Podcast About Scripture

For a couple of years now, I have presented (almost) weekly chapel lessons at my place of employment, Heritage Christian University. These are lessons are usually recorded, and the video is put up on YouTube (here), while the audio is made available as a podcast called About Scripture. You can find it on most podcast distributors. 

This past semester (Spring 2024) my series of chapel talks was on the book of Daniel. I try as best I can to make a devotional point in these lessons, and sometimes I achieve moderate success. I try to combine academic biblical studies with a theological and confessional approach to the text. My approach is decidedly non-dispensational; there's a lot in the text I take as intentionally figurative. 

These episodes on Daniel just dropped on the podcast maybe a day or two ago, so I thought it would be a good time to mention it on this blog. Earlier seasons of the podcast (i.e., earlier semesters of chapel talks) involved study of the character of Joseph in the book of Genesis and a study of what the Bible says about angels and demons. 

A new semester is about to begin (!), so I'm trying to figure out what topic will occupy me in my weekly chapels. 

Robert Kennedy (Sr.) and Edith Hamilton

At the gravesite for Robert F. Kennedy (wikipedia) in Arlington National Cemetery, one of the inscriptions (image, another one) quotes Kennedy quoting Aeschylus.

Aeschylus...wrote, "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

This quotation from Kennedy is from his famous, impromptu announcement of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the great speeches in American history, certainly one of the greatest more-or-less unplanned speeches in American history. See the Wikipedia entry on the speech, and watch it below. 

It's a remarkable speech that shows starkly the value of a humanities education. To be able to pull that quote from Aeschylus—well, that doesn't just happen. That takes preparation, not for this specific moment, but just for life in general. The ability to deliver such a speech in such a moment requires deep reflection on these issues years beforehand, in conversation with some of the great minds in world history. See this ten-minute video documentary on RFK's speech. 

Where does the quotation from Aeschylus come from? The basic answer is that the lines quoted by Kennedy come from the opening choral ode in the play Agamemnon, the first play of the trilogy called The Oresteia, first performed in 458 BC. 

More specifically, Kennedy's quotation came from the translation of these lines by Edith Hamilton in her first published work, the popular book The Greek Way (1930), at the very end of her chapter on Aeschylus. 

I was reminded of Kennedy's affection for Hamilton a couple days ago when I was alerted to a new review of a recent biography of Hamilton. The biography (which I have not read) is Victoria Houseman, American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton (Princeton, 2023), and the review is by Robert L. Pounder at BMCR (here). (By the way, Pounder really liked the book.)

In his first paragraph, Pounder recounts a fleeting encounter he had with RFK in Athens in 1966. Pounder reports that the memory of this brief meeting is still fresh. 

Almost sixty years later I can still see the intense look in Kennedy’s eyes as he asked me my name, where I was studying, and whether I had read Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way. When I responded that I had not read the Hamilton book, a collection of essays on mythological, literary, archaeological, philosophical, and historical topics first published in 1930, a cloud of disbelief passed over Kennedy’s face as his interest in me waned. It was as if I had committed heresy or disgraced myself shamefully. I was a big disappointment.

This wonderful anecdote provides more context for Kennedy's speech in April 1968. 

The translation of those lines by Aeschylus as quoted by Kennedy—and, by the way, Kennedy's memory failed him at one or two points, especially substituting "despair" for Hamilton's "despite"—was not the only translation produced by Edith Hamilton for those lines. She later produced a full translation of the Agamemnon, in which she offers this translation. 

Knowledge won through suffering.

Drop, drop—in our sleep, upon the heart

sorrow falls, memory’s pain, 

and to us, though against our very will,

even in our own despite,

comes wisdom

by the awful grace of God. (p. 170)

Kennedy was clearly relying on Hamilton's translation from The Greek Way and not from her full translation of the play. Hamilton herself had a deep affection for this passage from Agamemnon, as she highlights in his her aforementioned chapter on Aeschylus in her first work, as well as in the preface to the play in her translation of the full work (p. 161). Sarah Ruden has more recently translated the Agamemnon (here), and she also calls attention to this particular passage in her preface to her translation (p. 48). Her translation of the passage goes like this: 

Zeus puts us on the road

to mindfulness, Zeus decrees

we learn by suffering. 

