SBL Book History and Biblical Literatures CFP

The SBL Book History and Biblical Literatures CFP for the 2016 Annual Meeting is out.
Too interesting to miss.

Call for papers: This section investigates how insights from Book History illuminate scriptural literatures. We consider the culturally contingent concepts of text, authorship, readership, publication, and materiality, marshaling scholars of Hebrew Bible/ANE, Judaism, Early Christianity, Nag Hammadi, Syriac studies, and other sub-fields within the SBL to encourage collaborative and comparative work. We will host three sessions in 2016. The first session welcomes proposals on the theme of PUBLICATION. What did it mean to make a text "public" in the ancient world? If "publishing" is a modern concept that scholars sometimes anachronistically impose on antiquity, what are some ways we might think historically about the promulgation and dissemination of writing in the ancient societies that produced our sources? The theme of the second session is open. Given the lively interest in our 2015 theme of Paratexts, we welcome more submissions that engage this topic (the study of textual frames, such as titles, prefaces, epilogues, colophons, marginalia, etc), but also invite proposals on any topic within the purview of Book History and Biblical Literatures. For both of these sessions, we are particularly interested in proposals that take comparative and theoretical approaches and bring different subfields of the SBL into conversation with one another. In keeping with the interdisciplinary emphasis of the section, we especially encourage submissions from scholars working in Qu'ranic Studies/Islamic Studies. Our third session is an invited panel sponsored jointly with the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section on reading practices in antiquity, featuring classicist William Johnson of Duke University. 

Who is reviewed at the SBL Annual Meeting?

Every year in late November, approximately 4,500 biblical scholars from all around the world meet up for the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Annual Meeting in a US city. The SBL Annual Meeting is among the largest international meeting places for scholars working in the fields of Biblical and Religious Studies and is a main event for anyone specialising in biblical and related writings. For four days, papers are presented, sessions are attended and recent publications are discussed.

Among the most prestigious sessions at the Annual Meetings are review sessions and sessions set up in honour of the research or the career of a scholar. Over the last five years, the SBL has hosted approximately 30-35 review sessions and 10-15 honorary sessions each year. These sessions showcase the work of a scholar and tend to be well attended. They are likely to boost book sales and be career building, and they may be part of the process of authorising the status, or the memory, of a scholar as a leading figure in his or her field. Review sessions are important also because scholars in Biblical Studies are still associated with and recognised primarily for their books. Given that review and honorary sessions are likely to be important, the question of who gets their books reviewed, how and, where, warrants some attention.

In this blog post, I focus on one aspect of this question by asking how many female scholars get their books reviewed, how many honorary sessions are set up to celebrate women’s careers and how this compares to their male colleagues. I have gone systematically through the SBL Annual Meeting programme books from 2011 to 2015, counting review sessions and honorary sessions, looking for the relative distribution of men and women. (Other aspects deserve attention as well. For instance, ethnicity, or the intersection of gender and ethnicity, have not been dealt with here.)

Review sessions

Fig. 1	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
Authors/editors having their books reviewed, total	43	34	34	38	49
Men having their books reviewed	33	22	27	28	32
Women having their books reviewed	10	12	7	10	17

This overview shows the total number of authors/editors having their books reviewed at the SBL Annual Meetings over the last five years and the distribution of male and female authors/editors.

One general tendency is apparent: many of the books reviewed at the SBL are authored or edited by men. Between 64 and 76 % of authors and editors having their books reviewed from 2011 to 2015 were men, while between 36 and 24% of the authors/editors were women. In share numbers, the male dominance is obvious. However, since, according to the 2015 Society Report approximately 75% of SBL members are in fact men, the numbers are not unreasonable per se.

Two further tendencies should be noted, though. First, many of the review sessions devoted to books published by women are either hosted by SBL groups dedicated to studies of gender and/or women, or they are special sessions with such a thematic focus. This does not reduce the importance of these review sessions in any way, but this tendency implies that in the remaining review sessions organised by SBL groups and sessions that do not focus on gender issues, in particular, the relative amount of reviews of books published by women is lower.

The second tendency deserves some additional attention; namely, the distribution of sessions devoted fully to one single male or female scholar and his/her book.

