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods to some degree but more manifestly in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. This is a fundamental shift in biblical studies in the last fifty years. The mid-twenteth century biblical studies construed the biblical material as the product of a national default with an extended exile. Today the colonial context dominates with a sense of a short monarchial experiment.

Correlation is not always causation but it is interesting that this turn of mind coincides with the declining of Christendom.

I was sitting in a hotel on the Sea of Gallilee with friends Todd Still of the Truett Seminary, Ralph West pastor fo Church Without Walls Houston and Stephen Wells, the pastor of South Main Baptist church.  West and Wells described compelling ministries in Houston Texas. It was a stimulating conversation with working pastors who loved their congregations and their city. When I could not sleep that night I knew that I  wanted to learn more about how one might read the Bible in Houston Texas.

Several years ago I explored African American biblical hermeneutics in a book called Experience and Tradition: A Primer in Black Biblical Hermeneutics.  The book grew out of conversations with the writers who contributed to the Stony the Road We Trod volume on black biblical hermeneutics. The book reflected a black and white world that shaped me.  However, over the years, as I lived in Berkeley California it became clear that I was no longer living in a black and white word. It was a world of living and every changing colors.  The book Listening In: A Multicultural Reading of the Psalms explored the ways that a person might overhear the readings of different cultures.

There is a new way to ask the basic questions of biblical hermeneutics. When Mary Ann Tolbert and Fernando Sergovia edited the volume Reading in This Place they construed place a social location. I want to examine the intersection of social location and physical location. The urban context of let us say Houston, New York, Chicago, Washington D.C. requires a reader to present a reading that makes sense in a multiracial, interfaith context.  Rather than trying to find one way of reading I want to ask how one reads the Bible responsibly in Houston, New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C. This is a regional fusion. The term fusion is used in music and food to explore the pastiche of cultures.

Like the Listening volume this experiment is in no way meant to legislate a prescriptive hermeneutic. These essays will outline a basic melody that can take a particular riff as they say in jazz. The riff will have the flavor of the location of the reader. When Dave Brubeck was learning how to play jazz his teacher told him to travel the world listening to all he could and allow that to inform his playing. We will take a similar trip. It will be part the Travel Channel, part Food Network and all Bible and Theology.

This week Dr. Louis E. Newman of Carleton College in Minnesota  presented to our Christian Scriptures class a talk on “Sin, Repentance and Divine Forgiveness: A Jewish Approach.” He proposed that for Judaism sin is mostly considered as behavioral where many Christian traditions understand sin as an ontological problem. Many students were fascinated by his observation that in Judaism sin is analogous to disease, not death.  We had a great time for conversation but we did not have enough time to discuss his book Repentance: The Meaning & Practice of Teshuvah.

As we think about sacrifice I thought a picture of the four horned altar similar to the one found at Beersheva might be interesting for you to see.

Professor Beth Tanner is writing a book a concise history of Israel and Judah. She poses the question what do you call the region. She observes that Palestine is a Roman term. So we might want to avoid it because it is clearly anachronistic. Further the Roman term was the designation of the region during the British colonial rule in the area. The situation is complicated even more because the language of Palestine has been in the forefront of the conflict between  groups since the birth of the  modern nation of Israel.

Professor Tanner raises an interesting question for our Christian Scriptures class. Naming land is an expression of power. Whether one is a mapmaker or a historian to name a section of land puts one amidst an exercise of power.  Let me give you an example. In 1982 Argentina sought to assert sovereignty over the Islas Malvinas. In 1982 British newspapers reported that Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands a British colony since 1833. You can tell the politics of the commentators often by their decision to call the islands by their British name Falklands or their Spanish name Malvinas.

The Bible itself gives no easy help. The phrase “to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites” names the land by listing the occupants This list of occupants of the land changes in order but the people groups are fairly consistent.  (See Ex 3:8, 17; 13:5; 23:23, 28; 33:2; 34:11; Deu 20:17; Jos 3:10; 9:1) If we take these references as central then we could use the term Canaan as a broad geographical reference to the land of each of the people groups named in these lists.

Canaan is problematic for other reasons.  The promise of the land is the promise that the Israelites would have the land of the Canaanites, Hivites, Perrezites and Canaannites. Niels Peter Lemche in his book The Canaanites and Their Land argues that this easy slip from these sorts of references to posit a culturally coherent Canaanite menace is precisely one of the key missteps in biblical studies today.  For Lemche there never was a land of Canaan. He would replace the term Canaanite religion as the religious competitor of Yahwistic pre-exilic religion. Instead he suggest that there was diversity in West Semitic religion.  One wonders if one might called the West Semitic  region.