In the heart is no sleep; there drips instead

pain that remembers wounds. And to unwilling 

minds circumspection comes. 

But this is the gods’ favor, I suppose, 

claiming by violence the place of awe, the helmsman’s bench.

(Agamemnon 176–183)

Finally, for reference, here is the Greek text and the prose translation by Herbert Weir Smyth in the LCL edition. I've also included in the English translation my attempt to determine which Greek words were being rendered by Smyth's English. 

τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώ-

σαντα, τὸν πάθει μάθος

θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν. 

στάζει δ᾽ ἔν θ᾽ ὕπνῳ πρὸ καρδίας

μνησιπήμων πόνος· καὶ παρ᾽ ἄ-

κοντας ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν. 

δαιμόνων δέ που χάρις βί-

αιος σέλμα σεμνὸν ἡμένων. 

Zeus, who (τὸν) leadeth (ὁδώσαντα) mortals (βροτοὺς) the way of understanding (φρονεῖν), Zeus, who (τὸν) hath stablished (θέντα) as a fixed ordinance (κυρίως ἔχειν) that “wisdom cometh by suffering” (πάθει μάθος) But even as trouble (πόνος), bringing memory of pain (μνησιπήμων), droppeth (στάζει) o’er the mind (πρὸ καρδίας) in sleep (ἔν ὕπνῳ), so to men in their despite (παρ᾽ ἄκοντας) cometh wisdom (ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν). With constraint (βίαιος), methinks (που), cometh the grace (χάρις) of the powers divine (δαιμόνων) enthroned (ἡμένων < ἧμαι) upon their awful seats (σέλμα σεμνὸν). (p. 19)

One more thing: Kennedy quotes "the Greeks" another time in his brief speech; on that quotation, see this article. 

LXX Canon: New JBL Article

I just received my offprint for a forthcoming article titled "Suddenly and Then Gradually: The Growth of the Septuagint and Its Canon," Journal of Biblical Literature 143 (2024): 303–22. Below I paste the abstract of the article. I'll update this post with the link to the online source for the article when it is published. [Update, July 6, 2024: see here.] And, in accordance with the SBL publishing agreement, after 18 months I'll post the offprint of the article at my academia.edu page. 

Readers will find on the first page that the article is dedicated to Jim Aitken, a renowned LXX scholar at Cambridge whose sudden death last year shocked and saddened me, along with many others (see here). I did not know Prof. Aitken well. During the Covid lockdowns, he offered a couple seminars via Zoom, and I joined in some of those sessions as an observer. He was an editor, along with Bruce Longenecker, of a forthcoming volume that features an essay by me on "The Use of the LXX in the Early Church." (The volume is called The Apocrypha and Septuagint, and it is to be volume 1 of this Zondervan series.) Besides these encounters, Prof. Aitken had a direct impact on this JBL article, as he was present at the session of the IOSCS in which I presented the paper in November 2022. He expressed interest in the paper and encouraged me to continue pursuing the subject, and he advised me on some ways to refine the argument. 

Let me also note how much I appreciate and admire the current JBL editor, Susan Hylen. In my experience publishing papers via biblical studies journals, I can say that she as an editor dedicated an unusual amount of time to my article, partly due to my own stubbornness. She patiently waited for me to realize the wisdom of her counsel. The review process for JBL is a long one, but one of the payoffs is getting to work with and learn from Prof. Hylen. 

By the way, this post sorta continues a series that I started years ago, on the LXX Canon, a renewal of that series after seven years. See here and follow the links back. Also, the subject of this article picks up on the topic of chapter four in my book on the LXX, a book that I seem to have never mentioned on this blog—not too surprising since this is my seventh post on this blog in four years or so (but the second in the past couple weeks!). 

