(1) Genesis at the Crossroads: Where Hebrew Bible Scholarship Has Been and Where It’s Going

By Dan McClellan

In this opening keynote, Dan McClellan takes a wide-angle look at Hebrew Bible scholarship through the lens of Genesis. He reflects on how the field has changed over the past century, why historical-critical study matters now more than ever, and what scholarship can (and cannot) offer in a world that’s hungry for certainty.

He envisions interpreting Genesis not as absolute meaning, but about the relationship between possible meanings in the text and our knowledge/interests/culture/biases/assumptions, etc which results in a possible meaning speaking to us and thereby actualizing.  This is an understanding that I always come back to with the Greeks in that things are fields of possibilities waiting to be actualized in relation to the person, and so the mansion may feel like houseness incarnate to one person while gawdy to the next.  The dilapidated shack may appear as deficient houseness to one person, but rustic and quaint to the next.  Niagara Falls may appear as a wonder of the world, nature incarnate to the tourist, as background scenery to the commuter, and as noise pollution to the local resident.  Likewise, a right-angle triangle will appear very different to a child just learning her shapes vs a teenager in geometry class vs a geometry professor researching the history of the Pythagorean theorem:  The poised runner (dunamis), for instance, is not indifferent towards the enactment of the running (energeia), but precisely has this in view in itself, and in this sense has the entelecheia in itself.  Therefore, Heidegger notes as peculiar as it sounds, Aristotle can say actuality (energeia) is prior to potentiality {dunamis).

Why appearing?  Regarding the ancient notions of concealment and appearing, Calasso notes when Aratus set out to describe the phenomena of the cosmos, he began his poem thus: “From Zeus let our beginning be, from he whom men never leave unnamed. Full of Zeus are the paths and the places where men meet, full of Zeus the sea and the seaports. Every one of us and in every way has need of Zeus. Indeed we are his offspring.”  “Iovis omnia plena,” Virgil would later write, and in these words we hear his assurance that this was a presence to be found everywhere in the world, in the multiplicity of its events, in the intertwining of its forms. We still retain the Greeks structures of appearing though have long abandoned the Greek Gods.

Beings appear in relation to our ear (so to speak): what in them calls or speaks to you, which is why a mansion can be heavenly to one person and gawdy to the next.

McClellan made some interesting points about how passages in Genesis have been interpreted to mean Black skin was understood as a curse by God and used to justify slavery, where by contrast abolitionists marshalled the New Testament to combat slavery even though the New Testament writers were pro slavery!

(2) How to Read the Book of Genesis

By Dr. Ron Hendel

It can be a challenge to read an ancient book that still makes claims on us in the modern world. How does a reader sort out the differences between the worldview of ancient Israel and that of our era? Add to that centuries of interpretation layered onto the text, and it can quickly feel dizzying. In this lecture, Ronald Hendel offers a clear, historically informed way to read Genesis, one that helps modern readers make sense of the text while remaining honest about the tensions and complexities within the book itself.

The Tower of Babel story is very short, but uses repetition for nuanced meanings.  In the story there is an original unity where language is melodious and everyone is saying the same thing to one another. They wanted to make a name for themselves like we do today with the Empire State Building or the CN Tower.  They are afraid they will be scattered throughout the earth and so build a tower to gather themselves, but building the tower is just the thing that scatters them via God.  The first paragraph announces them as one people with one language, and in the second paragraph this is repeated – but God sees this as a threat.  Just as in Eden humans transgressed the boundary between humans and God, so was this the goal in Babel.  This is contesting or critique of the historical Babylonian ziggurat that links earth and Heaven with the shrine of Marduk at the top.

Given the question of language and translation so central to the Babel story, I may add that when we receive a message every understanding is a translation, translating the raw message to a summary, analogies, reflections, etc that makes it meaningful for us.  Language is not meaningful in itself, as we experience that it is mere noise when I encounter Chinese, for instance, and yet is meaningful in that there is a hidden original language allowing us to translate from one language to another: Our shared humanity, human condition, and world. For instance, our original words for the mind were taken from the world (e.g., wind). This is cross cultural because the world is similar cross culturally. There is extensive cross translation between the various sensory areas of the brain, and metaphor is possible because of our mirroring nature (e.g., the baby mirrors the expressions of the mother), as psychologist Harry Hunt notes.