Just for fun I used Wordle to create a word cloud of the first chapter of my dissertation. I think it’s pretty evident what the main issues in the chapter are….

My students have a paper due Saturday before midnight. The assignment is simple: write a dialog between two of the main characters/thinkers we’ve read so far this semester.This paper is causing anxiety in them and headaches for me.

There are a few more specifics to the assignment, but basically the paper prompt gives a lot of room for students to play with the texts, the ideas in the texts and the characters who inhabit those texts. I’ve given similar assignments before; but for some reason, students are really having a hard time this semester. Seemingly, they would much rather write on a theme in Gilgamesh than a dialog between him and Socrates.

I’m not sure what this means. There could be an inherent resistance to discourse longer than 140 characters. Or, a desire to keep ideas compartmentalized by historical context and never let them interact. Or again, it could simply be that I’m finding more anxiety because I’m teaching more classes.

Regardless, I’m very confused by this resistance to dialog.

Jim Watts at Iconic Books has a post on Dutch artist Sanja Medic’s book-inspired building façade. Very nice. Check it out, and follow the link.

Don’t you hate it when a good story passes you by? This happened to me the other day when Kimberly Daniels wrote an article on The Danger of Celebrating Halloween. Unfortunately, the article can only be found in a Google cache at this point, after having generated over a thousand comments of scorn on such sites as the Huffington Post.

While I could let the (un)dead bury the dead, I really feel that this article should be addressed. However, it’s not the highly tendentious particulars of Daniels’ argument that deserves attention as much as her general thrust.

For example, she states:

Decorating buildings with Halloween scenes, dressing up for parties, going door-to-door for candy, standing around bonfires and highlighting pumpkin patches are all acts rooted in entertaining familiar spirits.

While one could argue the validity of these claims, the bigger issue is that the supposed etymologies of these activities are given pride of place over how they are actually used in the holiday. What matters is not what people intend by their observance as much as the historical roots of their activity.

However, if we turn this around, wouldn’t the same hold for that most cherished of Christian holidays, Christmas and Easter? If someone is celebrating these holidays, won’t their inherent crypto-Christian behavior rub off on the participants the same way that Daniels holds for Halloween?

Obviously, some folks will hold that this augment fails because Easter might be related to a poorly attested pagan spring festival and Christmas is mistakenly aligned to Saturnalia. The links for both of these are quite tenuous. The former is attested only in Bede’s discussion of Ēostur-monath in De Temporum Ratione. The latter runs into numerous problems when one actually compares the 3-5 day festival (from Dec 17-23) with Christmas. In short, the argument is mostly bogus.

Likewise, Daniels’ contention that the origins of a rite dictate is also bogus. An ardent Christian celebrating Halloween is in no more danger of crypto-Paganism than a secular atheist celebrating Christmas is of crypto-Christianity.

It’s that time again. Kevin Scull has the Biblical Studies Carnival XLVII at his blog, Paul of Tarsus. Likewise, the Biblioblog Top 50 list is up for October. Finally, last month I neglected to mention Daniel and Tonya’s Biblical Studies Carnival XLVI at their blog, Hebrew and Greek Reader. (Sorry about that).

Philly.com has an article on the Phillies’ closer Brad Lidge. In addition to helping the Phillies in their quest for back-to-back World Series championships, Lidge is also taking classes in religion.

Lidge expects to finish his undergraduate degree within a few years. He plans to pursue a master’s, and hopefully a career excavating religious artifacts in Europe, after retiring from baseball.

Perhaps he will help save the Holy Grail from the Nazis after having helped the Phillies win another series of games.

Bill Mounce has an interesting post on conflicting translational practices in the ESV’s rendering of Rom 2:27, 29. The same word (γραμματος) is translated differently (“written code” and “letter”) in the two verses. Folks wonder why this is so, and Mounce give a rundown on the thought processes behind a biblical translator. What this ends up showing is just how squishy supple Bible translations really are.  He ends his post with a warning against armchair quarterbacking:

When someone says that a translation is “wrong” and that the translators “should” have done it another way, in most cases (in my experience) this comes out of a lack of respect to the complexities of translation and a lack of knowledge of all the procedures being followed by a translation committee.

An interesting post, even if it is about the Jesus festschrift.

My exploration of the relationship between Ishtar and Zombies in the Gilgamesh Epic has taken another turn. I recently acquired a copy of Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer’s Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth. The Sumerian goddess Inanna and the Akkadian goddess Ishtar had become largely (and almost completely) synchronized by the time of the writing of the Gilgamesh Epic. As such, examining the relationship between Inanna and the dead can throw light on that Ishtar.