Fig. 2	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
Sessions fully devoted to one single author/editor, total	23	14	20	25	26
Sessions devoted to men	19	12	18	20	21
Sessions devoted to women	4	2	2	5	5

While Fig.1 shows the total of all authors/editors having their books reviewed during an Annual Meeting, Fig. 2 counts the number of sessions dedicated fully to one single author/editor and his or her book. The figure shows that between 80 and 90% of all book review sessions devoted in their entirety to one author or editor are dedicated to male scholars and their books. Hence, when focusing on these particular sessions, the number of female scholars and their books are low. In other words, at the occasions when books published by women are reviewed women have a higher tendency to either share the session and, hence the attention with another or many other colleagues. Alternatively, the woman is part of a team of authors and editors and shares the session with them. Either way, the frequency of a session devoted to a single, female, author/editor is remarkably low.

Honorary sessions

My search through the programme books from 2011-2015 also included a look at honorary sessions.  

Fig. 3	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
Honourees, total	20	7	13	12	8
Male honourees	17	5	12	10	7
Female honourees	3	2	1	2	1

Fig. 3 shows the number of honourees from 2011 to 2015, and the distribution of male and female scholars being honoured. I defined an honorary session as an event organised in honour of a particular scholar to celebrate his or her career or scholarship, his/her life or contribution to a field, or a session set up to celebrate an awardee.

The general tendency is clear: sessions honouring a female scholar and her contribution to the field are rare. On average, 13% of the honorary sessions are dedicated to women. In share numbers, one might say that sessions in honour of women’s scholarship and careers are as good as non-existent (The total number of program sessions over the years 2011-2015 has varied between 449 and 523, according to the 2015 Society Report). From 2011-2015, there were never more than three such sessions in honour of women at any Annual Meeting. In 2013 and 2015, there was only one.

It should be noted that my definition of an honorary session did not include sessions dedicated to male scholars serving an “emblematical” function in the sense that their names are representing a particular perspective or way of thinking. Hence, sessions attributed to the work and impact of, e.g. Kierkegaard, Bultman, Tillich, or Bonhoeffer were not taken into consideration. If they were included, which they arguably could be, as they show how the memory of exceptional male scholarship is kept alive, the relative percentage of female honourees would have been even lower than 10%. None of these “emblematic” sessions are, as far as I have seen, dedicated to a perspective associated with a female scholar.

It could and surely will be argued that the reason for the low representation of female honourees is the historical dominance of men in the field and, that, in the generations of scholars that are now typically celebrated at the SBL, women in the Academe were few. It is possible, thus, that the number of women will rise during the next decades due to the increased number of women in academic jobs. However, this hypothesis remains to be checked and, at the time of writing, it is an hypothesis only.

Who is reviewed and who is celebrated at the SBL Annual Meetings, and why does it matter?

The present exploration is brief, simple and preliminary. There are several questions I do not have ample material to answer. I am for instance not claiming to know the relative amount of female SBL members getting their newly published books reviewed at the Annual Meetings, nor do I know how this number compares to the situation for their male counterparts. I leave this for further exploration. Likewise, I do not have sufficient material to argue why the situation is as it is. However, I would like to make some suggestions. On one level, one might say that the numbers are the result of every single decision made by chairs and steering boards of the various SBL groups. If this is the level of explanation we choose to accept, I am as responsible for the general outcome as anyone else, having served and still serving as chair and at steering boards in the SBL system. Although the figures above should clearly serve as a reminder to both chairs and steering boards, I would argue that the relative lack of women should be explored primarily as part of a broader, systemic tendency. Eva Mroczek has called attention to the fact that during the last decade the three most prestigious awards endowed by the SBL have had only male recipients. Likewise, Ellen Muehlberger has highlighted the male dominance of the Review of Biblical Literature, which was founded by the SBL (here). My findings are adding to this picture.  

I am, most of all, worried about the impression created by the imbalance displayed by this exploration of the review and honorary sessions at the SBL Annual Meetings. When scholars who get a full review session dedicated to their books tend to be men, and when scholars who are celebrated for their work are almost exclusively men, it is very likely that the imagination of the successful scholar will be shaped in a male image.

Thanks are due to Eva Mroczek, Ellen Muehlberger, Torgeir Sørensen and Benjamin G. Wright III.

Two forgotten sources to 4 Ezra

In the last few years, I have mentioned on two occasions manuscript witnesses to 4 Ezra that have apparently been left out of scholarly discussions focusing on this writing. In this post, I propose two possible reasons for this omission, and discuss why these manuscript sources to 4 Ezra deserve our attention. My interest here is not the decisions made by individual scholars, but rather the assessment schemes embedded in philological paradigms and the structuring effects of disciplinary borders to research practices.

