As many of you know the Top 50 has ended, but Joseph Kelly is feeling nostalgic on this last day of the year and has posted a final Top 50. Yours truly remains rock steady at #28.
December, 2009:
Wishing you a happy and healthy New Year
But not necessarily a prosperous one. Not because I do not wish you all success, but because we need to remember that profit is not the goal in and of itself. Today’s epistle from the Book of Common Prayer’s Daily Office reminds us of this quite succinctly.
James 4:13-17 — Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
Infallible J.I. Packer
Ok, that was a bit misleading. I am not suggesting JI Packer is infallible, rather in this interview with the best-selling author of Knowing God from last week’s Washington Post he speaks about the infallibility of scripture and a few other things as well. Packer’s comments on infallibility confused me at first.
Q: On a radio program, you explained why different Bible translations have different endings to the Gospel of Mark. How does this jibe with the inerrancy of God’s word?
A: The inerrancy of Scripture applies to the material as prepared for publication. I’m saying that quite deliberately because I want to allow the editor in. In some Old Testament books, it’s very evident that an editor has been at work. That’s quite all right. It’s part of the process.
Hunh? “The inerrancy of Scripture applies to the material as prepared for publication”? That sounded to me as though he was suggesting that Zondervan or Crossway
Q: But some people believe that every word written and every “i” dotted came strictly from the hand of God to the author. At the other extreme, atheists and liberal Christians say, “No one knows what’s true in the Bible because it’s been changed so much.” How do you see this?
A: I’m saying that an editorial process that is preparing the material for publication counts as part of the inspiring process whereby God, in his sovereignty, gave every word. Some people ask for trouble by not allowing for the reality of editorial processes. The editorial process is very important for preparing the work for public consumption. It’s part of the inspired process.
There are a couple of things that I note in this second answer. The first is that he is now speaking of “inspiration” of the text rather than “inerrancy.” Judging from his earlier answer it seems that he is using the terms interchangeably. (I am not familiar enough with his work to know his precise usage.) I myself would make distinctions, or at least a distinction in how many use the term “inerrancy,” much in the way that the questioner suggestions, every jot and tittle being moved by the very hand of God.
John Hobbins Reconstructing Lamentations
Megillat Eicha, Alsace c. 18th century (image: Learn.jtsa.edu)
John has an intriguing post regarding Lam. 3:51: Lamentations 3:51: A New Proposal This is a notoriously problematic passage and John has an interesting proposal for a textual reconstruction. Of greater interest to me is his broader conclusions that I am not sure that I can agree with.
On this reading, in 3:1, at the onset of a larger whole, a female lamenter explicitly casts herself as a male persona, an “everyman” (Hillers’ characterization (1992:122) developed by Dobbs-Allsopp [2002:105-109]) who gives voice to a collective experience, only to allude to her particular identity in 3:51. In the poem’s conclusion, 3:52-66, the singular “I” continues to be used, but, as Dobbs-Allsopp notes (107), “it has become more inclusive.” As she did throughout Lam 3, the lamenter concludes by voicing the grief and hopes of an entire community.
The public articulation of grief by women is extremely well-attested cross-culturally. The details have become the subject of intense study by anthropologists. Those familiar with this research will formulate, almost as a matter of course, a working hypothesis: Lam 1 is a dialogue in which (a) a chorus of lamenting women provide a context for the voice of (b) a single lamenting woman speaking in the voice of Zion: (a): Lam 1:1-11 except for 1:9c and 1:11c; (b): Lam 1:9c.11c.12-22. Lam 2 is easily understood as a dialogue between two lamenting women, (a) a lamenter who speaks of and to Zion, and (b) a lamenter once again speaking in the voice of Zion: (a) 2:1-19; (b) 2:20-22. On this understanding, it is one of “the maidens of Jerusalem” spoken of as a lamenter in Lam 2:10 whose words we hear in 2:11-12 with its focus on children and mothers. Lam 3, with 3:51 construed as suggested above, is a monologue of a lamenting woman, a female citizen of her city, who gives voice to the grief and hopes of an entire community.
It seems to me that John makes a tremendous leap from his textual analysis to proposing a female author (even one that poses as a male persona). John is of course correct that women are often those most visible and vocal in the grieving process in many cultures and indeed it has been the subject of a great amount of study lately. At the risk of being labelled a misogynist, I would suggest caution when moving from that research to the reconstructions offered by John. I am sure that those familiar with such research would offer such a hypothesis but it seems overly cumbersome.
The most obvious hurdle is that the text itself takes the voice of a man. Would we not have to then argue that the original female author (which seems to be John’s argument) felt the need to present her laments as a male composition because, presumably, the culture would not accept a composition written by a woman. Yet if the culture is so affirming of women as lead lamenters then why would they not also accept such a composition? Certainly the identification of Zion as woman and Daughter Zion introduce the feminine perspective (and see Dobbs-Allsopp and Linafelt for more on these themes), but does that necessitate a female author?
Finally, does the gender of the speaker or author matter? That is to say, do we read the text differently if we have a man or a woman in our consciousness as the author? It might provide us with slightly different nuances to our readings, but what do we gain exegetically? And that holds true even if arguing for a male author.
I can genuinely say that I do not feel a vested interest in whether it was a man or a woman (or, more likely, men or women) who wrote these laments. I just question whether or not such a thing is knowable and how it would change our readings. Then I wonder, should it? When we read an anonymous work we tend to take the words at their “face value” (a dubious concept, but you know what I mean), but once we know the author there can be a tendency to read that work through the filter of what we believe we know about the author and what we think their agenda might be.
Is it possible not to offer a gender neutral rendering of the text, but rather a gender neutral reading? Should that be our goal?
I also thought I would share with you all the targumist’s rendering and reading of the passage (Lam. 3:49-51). (You can find my translation of TgLam, my doctoral thesis, and other articles on this blog as well. See the tab above or go here.)
עיני זלגת דמעין ולא תשתיק מלמבכי מדלית פאיג עקתי וממלל תנחומין לי
עד כדו דסיתכי ויחזו עולבני יי מן שמיא
בכותא דעייני אסתקפת למרע נפשי על חורבן פילכי עמי וניוול בנתא דירושלם קרתי
49 My eye weeps tears and does not cease from crying. There is no respite from my anguish or anyone to comfort me;
50 Until the Lord looks out and sees my humiliation from heaven.
51 The weeping of my eyes is the cause of the affliction of my soul over the destruction of the districts of my people and the humiliation of the daughters of Jerusalem, my city.
