Judges 2 - Continuing the setup

Judges 2

Reawakening

So I find myself well into the beginning of my PhD program and needing to work through much more of the text of the Hebrew Bible. Thus, I'm intending to reawaken this blog and use it to post my rough translations of texts as I work through them. I'll try to append some level of basic commentary after each section I post, though I do not plan on making them particularly thoroughly researched. Still, further comment is always welcome.

Today: Judges 1

An update and planning

July has seen me doing a lot of things, thought most of them were not thesis related. That said, I have been stewing on the issue of where to go next in the thesis.

My original outline started with a section on ancient Israelite/near-east thoughts and rules on sex. This I've gotten at least a draft of written.* What I thought was to follow is commentary on modern thought on sex, but I've come to realize I need to better narrow this section's focus: we in the modern/post-modern era have said a lot of things about sex. That said, I think there are a number of contrasts to make with ancient thought that can help draw a sharper line between modern and ancient views. I think this section is going to be re-purposed to cover those. I have, I think, a whole page (oooo....) started along with an outline. I think this section has been a bit intimidating for me, and I've been avoiding it.

Additionally, I have been working on translating/reading Song of Songs. I have a chapter left to go at this point, though I have some notes of things to look up. (Mostly place names and cultural references I am unfamiliar with.) Additionally, I finally picked up a copy of Gesenius so I will need to dig through it for comments on the grammar of Song of Songs. (And I really should have had a copy before now, seeing how Avi, my advanced Hebrew prof, would reference it all the time in class.)


I think the translation/reading of the text is going to be an appendix in the thesis, along with my notes on translation. And then my exploration of Song of Songs might be limited to 2-3 sections, rather than try to produce a complete commentary on the entire text. (Or at least I may make some statements about the text as a whole but focus on the linguistic aspects of 2-3 sections, likely the more sensual places.)


After that, I think some sort of response to Hosea, Ezekiel and other prophets and their use of sex might be in order. And then some sort of "where do we go from here" section, drawing conclusions and trajectories of thought.




*Which, if anyone wants to read and give comments on, just ask.

Something done

Work continues! Though I don't blog as much as I might like.

I've got a good rough draft of a section on ancient sexuality crafted. While I planned to have something written on modern thought on sex, I'm finding this is a huge topic. (And most of my research seems to turn up things saying "this is how we should be thinking about sex" rather than "this is how we are thinking about sex.") I suspect I need to better limit my topic to more psychological/sociological texts for this part, with some look at religious thought. That said, I have found some good points of view on the evolution of thoughts about sex. (Mostly delineating how Greco-Roman thought heavily influenced budding Christianity's thoughts on the subject.)

A number of sources seem to work on the idea that the modern binary concept of gender (you are male or female) versus the more continuum idea of older thought. I think I might need to dig into this a bit further. It seems to reach into other reading I've done in other areas, specifically it seems to echo some of the Tantric thought: that is that there is a dualism in the world of male/female, but those are ends of a spectrum and individuals fall into different places on that spectrum. Though the Tantric information I read treated the spectrum as equal or level, without one end being inherently better than the other. (They used positive/negative terminology, but I'm not sure they meant it in a better/worse sense, but rather a extruding/intruding sense?)

I find it interesting our language is so coded with insisting on marking one term in a duality as "higher" or "better" than the other term that even terms that in theory should be able to be value neutral aren't. Further on the subject of language, I'm curious whether this gender continuum exists as it has been stated in the Hebrew mind, since it and most of the other Semitic languages I've looked at are so strongly gendered languages. (I mean, they tend to gender their -verbs-, which even Greek doesn't do.) Further, the languages lack a neutral, save for the 3 person plural perfect forms and the 1st person, and even there I vaguely remember it being mentioned in class that there may have been a 3 person plural feminine at some point. (I don't remember if there were gendered 1st persons.)

But that is another interesting linguistic turn: If the society was so strongly gendered, why is there no gendered 1st person voice? Japanese has it, at least to some degree. That is, there are at least 2 versions of "I" (watashi and boku) and my first Japanese instructor insisted that males us boku while females and males can use watashi. In later studies, this might be dialectic, as not all my instructors used this dualism, and most just had us use watashi, with boku being used by males in informal settings. (There are at least 2 other words for "I": ore which was very informal and atashi which I suspect is a dialectic form of watashi.) This gendering of the 1st person pronoun is even more interesting because the language itself is virtually ungendered* and rarely uses pronouns.

