It is that time of year: CV updating, annual reports, and general housekeeping. Toward that end I just added two new PDF articles to my Research page. One is an article entitled “Jew or Judaean,” and the other, “What Does Love Have to Do With It? Sibling Relationships among Judean Jews in the First-Third Centuries CE.”
American Historical Association
I will be participating in a roundtable on “Jewish History/General History: Rethinking the Divide” at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Monday, January 5, 11 AM – 1 PM. In this paper I will reflect on historical turn in the study of Jews in antiquity from history to “rabbinics” (some thoughts about that category here) and its contemporary implications, particularly since the rise of the concept of “Late Antiquity.” Mostly, though, I am looking forward to learning from the other members of the panel.
Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine Presentation
This is an exciting time for the “Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine” project. This online project seeks to collect and make accessible all of the published inscriptions from the region from the Persian period through the early seventh century CE. We have been spending much time changing our data to make it “EpiDoc conformant” (a data standard used by many projects, especially in the EAGLE consortium), and in the next few weeks we will transition that new data – along with many new inscriptions – to the site. Having just received a major grant from the Goldhirsh-Yellin Foundation, we have many great things in store.
I will be making an informal presentation on the project on Thursday, December 18, at 7:00 PM at the National Library of Israel at the Giva’at Ram campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The announcement of the event can be found here. All are welcome!
Beggar at the Banquet
At this year’s Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting I will be presenting two papers. The first of these, entitled “Beggar at the Banquet,” will be given in a joint session sponsored by the Meals in the Greco-Roman World Section and the Meals in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Consultation (S23-330). The topic of the session is “Meals and Justice.”
In this paper, I explore rabbinic discussions, primarily stories, that involve giving food to the poor against both the reality of poverty in the ancient world and the most famous of such stories, Odysseus’s appearance in the disguise of a beggar at the banquet of suitors for his wife Penelope in books 17-18 of the Odyssey. The rabbinic stories fall into three broad categories that I chart on a spectrum from least to most “intense”: incidental encounters with beggars seeking alms (for or in the form of food); beggars who come to a householder’s field or door; and finally the few rabbinic stories that depict beggars at a banquet. Unlike the story in the Odyssey, these latter narratives in particular recognize the importance of giving alms to the truly poor, not just to those of the same social class who are seen as temporarily down on their luck. Like the Odyssey, though, these stories hardly recognize the humanity of the poor and treat them instead instrumentally, as presenting opportunities or tests to the wealthy.
Was Paul a Palestinian Jew?
In her review of How the Bible Became Holy in the Wall Street Journal, Sarah Ruden wrote:
He tries to undercut, for instance, the well-founded consensus that Paul was a Diaspora Jew, from a family established in Tarsus (in modern-day Turkey), who first lived in Jerusalem during his youth or young adulthood for study and professional and religious development. For this account Mr. Satlow substitutes a speculative one of Paul as a cradle Palestinian Jew, and he does this seemingly in order to support a widespread characterization of the evangelist as a traitor to his heritage: As far as scripture is concerned, Paul hawked a debased version among people he didn’t know and who themselves didn’t know any better; he wasn’t one of them, attuned to their needs and aspirations; holy writing as he presented it and remade it thus has no deep integrity.
(my bold)
Ruden’s charge that appears after the sentence in bold – that Paul “hawked a debased version” and was a “traitor” – I found entirely bizarre. I neither made this charge in my book nor do I believe that it is remotely true.
As for the sentence in bold, I do argue that Paul was born and raised in Palestine. But is it speculative? Or, maybe more precisely, is it any more speculative than the “well-founded consensus”? And what is at stake? I have recently posted an essay that sketches the existing evidence on both sides of this question and develops in more detail why I think what I do. A more scholarly version of this argument is forthcoming, and will eventually be posted here.
In the interim, my essay can be found here.