My first example, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) Supplément turc 983, f 113/126, containing Syriac 4 Ezra 8:33-41a/8:41c-47, was discussed in the post “Recycling 4 Ezra” (12 February 2014) (here). As noted in that post, this single parchment leaf was published in 1993 by Bernard Outtier in the article, “Un fragment syriaque inédit de IV Esdras”. The leaf has been dated paleographically to the sixth century (Outtier) and also to the eighth to ninth centuries, by Franҫoise Briquel Chatonnet (“Manuscrits syriaque de la Bibliothèque nationale de France” […], 185). As I mentioned in the 2014 post, the fragment has played no role in the scholarly discussion of 4 Ezra.

The second example, British Library (BL) Or. 6201 C (Fragments), containing Sahidic 4 Ezra 10:32-47, was mentioned in passing in the introduction to the post, “4 Ezra in Syriac Lectionary Manuscripts” (4 September 2015). This fragmented leaf was published by Hans-Gebhard Bethge in 2004 (“Neue Bibelfragmente: Ein Überblick”), and discussed most recently by Alin Suciu in the article, “On a Bilingual Copto-Arabic Manuscript of 4 Ezra and the Reception of this Pseudepigraphon in Coptic Literature”. It was Suciu who brought the existence of the fragment to my attention some years ago. I do not know Coptic but, out of pure curiosity and general interest in the transmission history of 4 Ezra, and in order to obtain an impression of its material features, I had a brief look at the fragment when I visited the British Library for other reasons in February 2014. BL Or. 6201 C (Fragments) is a glassed collection of small, unrelated fragments from Coptic manuscripts. The leaf containing 4 Ezra is by far the largest of them, measuring approximately 17 x 11 cm. Parts of two columns of text are visible, but the parchment is dark and some of the text has faded. Neither Suciu nor Bethge date the fragment but Bethge suggests that it was “geschrieben wohl nicht vor dem 6. Jahrhundert” (“Neue Bibelfragmente”, 198). For further information about the fragment and its text, please consult the experts. For the present discussion, a pink post it-note stuck to the glass of the collection of glassed fragments in the British Library is of particular interest. This note identifies the text of the fragment as a passage from 4 Ezra and the note is signed “H.-G. B. (i.e., Hans-G. Bethge) March 89”. In other words, this note suggests that the fragment has been known to specialists of Coptic manuscripts since 1989 but, to the best of my knowledge, it was not mentioned again in the scholarship on 4 Ezra until Suciu brought it up in September 2015.

These two fragments containing passages from 4 Ezra have two important things in common. They have both been published (in 1993 and 2004, respectively), and both have been known to scholars specialising in the manuscript traditions in question, the Coptic one long before its publication, and yet they have not made their way into scholarship regarding 4 Ezra.

It is conceivable that this omission may be due to a lack in the transfer of knowledge between academic fields. The communication between those whose primary interest is the manuscripts of a given linguistic tradition and those who are interested in the writings and the narrative contents of the texts preserved in the manuscripts may sometimes mean that information gets lost between the two. Scholars may be working on overlapping empirical materials but, due to disciplinary divides, they do not necessarily share the same academic discourses and literary canons. The result may be gaps, like the one suggested here.

Another possibility is that the two fragments mentioned above may have been categorised as “bad text witnesses” and then forgotten by scholars of 4 Ezra. Within a text-critical paradigm, manuscripts are first and foremost interesting as witnesses to earlier texts. Their value as good or bad witnesses is determined by their age, availability, condition and proximity to the assumed early text. One might say that textual criticism was designed precisely to enable editors to choose between witnesses and hence, logically, to put aside the less interesting ones. From this perspective, the lack of attention to the two manuscript sources discussed here makes sense, since BnF Supplément turc 983, f 113/126 and BL Or. 6201 C (Fragments) are both fragmented and hard to read. It is also possible that the preference given to the early, complete Latin witness to 4 Ezra has reduced interest in other witnesses even further. It should be noted, however, that both the Coptic and the Syriac fragments may be relatively early compared to other available sources. Admittedly, Bethge’s suggestion of a post sixth century dating for the Coptic fragment does not say much. Concerning the Syriac sheet, two different dates have been suggested. If Outtier’s suggestion is correct, this fragment may be one of the oldest witnesses we have to any passage of (Syriac) 4 Ezra, possibly as old as, or even older than, the version of 4 Ezra surviving in the Codex Ambrosianus. Even if Briquel Chatonnet’s suggested eighth century dating is correct, this Syriac source is still quite early, compared to the extant Latin, Georgian and Armenian witnesses to 4 Ezra.