Abstract:

The Septuagint defies easy definition. Biblical scholars routinely use the term to designate the Greek Old Testament, though they recognize that such language is similar to talking about “the English Bible” or “the German Bible”: there is no such thing, or rather there are many such things. This paper urges closer attention to the way ancient people described the translation, particularly its scope. While modern scholars often seem (tacitly or not) to assume that the Septuagint began as the Greek Torah and then expanded its borders to welcome new Jewish scriptural books as they continued to be translated into Greek, ancient authors did not depict the Septuagint in this way. All ancient Jewish sources that mention the translation restricted the Septuagint to the Pentateuch, whereas most patristic sources attributed a Greek version of the entire Hebrew Bible to the Seventy translators. The the most significant moment in the “growth of the Septuagint” is when it suddenly swelled from five books to perhaps a couple dozen or more. These ancient ideas on the extent of the Septuagint have implications for our notions of the Septuagint canon and for the use of this Greek version in the New Testament.

My Interview with Michael Halcomb

Today Michael Halcomb of GlossaHouse released on his podcast Provetext an interview he did with me a few weeks ago. See the video below. The episode is called "Making the Bible & Understanding the Septuagint: An Interview with Dr. Edmon Gallagher." The first several minutes we talk about personal stuff—family, educational background, etc.—but then we start talking about academic stuff at about the 7-min. mark. The whole episode is about 73 minutes. 

At about the 14-min mark, we start talking about the definition of "Septuagint," which is something about which I have a forthcoming academic article. Maybe I'll have more to say about that article later. 

We also talk about the use of κύριος in the LXX and its application to Jesus in the New Testament, and  whether Paul quoted the LXX. At about 27:30, we transition to talking about canon lists, and we stick to the topic of the biblical canon for the rest of the episode. About 15 minutes from the end, I mention another book I'm writing on the biblical canon, and then it comes up again at the very end of the podcast, where I mention that I am about to submit the manuscript to the publisher. I can now report that I did submit the manuscript, and it has now (just yesterday) been approved for publication. So now I'm making a few other little tweaks and will submit the completed and approved manuscript in the coming days. 

Adler's The Origins of Judaism, Reviewed

I've been reading Yonatan Adler's book The Origins of Judaism (Yale, 2022), which I am finding very helpful and mostly persuasive. So I was interested to see that Jim Davila linked to a critical review of the book appearing in the Jerusalem Post and written by Ari Zivotofsky. 

To my mind, the review misunderstands the basic point of Adler's book. Zivotofsky seems to think that Adler wants to demonstrate that Judaism didn't exist before the second century BCE, or that the Pentateuch didn't exist until then, or that nobody had heard earlier of certain practices that have come to be associated closely with Judaism or Jewish identity (such as Sabbath observance and keeping kosher, etc.).

From the review: 

For example, Adler presents evidence that he claims demonstrates that the Torah's kosher dietary laws regarding forbidden species were not observed before the first century BCE. 

...

He then states that substantial numbers of non-kosher fish bones were found in and around Jerusalem in periods earlier than the second century BCE—proof, he says, that the Torah's dietary laws were not part of Jewish consciousness. 

...

Even if non-kosher fish bones prove lack of observance of dietary laws, they do not necessarily prove lack of awareness. Persian-era Nehemiah (13:16) sharply criticizes Judea's Jews: "And the Tyrians [who] abode therein were bringing fish and ... selling [them] on the Sabbath...." Thus non-kosher fish (whose remnants were found in a Jewish area) perhaps were eaten by non-Jewish merchants or purchased by non-observant but fully aware Jews.  

The reviewer is arguing that even if the Jews of Nehemiah's time did not observe the Torah's food laws, they may have been aware of those laws. This argument is intended as a criticism of Adler, but Adler does not argue any differently. Indeed, the reviewer repeatedly establishes Adler's case. 

