Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

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Inscriptions and FAIR Archiving

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I direct on online project that seeks to collect, analyze, and make accessible the inscriptions of Israel/Palestine from roughly the sixth century BCE to the seventh century, CE.  The site can be accessed here.  Over the past few years the team working on this project has had to confront a wide variety of technical and architectural challenges, and we have been producing presentations on those challenges and our approach to them.  We (although I was not there!) recently presented at TEI2019, a meeting devoted to the Textual Encoding Initiatives.  In this presentation, we discussed our approach to archiving our data according to the best current framework, known as FAIR, which seeks to make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.  We will soon be submitting the paper for publication, but the abstract and slides of the presentation are now available.  The slides can be found here and the abstract is below:

The Inscriptions of Israel Palestine Project is an online corpus of inscriptions from Israel and Palestine, written in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Aramaic, dating roughly from the Persian Period to the Arab Conquest. As of spring 2019, it has collected and encoded more than 4000 inscriptions, out of some 10000 relevant texts: we aim to create an exhaustive and easily accessible collection and to enable users to carry out a variety of searches and extensive textual analysis.

The FAIR Principles aim to enhance the ability of machines to automatically find and use digital objects, in addition to supporting their reuse by individuals. The principles are organized under four areas intended to ensure digital objects are findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable. Following epigraphy.info’s mission statement we are applying the FAIR Principles to guide our development of archival formats and processes for our corpus.

As IIP prepared to deposit files in the Brown Digital Repository, we defined formats for ensuring that our files will be as informative, self-documenting and re-usable as possible. Each inscription is contained in a single, XML file, encoded in the well-documented Epidoc subset of the TEI. These files, however, linked to externally maintained controlled vocabularies (using the xi:include feature) and bibliography (using Zotero), in order to facilitate the work of our encoders and ensure consistency.  One of our challenges was to incorporate these external data into the robust, stand-alone, archival format.

We will introduce the FAIR Guiding Principles and FAIR Metrics as they apply to epigraphic corpora and TEI encoding, discuss the roadmap for implementation, and look at archival practices beyond FAIR when it comes to preservation of data as well as re-use. While the first steps to making a digital corpus findable and accessible seem straightforward—IIP texts have been ingested into the Brown Digital Repository, have unique and persistent identifiers, rich metadata, and are freely available, we can still improve on both facets. Simple interoperability and re-usability are available through the IIP API in both the production and the archival versions of the corpus, however, it will be important to do further work on controlled vocabularies, shared concepts, and encoding practices in order to enhance both of these facets.

Blurbing Ecclesiastes

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Last week in my course at Brown, “How the Bible Became Holy,” students read the book of Ecclesiastes and portions of Sirach.  At the beginning of class I tried a new warm-up exercise, in groups: Imagine that you are the publicist team for Ecclesiastes (today or in antiquity).  Write a blurb that would sell the book without misrepresenting it.

Here are some of their blurbs:

For Ancient Readers:

The Many Habits of Highly Righteous Individuals.  Want to be a highly respected person? Want to serve G-d in the best way possible? Pick up Ecclesiastes and learn all the morals you need in 12 easy chapters. G-d will smile down upon you.

How are you spending your days? Is there meaning to this life? How should you be serving yourself and others in the eyes of God? The book of Ecclesiastes will answer all of your questions!  Read this book and learn from the experiences of others that came before you.

 

For Modern Readers:

How the Ancients Did It.  Frustrated with the day to day grind.  Worried that you are not living life to its fullest potential? Pick up the book of Ecclesiastes and find out how the wise people of ancient times lived their best life. Forget minimalism.  Dwelling in the past is the only way to improve the world.

Ecclesiastes: A hard but necessary look at the realities of living a truly pious life. Enjoy what you can, when you can – before it all ends.

Do you want to know the secrets to happiness? Do you want to truly live every day as if it’s your last? Read the book of Ecclesiastes! It has all of this and more. Listen to the wisdom of your ancestors and spend your days with food and delight.

Ecclesiastes serves as a succinct account of ancient wisdom that functions as a “self-help” book for a modern reader. Investigate an account from antiquity that shines light on how to turn your life around and live life to the fullest that remains applicable and fundamental to success in today’s world.

Learn from the unparalleled wisdom of ancient King Solomon. Find success, happiness, and God’s favor through the teachings of the book of Ecclesiastes.

Do you want learn all the wisdom concerning everything done under heaven? Do you want to lead a meaningful life? Ecclesiastes will help you live your life to your potential. Learn the steps to lead a pious life.