The reason I find this situation interesting is that manuscripts that may be regarded as irrelevant within the context of one paradigm, may be highly relevant within another. Today, we see a general rise in the interest taken in reception history, in the history of engagement and use of manuscripts, in the materiality of textual artefacts and in manuscript practices, as well as a renewed focus on the cultural contexts of the Jewish and Christian East. This situation suggests that fragments, such as the ones discussed in this post, should be brought out of the shadows and put under scrutiny by those who work on 4 Ezra. The two fragments may well be “bad witnesses” from a text-critical point of view, but that assessment does not make them less important as sources to the further development and engagement with the text of 4 Ezra among Syriac and Coptic Christians. Rather, such “bad witnesses” may have interesting stories to tell, and attention to other and later cultural and linguistic contexts of use might change the disciplinary story about the life of a writing and the ways in which compositions such as 4 Ezra continued to matter in late antiquity and the early middle ages.

Importantly, such an exploration would demand increased communication between those who work primarily on the manuscripts and those whose interest is first and foremost in the writings contained in them. Otherwise, sources such as these may be lost in the transmission between academic fields.

Select literature

Bethge, Hans-G. “Neue Bibelfragmente: Ein Überblick.” Pages 195-207 in Coptic Studies on the Threshold of a New Millennium. Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Coptic Studies. Leiden, 27 August – 2 September 2000. Volume 1. Edited by M. Immerzeel and J. van der Vliet. 2 vols. OLA 133-134. Leuven: Peeters, 2004.

Briquel Chatonnet, Franҫoise. Manuscrits syriaque de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (nos356-435, entrés depuis 1911), de la bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence, de la bibliothèque municipale de Lyon et de la Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg. Catalogue. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1997.

Outtier, Bernard. “Un fragment syriaque inédit de IV Esdras” (Apocrypha 4 (1993):19-23).

Suciu, Alin. “On a Bilingual Copto-Arabic Manuscript of 4 Ezra and the Reception of this Pseudepigraphon in Coptic Literature.” JSP 25/1 (2015): 3-22.

Cf. also Adam McCollum’s post on Georgian 4 Ezra:

McCollum, Adam. “On 4 Ezra in Old Georgian, with a synoptic text example of 5:22-30” Posted on hmmlorientalia, 12 September 2015. https://hmmlorientalia.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/on-4-ezra-in-old-georgian-with-a-synoptic-text-sample-of-522-30/

 

Thanks are due to Alin Suciu and Karina M. Hogan.

This blog post is based on my research and is part of the wider dissemination of my work. If you want to use the information in this post, please cite it!

Lied, Liv Ingeborg, “Two forgotten sources to 4 Ezra,” posted on Religion – Manuscripts – Media Culture, [21 December 2015] (URL, retrieved [date]).

If you want to discuss any of the findings or hypotheses, feel free to contact me in the commentary field below.




7 January 2016: This essay was re-published at the Women Biblical Scholars site. You find it here: https://womenbiblicalscholars.wordpress.com/

Pseudepigrapha Section CFP, SBL Annual Meeting 2016

The SBL Pseudepigrapha Section call for papers for the 2016 Annual Meeting is out:

The Pseudepigrapha Section is planning to have four sessions at the Annual Meeting in San Antonio. The first session, ”Interaction and change in scribal cultures in the Persian and Hellenistic periods,” is jointly organized with the Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature Section. This will be an invited session. The second session, “The Textual History of the Bible: The Deutero-Canonical Scriptures,” will also be an invited session. We will examine various linguistic, literary, exegetical, historical, and canonical aspects of a number of deutero-canonical books. The volume will appear with Brill in 2017. The third session, titled ”Violence,” is an open session. We invite papers that deal with violence in all of its aspects, exploring the various uses, functions, and contexts of violence in pseudepigraphical texts. The fourth session will be an open session. Young scholars and new voices in Pseudepigrapha Studies are especially encouraged to submit abstracts.


Deadline 1 March 2016.

More information here: http://www.sbl-site.org/meetings/Congresses_ProgramUnits.aspx?MeetingId=29