Adler has no intention of arguing that the prescriptions of the Torah were unknown in Judah or Israel prior to the second century BCE. Instead, he seeks to show that there is no evidence that a variety of practices enjoined in the Torah were practiced among a large swathe of the Jewish population in an attempt to adhere to the Torah. All aspects of that sentence are important for Adler's thesis. He is looking for certain practices (kashrut, Sabbath rest, etc.), not knowledge of those practices. He is looking for widespread practice among the Jewish people, not among a distinct minority. And he is looking for practices that are motivated not by cultural norms but by adherence to the Torah. He shows repeatedly, in chapter after chapter, that it is the second century BCE when we have this kind of evidence. That does not mean that Jews did not observe the Sabbath before the second century BCE—or even that a widespread segment of the Jewish population did not observe the Sabbath in an effort to adhere to the Torah prior to the second century BCE—but we do not have evidence for such observance. Indeed, regarding the Sabbath command, we have explicit biblical evidence that not many Jews were observing the Sabbath in certain periods prior to the second century BCE (Jer 17:19–27; Neh 10:32; 13:15–22). They certainly knew about the Sabbath prohibitions, at least the ones who heard Nehemiah or Jeremiah yell at them about it, but they weren't practicing them. 

The reviewer insists that "A lack of adherence does not prove lack of knowledge...," which is true, but it does prove a lack of adherence. 

The reviewer disputes Adler's argument in regard to figural art, noting that later periods interpreted the Torah's proscriptions of images (such as in the Ten Commandments) differently from the common interpretation current in the first century CE and the immediately preceding centuries. But Adler himself had pointed this out on the first page of the chapter (p. 87) and in the last endnote of the chapter (p. 268 n. 126). 

About tefillin (the subject of Adler's chapter 4), the reviewer says:

Adler uses lack of evidence to "prove" that certain rituals did not exist, such as not finding evidence of tefillin earlier than the second century BCE. 

Contrast this interpretation of Adler with Adler's own concluding sentence of the relevant chapter: "No evidence for the observance of any practice resembling either tefillin or mezuzah is available from any time before the middle of the second century BCE" (p. 131). "No evidence for the observance" is true, if one follows the analysis of Adler, and I wonder if the reviewer—had he read Adler closely enough to realize what Adler is actually arguing—would dispute that conclusion. At any rate, "no evidence" is a far cry from the reviewer's claim that Adler seeks to prove non-existence for these rituals. According to the reviewer: "For Adler to argue that the absence of even older tefillin proves their nonexistence is fallacious." Indeed. 

One last quotation from the review: 

Finding a suggestion of lack of observance is not definitive proof of ignorance of the laws nor lack of observance among other contemporaneous Jews. Even a cursory reading of the Bible paints a picture of the masses not always following the Torah's rules; thus it is not surprising to discover evidence of laxity among the Iron Age II or Persian-era masses. 

Again, the reviewer makes half of Adler's point for him, which is the laxity. The other half of Adler's point: where is the evidence for fastidiousness among the Iron Age II or Persian-era masses when it comes to observing the Torah's laws? 

Now, admittedly, I said I'm reading Adler's book, so I haven't read all the way through it. Perhaps in later pages he will start making sweeping generalizations or giant leaps of logic, but I haven't seen it yet, nothing like what the reviewer attributes to him. Hitherto his argument is reminding me a lot of Morton Smith's 1971 book Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament, a book that does not appear in Adler's bibliography. The last chapter of Adler's book promises a historical reconstruction that requires some imagination, so we will see what he comes up with. 

Dorival on the History of Canon Research

I've been writing about Gilles Dorival's new book on the LXX (here), particularly about his first chapter on the development of the Jewish canon (here). Dorival spends a few pages (pp. 7–11) of his first chapter surveying "Theories of the Formation of the Biblical Canon." In this post I note merely some corrections and confusions (on my part, or Dorival's). 

Several times in this book (pp. 7, 35–36, 171), Dorival attributes the first formulation of the Alexandrian canon theory to Grabe in the preface to his 1715 translation the Letter of Aristeas. But, as I've noted before, Grabe did not write that preface, and the preface has nothing whatever to do with the Alexandrian canon theory. Instead, the first formulation of the theory should be attributed to Francis Lee in 1719 (see here). 

