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I am presently reading Daniel Kahneman’s engaging book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.  Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics (!) for his collaborative work with Amos Tversky that helped to develop the field of behavioral economics, gained notice primarily for his work on understanding the kind of biased (and often incorrect) decisions toward which we gravitate.  In this book he draws a more synthetic and accessible picture of how we think.

In sum, he simplifies our thinking processes into two “systems.”  System 1 is our default, intuitive system – it allows us to make decisions with little or no effort.  System 2 is our more deliberate, focused way of thinking, which we consciously engage in order to solve problems too difficult for System 1.  This is certainly a simplification of thinking, but it is not entirely a heuristic.  When System 2 is engaged, there are measurable physiological changes, including a rise in pulse and dilation of the pupils.    The book describes these two systems but, more importantly, elaborates on how they work and their ramifications.

I will most likely write a few posts on this book, but I am now thinking about how  educators in higher education might maximally exploit these findings in a classroom in order to fool increase student learning.  Right now I am intrigued by the possibility of using a pre-class audio/visual presentation.  That is, students walk into the classroom and encounter a loop of a series of slides and background music.  The purpose, of course, is to put them “in the mood” to learn.

This, though, is where it gets interesting.  Because System 1 is lazy and works with the information that is easily at hand, it is very susceptible to “priming.”  A slide show thus might include technical vocabulary.  When we actually discuss that vocabulary later in class, there should be some increased degree of recognition.  A well-designed set of slides could thus prime students for the learning to come.

In addition to priming, the music sets the mood.  My classroom is generally discussion centered; it is a System 2 kind of place.  For discussions to work, students must be thinking rigorously, but they must also feel comfortable.  Here, then, is my conundrum.  Dissonance activates System 2.  Nice, easy, listening is System 1 music: “all is fine around me, there is no need to think too hard about anything.”  On the other hand, I am sure that if I were to open class with a track from Metallica, it would leave many students (but certainly me) grumpy and combative.  So here is where I turn to you, reader: What music in particular would you suggest that I play in my classes (now entirely putting aside the actual subject of those classes) to achieve these goals?

 

I have been struggling recently with the biblical account of Jacob’s last testament to his sons and their descendents, found in Genesis 49:1-27.  I am hardly the first.  As many commentators have already noted, this is one of the most obscure passages in the Pentateuch.  The Hebrew is difficult and at times almost unintelligible; the text keeps mixing metaphors; and the word-plays that it makes on the names of Jacob’s sons seem to be in tension with the derivations of the names given earlier in Genesis.  The testament is also nakedly political.  Most of the tribes are lightly brushed aside in a verse, and the two tribes that receive extended blessings are Judah and Joseph, the tribes that not coincidentally at all are associated respectively with the southern and northern kingdoms, formed after the death of Solomon in the tenth century.  The “blessings” of Reuven, Simon, and Levi – the three oldest brothers – are hardly blessings, and seem intended to malign them in order to set the stage for Judah’s ascendency.  That is, as the fourth son, Judah would gain power only because his three older brothers forfeited their right to it due to their bad behavior.

What is a plausible historical context for such a text?  What is particularly peculiar to me is the dual blessing of Judah and Joseph.  The blessing of Judah clearly assumes that the tribe of Judah holds supreme power; I cannot see how it can be dated prior to the fall of the northern kingdom (Israel) to Assyria in 722 BCE.  Yet the blessing of Joseph assumes that his tribe – Israel – has withstood attacks and is flourishing.  It is hard to imagine how a scribe writing in Judah/Jerusalem after 722 BCE could have written this.  How can we make sense these two blessings appearing together?

Here’s my preliminary solution, following, to some extent, John Skinner’s suggestions in his volume in The International Critical Commentary on the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments (pp. 507-25).  The bulk of this testament, including the blessing of Joseph, was produced in Israel (the northern kingdom) prior to 722 BCE.  After Israel’s fall, it was part of the literature that exiled scribes brought to Jerusalem.  Some time later, being revised by a scribe in Judah, the testament was updated to include the strong statement about Judah’s leadership.  By that time Israel was no threat, so Joseph’s blessing was left unchanged.