In discussing the story of “Inanna’s Decent to the Netherworld,” Diane Wolkstein comments on the interrelation between Inanna and her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Netherworld:

In many ways, Ereshkigal is the other, neglected side of Inanna. Therefore, when she hears of the appearance at her gates of the “all-white” fertile, bedecked Goddess of Love, she is enraged, for Inanna’s light, glory and perpetual movement have, to some extent, been achieved at her expense. (158)

Ereshkigal, the neglected side of Inanna, has certain qualities that are similar to Lilith’s. Both are connected to nighttime aspects of the feminine—the powerful, raging sexuality and the deep wounds accumulated from life’s rejection—which seeks solace in physical union only…. The powerful Lilith of Inanna’s adolescent days had to be sent away so Inanna’s life-exploring talents could be developed. But now that Inannna has become queen of her city, wife to her beloved, mother to her children, she is more able to face what se has neglected and feared: the instinctual, wounded, frightened parts of herself. She now hears, and is capable of respond to, the labor of Ershkigal in the Great Below. (160)

So Ereshkigal and Inanna are doppelgangers and alter egos—sharing many characteristics, but unable to be in the same place. This relationship is extended to Ishtar through the synchronizing of the Inanna and Ishtar.

My students are currently reading Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone (one of his Theban Plays). In this play Creon brings doom upon his own house by not providing proper burial for his traitorous nephew, Polynices. In other traditions Creon leaves not only Polynices but also the Argive host that accompanied him unburied, causing further problems for Creon when Athens shows up with a peacekeeping taskforce. From these stories it would appear that messing with the dead was always bad, but a recent article by Saul M. Olyan provides a needed balance. Not all accounts of disturbing the dead are negative in character.

In the most recent Journal of Biblical Literature Saul M. Olyan has an article entitled “Unnoticed Resonances of Tomb Openings and Transportation of Remains of the Dead in Ezekiel 37:12-14” (pp. 491-501). Olyan explicates two differing ways of dealing with buried remains.

The more well known view can be found in numerous inscriptions throughout the ancient world that speak of letting the dead rest in peace. The fear here, of course, is that the dead would not be allowed to find this desired respite, would have their remains disturbed and would spend all eternity as restless spirits. In one example Olyan quotes Ashurbanipal’s desecration of Elamite tombs:

I took their bones to the land of Assyria, imposing restlessness upon their ghosts. I deprived them of ancestral offerings (and) libation water. (pp.496-7)

However, messing with dead need not always be negative. In Ezekiel 37:12-14 Olyan sees a secondary burial of the exiled dead in post-exilic Judea. A similar motif of moving the dead can be found in an earlier Hittite text not mentioned by Olyan.

In the “Apology of Hattusili III” the regent speaks of his older brother, Muwatalli II, who moved the capitol of the Hittite Empire from the northeastern Anatolian city of Hattusa to Tarhuntassa, further south. In the process of the move, Muwatalli II moved the dead as well as the living to his new capital (though some scholars hold it was just the image of the dead).

Conceptually, it is hard to tell where to put Sophocles in relation to the material addressed here. He is writing a century after the prophet Ezekiel (and is probably contemporary with Ezekiel’s redactors). Creon is closer in date to the Hattusili, but to what extent have these traditions been handed down to classical Greece intact? At very least we can see in these texts a larger view of the importance of proper attendance to the dead. If only Creon had been more attentive.

Teaching Sophocles’ Antigone is difficult with undergrads. They have a tendency to favor Antigone over Creon and make the latter into some sort of vile character. Add a few conspiracy theories and Creon becomes quite a demonic character. My job often turns into making sure Creon gets a fair shake.

It’s not that undergrads fail to understand the motives of the play. Antigone’s first commitment is to her family, Creon’s is to the city and society as a whole. Antigone has broken the law, but is the law just to begin with?

The underlying problem for many students is the bifurcated world in which we live. The Coke-vs.-Pepsi false dichotomy of our society so often tries to force us to make decisions, especially political ones. In the primaries last year, if you voted for Obama over Clinton you were sexist; the other way around and you were racist. The two candidates were very close ideologically (centrist Democrats), but a dichotomy had to be drawn, the political zeitgeist in the States demanded it.

Under these assumptions, it becomes easy to turn Creon vs. Antigone into something akin to McCain vs. Obama. Creon is older. He puts country first, etc. etc. Antigone is younger. She’s not from the patriarchal power structure. She represents change, etc. etc.

However, in truth Creon and Antigone are represented better in our political world by the Republican ticket in ’08. Creon is McCain, and Antigone is Palin. They are both conservative. Creon’s slogan could easily have been “Country First,” but Antigone is running on a pro-family, highly religious platform. The fact they don’t get along points to their inherent similarities. They are both “maverick-y.”

Of course, this metaphor breaks down when we ask who Obama would be in Sophocles’ play. But that is in some way the point. Sophocles is not giving us a simple dichotomy where we are to root for one of the protagonists over the other. Both are so intertwined that they bring about the other’s defeat.