In this section Dorival also describes the three-stage theory of canon formation (p. 8). In favor of the view that the Torah was canonized first, Dorival comments on Ezra's reading of the Law in Nehemiah 8 during the course of a morning. "Since half a day is time enough for the reading of the Law, but not the Law and the Prophets, the implication is that the Prophets were not yet part of the canon." This argument makes no sense. Now, I acknowledge that Dorival goes on to argue against this three-stage theory, so he would presumably respond to my previous sentence by saying, "yeah, I know." But I'm wondering whether anyone can ever have really brought forward this line of argument about Nehemiah 8. I've never heard it in those terms, before, and for good reason: Nehemiah 8 says nothing about Ezra reading the Prophets, so why would anyone think it would be a good argument to say that he didn't have time to read the Prophets? And another thing: what about Dorival's assertion that half a day is plenty of time to read the Pentateuch? I guess, but you'd have to read quickly. On the next page Dorival acknowledges that the half-day reading "suggested that the Biblical corpus was limited to the Torah or even to one book of it" (p. 9). 

The overturning of the Alexandrian canon theory occupies the next couple paragraphs, in the midst of which he makes an interesting statement about the discovery of Ben Sira in the Cairo Genizah: "For the first time, it was proved that a book hitherto considered as specific to the Alexandrian Bible had a prior existence in Hebrew" (p. 10). Did scholars in the nineteenth century really think that Sirach might have been written in Greek? Even though the translator's preface precedes the book in Greek? And even though Jerome had said (in his preface to the books of Solomon according to the Hebrew) that he had seen a copy of Sirach in Hebrew? And even though the book is quoted in rabbinic literature, a fact surely known to those nineteenth century scholars? A statement similar to Dorival's is made in an article by Natalio Fernández Marcos (in his essay in this book), when he claims that the Alexandrian Canon hypothesis was based in part on "the idea that most of the deuterocanonical/apocryphal books had been composed in Greek and on Egyptian soil" (p. 76), an idea refuted, he says, by the discovery of Hebrew Ben Sira in the Cairo Genizah and the discovery of Hebrew Ben Sira and Hebrew/Aramaic Tobit at Qumran. 

Look, maybe Fernández Marcos and Dorival are right about this—that scholars used to think these writings were composed in Greek—but I have my doubts. First, Jerome (problematically) claimed he had translated Tobit from a semitic text, so I don't see why western scholars would ever imagine that Tobit had been composed in Greek. I've already mentioned the evidence for Ben Sira. I don't feel like digging through nineteenth-century writings on the canon right now to see whether they thought the deuterocanonicals were written in Greek, but these two books (Tobit and Ben Sira) are the worst examples, because there was definite evidence for a semitic origin long before the discoveries in modern times. Furthermore, the heyday of the Alexandrian Canon hypothesis was the first half of the twentieth century (see here), and started to be widely accepted right around the time of the discovery of the Cairo Genizah. How could the Alexandrian Canon hypothesis be based on the idea that the deuterocanonicals originated in Greek if the strongest supporters of the hypothesis lived after the discoveries in the Cairo Genizah? 

Dorival's conclusion to this section: 

Because of these discoveries [= Cairo Genizah and Dead Sea Scrolls], one may conclude that, in the Judaism prior to Jabneh, a collection of holy books larger than the Jewish canon of twenty-two/twenty-four books existed. This collection appears to vary from group to group, with a stable of books common to them all. There is no direct connection between Alexandria and the deuterocanonical books. The Christian Old Testament is larger than the Rabbinic Bible because it comes from the larger collection of books that was understood as 'inspired' by one or several Jewish groups at the beginning of the Christian Era. (p. 11)

This view has similarities to the "majority canon" position of Timothy Lim, though Dorival does not cite Lim here. I myself think that this conclusion should be stated less confidently. (See my review of Lim.) It is, in fact, not clear that "a collection of holy books larger than the Jewish canon of twenty-two/twenty-four books existed," although I suppose that Dorival is correct that "one may [or may not] conclude" so. 

Dorival on Canon Terminology

As I mentioned last time, I've got some thing's to say about Dorival's first chapter, the one on the development of the Jewish canon. As it turns out, I'm going to split my thoughts on this chapter into at least two posts. 