Isaac in his blog wrestles with the topic of the infighting between Rachel and Leah. We will look at the various marriage models in Genesis. What Isaac is observing is the conflict that happens in soral polygyny. Tomorrow we will have a biblical simulation on the birth of Isaac. The birth of Isaac Genesis 21 recounts the joy of the birth and the anguish of the discards Hagar and Ishmael.
The reflection on the marriage in Genesis quickly brings the modern reader to the topic of endogamy, marriage within a certain social group and exogamy marriage outside that social group. The marriages of Genesis accent the Hebrew commitment to endogamy. But whenever we read these texts it provides an opportunity to reflect on marriage today. Typically American student balk at endogamy and arranged marriages. They ask: where the romance is? Where is the choice? Exogamy embodies the Enlightenment ideal.November 29, 2010 Time Magazine cover-story was Who Needs Marriage? However, this is more in the imagination than actuality. If anything according to Time magazine endogamy is more the norm. Persons are increasingly marrying persons from their own social class and educational background. The article points out that the upcoming marriage of Prince William and Kate is more endogamous. They both went to the same university. They are about the same age. They have been friends for some years. This is in marked contrast marriage of Prince Charles and Diana. Endogamy is in.
Also the Time study raises the issue of class just as Genesis does. That is to say monogamy was probably the norm in ancient Israel but not the book of Genesis. The Pew Time study found “A marriage gap and a socioeconomic gap have been growing side by side for the past half-century, and each may be feeding off the other.”
The book of Genesis is a etiology of the origins of the people but it is also a map to an appropriate view of marriage in their time. These stories are not only meant to reflect the marriage rules but also to reinforce those rules. Look at the trends in the marriage debate still ask the question of marriage as a social instruction.

Makes you wonder what to do with these early dysfunctional families.

The readings this semester of the New Media Faculty Seminar have been challenging week after week, Doug Engelbart and Nelson less so Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg. This week the reading from McLuhan was difficult in a different way. McLuhan is a type of public intellectual that draws from a wide array of sources from literature to intellectual history. He was in fact creating what became media studies.

Marshall McLuhan and Northop Frye, the author of Anatomy of Criticism were two Canadian public intellectuals who not only framed their own disciplines but set ripples in a number of other disciplines. What made it possible for them to function as public intellectuals was the way they were able to transgress disciplines.

Part of this type of transgression involves parsing out metaphors of well worn and tired mental associative paths. Cppant explores the desktop metaphor as a way to think about the computer. She observes the way that the metaphor desktop and the limits of paper have become a limiting metaphor. The metaphor of Bookburning and metamedium (Alan Kay and Adel Goldberg NMR 394) appliances provide an alternative way to think about augmenting human intellect.

Just as McLuhan and Frye brushed away dead metaphors and created new ones through the venue of public intellectual discourse, as opposed to discipline limited discourse, so Jeff Jarvis in his blog buzzmachine.com does today. I watch and listen to Jarvis, a professor at City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, on the TWIT Network show This Week in Google.  Jarvis’ description of the types of media today reminds me of the discussion of McLuhan in his Gutenberg’s Galaxy when Jarvis describes the New Molecules of media.

Genesis describes the Flawed Families of the Bible. It also reminds today’s readers of the ongoing struggle to develop healthy and faithful ways to maintain human community. We used the language of endogamy (marriage inside the group) and exogamy (marriage outside the group). I was reading Lisa Miller’s article in Newsweek “The Cost of Being Jewish.” She mentions the concern the concern for the future of American Jewry with a intermarriage rate of 50%.
The book of Genesis is full of opportunities for today’s readers to review the categories of identity that shape us. Renita Weems Just a Sister Away and Sharon Pace The Women of Genesis: From Sarah to Potiphar’s Wife invite the reader to understand the role of gender, race, and nationality frame these texts and our understanding of identity today.

We see the search for identity not only in the Bible but also in more contemporary culture such as American jazz music and culture. Ken Burns’ television series Jazz the rise of jazz in America tries to give voice to personal and group identity. Fats Waller to Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie explore the roots of the African American experience in a way that would not overly alienate the European audience. Yet there is a place for Benny Goodman and Dave Brubeck. The book of Genesis to the jazz clubs of the United States in the twentieth century endogamy and exogamy, how we shape our identity through marriage and other institutions of affiliation remains a lively and debated question.