Additionally, I'm not sure a thorough exploration of modern ideas about sex/sexuality is what is needed, mostly because it would take the better part of a lifetime (and then the ideas would have changed again and it would need to be started over...). Rather, I suspect I will work on contrasting ancient Israelite thought with modern, bringing out further some of the differences. One of the biggest that I suspect will come out is the soul/flesh dualism of Hellenistic thought, as it is already started even in Paul, but is so much more present in Augustine. (Though I suspect in Augustine's case it has to do with latent influences of his Manechean past and his regrets over his own sex life. Though I'm not quite ready to blame all of modern Christianity's problems with sex on Augustine's youthful libido.)

*It could be argued that it is more interested in social hierarchy for determining how one speaks, and since males were (are?) considered superior to females, this gendered how language was used. However this is a different kind of gendering of language than Semitic and Western languages tend to have.

Yeah, about that momentum thing

I was actually doing fairly well. To be fair to myself, I have managed to get through most of the texts I picked up on ancient sexuality. Most seemed to focus on the biblical texts and their view of sexuality, rather than something more anthropological/historical-sociological. Though, to be fair, the biblical corpus does represent most of the texts we have from Ancient Israelite culture. (As near as I can tell, anyway.)

Looking outside Israel is interesting, and certainly enlightens a bit. The Ancient Israelites seemed to be -far- more patriarchal than their surrounding cultures, and those ones (Egypt, Sumer, Babylon) weren't exactly bastions of ancient feminism. I have been reading some ancient Sumerian poetry and it has been fascinating. What was really interesting was a poem about Inanna (goddess of war) being jealous and angry at her husband's infidelity. This sort of reaction -never- occurs in the biblical text. In fact, when men -do- get multiple women, they are presented as a completely normal family or one of the women more or less drops the other in her husband's bed. (Sarah-Hagar, Rachel/Leah and their handmaidens)  That said, a later poem in the cycle seems to have Inanna offering Dumuzi (her husband) a random taptress (innkeeper/bar wench) into his bed as she recovers from giving birth, so it's the lack of her consenting to his sleeping around that is the problem, not the act itself.

In all, I'm finding the Sumerian poetry oddly interesting. I will have to hunt down copies of texts of the Egyptian and Ugaritic love songs as well.

Regaining Momentum

Having spent the week dealing with large number of strawberries from my mom and some final moving-in work, I'm turning back to reading.

Most of the reading has been on pedagogy and biblical language studies for my TA work, but I did work through Phyllis Trible's God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. While she deals more with gender issues than sex ones (not that they can easily be divided), she does deconstruct the story of Genesis 2-3 rather beautifully and also works quickly through Song of Songs read in the light of Genesis.

Specifically, she shows Genesis 2-3 to be God creating humanity in Eros, in an erotic two-as-one wholeness that is destroyed when humanity disobeys. It echos a good deal of Bonhoeffer's interpretations of the text. (Which I mean to look at soon.) From there, she shows how Song of Songs revels in that two-as-one and rebuilds the unity that is spoken of after gender is differentiated but before the Fall. An interesting read, especially with the implication that patriarchy was a result of the Fall, and not something ordained by God from the beginning. (Though she is perhaps a bit more circumspect about the erotic elements of Song of Songs.)

Cross-pollination

While reading Pedagogy of the Bible by Dale B. Martin for my TA class-work, I've run into Bernard of Clairvaux, a medieval monk. He apparently has a series of sermons on Song of Songs which sound fascinating. I'll have to hunt them down.

Additionally, Martin is going through how (at least American) biblical studies seems to have been captivated by the historical critical method and the belief that there is one single meaning intended by the author of the text (or only one meaning that an audience can or should receive from it). He contrasts this to the pre-moderns would would find a number meanings within a single text, both literal/narrative and allegorical ones. And these theologians had no problem holding multiple meanings, even when they were drastically different.

This seems to parallel Alter's approach to the Bible as literature, that is, as art. Art has always been something in which individuals viewing the art are each drawn to their own meaning. Viewing biblical passages in this same light lets us draw out multiple meanings from the same texts, rather than insisting that there is a way to be guided to a single "true" meaning. (And it implies that the authors/editors/redactors of the biblical text knew they were making art and were inspired to put multiple meanings into it.)