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Prophets, according to the Hebrew Bible, cannot really afford to be wrong.  Deuteronomy 18:20 in fact singles out accurate prediction of the future as a necessary characteristic of the future.  Yet several of the prophets of ancient Israel – the very ones preserved in the Hebrew Bible (not to mention what must be assumed to be scores more who did not make it that far) – in fact made such incorrect predictions.  Later interpreters throughout antiquity would assume the authority of these prophets and seek to reinterpret their predictions, but how did such prophecies, and prophets, gain authority to begin with?

I don’t have a complete answer to this problem, but I will be using the Book of Daniel (which of all books of the Hebrew Scripture might hold the prize for incorrect prophecies) as a test case to explore this problem in a conference paper that I will be giving in Edinburgh on May 6.  The conference title is “Power, Authority, and Canon,” and details can be found here.

Last semester I taught a graduate seminar on Race, Religion, and Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean (see here).  As a class project we began to compile a relevant bibliography and provide some minimal annotations.  That bibliography is on Zotero (as a public group) under the title RaceReligionEthnicityAntiquity (link here).  This is the first time I have done anything like this, so I invite you to add to, improve, or otherwise comment on it.

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.”

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.

A new essay of mine just appeared: “What Does Love Have to Do with It?  Sibling Relationships among Judean Jews in the First-Third Centuries CE,” in Ehe-Familie-Gemeinde (eds. Dorothee Dettinger and Christof Landmesser), 103-16. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlangsanstalt, 2014.

PDF available here.