Dorival's first major section in the chapter is called "Words and Concepts" (pp. 3–7). He runs through the well-known history of the word κανών and related terminology. Let me mention first something that I appreciated. Dorival acknowledges that a canon can exist even in the absence of the word "canon," and he thinks such was the case for some ancient Jews. 

First, even if the word 'canon' is lacking, the reality of the canon did exist in these ancient Jewish milieus: that is, a list of books understood as being in some sense normative. Greek-speaking Jews probably used the expression 'testamentary books' (ἐνδιάθηκοι) for this list. (p. 5)

For the term ἐνδιάθηκος, see Origen's Selecta in Psalmos 1 as quoted by Eusebius (Hist. eccl. 6.25), where the list of of "testamentary books" is attributed to "the Hebrews," from whom Origen may also have derived the terminology of "testamentary books."  

Moreover, Dorival argues that the Rabbis used the word seder for what Christians called a κανών, and he cites Jerome's Prologus Galeatus (where the term is ordo) in favor (pp. 5–6). 

In Jerome's text, the word ordo first refers to the succession of the books among the three categories of biblical books, but then also to each category of books. The word ordo has the meaning of category of books in Gelasius' Decretum ... and in Rufinus, Commentarius in symbolum Apostolorum 36. (pp. 5–6)

He connects ordo in these Latin sources to seder at b. B. Bathra 14b. "The suggestion is that the Sages called seder what the Church fathers referred to as canon" (p. 6). I think this is a good possibility. I feel like I may have made this suggestion in print, but I can't remember where. I'm glad to see it here in Dorival. (Or, maybe I just read it in the previous French version of this essay.)  

I do have a couple of critiques on small points about termionology. Dorival discusses the Hellenistic-era Alexandrian canons of classical authors, seemingly implying that the word κανών was used for these lists (p. 4). It was not. Later he says:

English historians assert that the first modern occurrence of the word 'canon' meaning 'the canon of the Scriptures' is David Rhunken [sic] in 1768. In fact, this word with this meaning is found in French writings of the late seventeenth century: in 1685, in the work of Richard Simon ('Canon juif') ... (p. 6, providing further examples)

These statements from Dorival are confused. What can he mean by telling us that the word "canon" in the sense of "canon of Scripture" is already so used in seventeenth-century French literature? He seems to mean that Simon's use of the word "canon" in this sense is an early example of this meaning, but hasn't Dorival already told us that this word is used in this sense in fourth-century Greek literature? In that case, Richard Simon was not innovating, even if the word "canon" was rarely used in this sense in the intervening years (about which I am not certain). Actually, now that I look back at Dorival's first few pages, I'm not sure whether he acknowledges that Athanasius used κανών and related terms to designate the canon of Scripture. He simply notes on p. 3 that Eusebius and Athanasius did use these terms, but he doesn't say what sense the words bore in those contexts (and Eusebius himself did not use κανών for "canon of Scripture"). As for the assertion about English historians and David Ruhnken, I believe Dorival has again misunderstood. In a previous post, I noted that Ruhnken is credited as the first person to use the word "canon"—not in the sense of "canon of Scripture," a usage that goes back to Athanasius, but—for the lists of classical authors drawn up by the Hellenistic-era Alexandrian scholars. Those Alexandrian scholars did not use the term "canon" to talk about "the canon of Greek orators" or whatever; that was the innovation of Ruhnken.   

Another thing: Dorival says, "The existence of the acronym Tanak (b. Sanhedrin 101a, b. Qiddushin 49a, b. Mo'ed Qatan 21a) seems to imply they did not have a word for canon" (p. 5). The French version (p. 12) makes it even more clear that Dorival means that the Talmud uses the acronym Tanak. But the Talmud does not use the acronym. In the three passages listed by Dorival, the Talmud uses the spelled-out names Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim (in Hebrew, or—in the case of Quddushin—Aramaic), not the acronym. I checked in the Soncino edition of the Vilna Shas, but you can also check it at Sefaria: it's §3 of Sanhedrin 101a; §12 of Qiddushin 49a; and §7 of Mo'ed Qatan 21a. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something?