Want to learn how to improve your life and your understanding of the world? Read Ecclesiastes and in just 12 short chapters, gain a lifetime’s worth of self-help knowledge that will teach you everything you could ever want to know about God, the world, wisdom, and good. Becoming a better person has never been so easy!

The 1619 Project, and a Quibble

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The New York Times has recently been running a series of articles marking the 400th anniversary of the arrival of African slaves in the New World that they are calling the 1619 Project.  The approach that they took on these essays is original and commendable.  Each of them illustrates a different aspect about how slavery and then racial discrimination shaped various aspects (e.g., cultural, social, legal) of present day America.  I have enjoyed reading these essays, which gave me a different lens to view some modern issues.

At the same time, the essays tap into a larger academic sociological debate about the relationship between “society” and the individual.  That is, to what extent can we explain social phenomenon with reference to social institutions and structures?  The authors of the 1619 Project essays mostly take a stand on this debate, attributing many of our present social woes and challenges to “the system.”  Thus, a few of the essays use the metaphor of “DNA,” as in, the United States has a particular racist DNA at its core.

My own scholarly proclivity is to treat such arguments and analogies with a great deal of skepticism.  Societies are unlike living organisms and while they do hand down certain laws, institutions, and norms, they do not have a DNA.  Societies don’t act on their own; the individuals who make comprise them are the actors.

I wrote a letter to the New York Times along these lines, which was published yesterday and which I reprint here:

To the Editor:

I very much appreciate and enjoy the 1619 Project, both as a necessary corrective to the way that American history is often portrayed and as an impetus to productive change. At the same time, I take issue with a metaphor of “DNA” that appears in several essays, such as “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” The metaphor is misleading and perhaps pernicious, as it obscures agency.

Every generation receives traditions, found in laws, customs and institutions, but every person in every generation has significant leeway in how to understand and live those traditions. Traditions — perhaps the meaning of “DNA” in this metaphor — make racism easier, but ultimately it is the quotidian choices that we have and continue to make that cause racism, as they will its eradication.

Michael Satlow
Providence, R.I.
The writer is a professor of religious studies at Brown University.

Course: How the Bible Became Holy (Again)

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I have taught an introductory level undergraduate course, “How the Bible Became Holy,” several times at Brown and will be doing so again this fall.  The course gives (but does not insist on) a loose narrative to the history of the biblical text, but is really intended to introduce students to biblical literature and history and to think more deeply about the intersection between the two.  Every time I teach the course I tinker a bit, and this time is no exception.  My ideal would be to teach this course using my own book, but that feels too weird to me.

The current version of the syllabus (in pdf format) can be found here.  Suggestions for improvements in future renditions are always welcome.

The Poor and Their Relief in the Mishnah

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Last month there was a workshop in Jerusalem on charity in rabbinic literature that I was sorry to miss.  There has been a great deal of scholarly interest lately on the topic of charity generally in antiquity, among Jews, Christians, and Muslims.  While Peter Brown’s book, Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD takes a broad approach to issues that involve charity and aid for the poor in antiquity (while scarcely mentioning Jews), recent books by Alyssa Gray, Gregg Gardner, Yael Wilfand, Noam Zion, and Rivka Ulmer all make solid contributions to thinking about rabbinic attitudes toward the poor and our responsibility to them.  A book that I edited, Judaism and the Economy: A Sourcebook contains contributions that further advance our understanding of Jewish ideas and practices of charity from antiquity to the present.

I recently published another essay that deals with this topic from what I think is an unusual angle.  It is titled, “The Poor and Their Relief in the Mishnah: An Economic Analysis,” Studies in Judaism, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences 2 (2019): 61-72.  I do not have an offprint to share, but below is the Abstract:

The Mishnah, it has long been argued, assumes an economy in “stasis”; the economy is eternal and never-changing. If this is indeed the case, then the Mishnah should neither acknowledge nor promote economic mobility, even among the poor. This paper, which views the Mishnaic portrayals of the poor and of poor-relief through from an economic perspective, largely confirms this conclusion. The Mishnah, I argue, acknowledges a binary class system, “the poor” and everyone else, and sets the poverty line quite high by modern standards. It is assumed that only the situationally poor (i.e., the formerly rich) will move between classes. While, following the Torah, the Mishnah prescribes relief for the poor, it minimizes the amount necessary to be left for the poor while also changing the mechanism of poor relief in a way that reinforces social hierarchy.