If this solution works, then we have here an excellent example of the ways in which the scribes of Judah revised the texts that they received from their brethren from the north.

The program for the “Ancient Religion, Modern Technology” workshop is now posted. Please join us!
http://tinyurl.com/3jpeun9

I recently had the opportunity to to see the Dead Sea scrolls exhibit at the Discovery Center in New York.  The exhibit is being advertised heavily (it seemed like there was a poster on every other block in Manhattan) and has been extensively reviewed.  The reviews have been generally positive, if at times puzzled.  In The New York Times review, for example, Edward Rothstein calls the exhibit “understated” and asserts that it describes an historical arc, even if (in my reading at least) it is difficult to locate the shape of the arc.

The exhibit is essentially two exhibits.  The first floor contains artifacts relating to the biblical period (ca. 500 BCE and earlier).  Then one descends to the second floor, where in addition to a collection of scrolls there are some artifacts from Qumran (an inhabited settlement near where the scrolls were found) and Jerusalem more generally.  There are also side exhibits on Masada, the Ten Commandments (where the second-oldest manuscript of them will be displayed for a short period of time), and the origins of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

First, the positive:  The scrolls are always fun to see, even if most of the ones on display, in terms of importance, would be on the “B list” for scroll scholars.  (For those unable to get to the Discovery Center, the Google digitization project offers another, albeit virtual, way to access the scrolls.)  The objects on the first floor give a nice overview of issues in biblical archaeology, even if they don’t break any new ground.  The objects on the second floor – composed primarily, as on the first floor, of a lot of pottery – also add some context to the scrolls.

There is much that we still don’t know about Qumran and the scrolls, and the exhibit does a good, “understated” job not sensationalizing or drawing unwarranted conclusions.  The result, though, is vaguely unsatisfying.  I was left with a feeling that the curators themselves did not know how to link these objects.  In fact, I strongly suspect that they could not acquire enough objects to mount a respectable exhibition on the Dead Sea scrolls themselves, so they acquired other tangentially related objects to fill out the show and then didn’t quite know what to do with them all.  The exhibit had a failure of nerves.

Yet this raises a very interesting question: Given all that we do not know, and if one had access to any and all objects, what might a successful exhibit look like?  How do you make a narrative when we don’t have one?

One suggestion is to organize the exhibit according to the history of scholarship.  Here is my whimsical and schematic first stab on how such an exhibit might look:

1. Cairo Geniza: The discovery of the Damascus Document and the research that led scholars to link it to an early Jewish group.  Here we might also include information/artifacts on the early scholars of the literature that became known as the Pseudepigrapha (e.g., Jubilees);
2. Josephus and his history of the time, including discussion of the Jewish “sects”;
3. Discovery of the Scrolls, with the necessary story of the Bedouin shepherd and the Wall St. journal ad;
4. The earliest explanations of the scrolls, with the emphasis on eschatology;
5. The excavations of Qumran and the understanding of the community as a kind of “proto-Christian” monastery;
6. The work on and reconstruction of the scrolls;
7.  The Six Day war and the legal issues of scroll possession;
8. Evolving emphasis in the 1970’s on the place of religious law in the scrolls;
9. The struggle over and eventual publication of MMT, and the new insights that it gives us to the group’s origins;
10. Purity practices;
11. Food;
12. Prayer and angels;
13. Canonization and the developing sense of sacred literature, and the link to later Jewish and Christian canons;
14. New archaeological research on Qumran and the graveyard, and what it reveals;
15. Daily life for a member of the group

I feel like there should be a last exhibit that refers back to 1, but I can’t think right now of what that might be.

My point is that a thematically based exhibit with a (somewhat contrived) narrative thread might be the most effective mode of organization, while at the same time not speculating overmuch.