Michael S. Heiser's Blog, page 63

MEMRA 2014

Course registration for MEMRA 2014 is now live. I’ll be offering four online courses, all of them 52 weeks in duration:

Beginning Biblical Hebrew

Beginning Biblical Greek

Beginning Ugaritic

Beginning Aramaic

The last one in the list is new this year. I was considering also adding Egyptian, but that will have to wait until next time. The 2014 module begins on January 6, 2014, which will give me time to migrate the existing courses to a new (and better) platform. Registration ends on Christmas day.

Course descriptions can be found here. I also recommend reading through the FAQs.

For those new to MEMRA, I have made hundreds of HD videos of me going through college/seminary level grammars for each language, along with vocabulary. I go through the exercises in each grammar (which also have answer keys) just like you’d experience if you took the course on a green campus somewhere (actually, it’s better since you can replay them if you don’t understand something). Students ask me questions via a discussion board. The Hebrew course has around 140 videos; Greek around 130. The Ugaritic grammar is shorter, so that one has around 50 videos. The videos run in Quicktime so you can watch them on handheld devices, any computer, or an iPad.

Here are some sample videos.

If you want to learn these languages at your own pace over the course of a year, you can’t do better (really). I charge $150 for the year (so $3 a week, less than a latte). I’m discounting that price to $125 until Thanksgiving.

If you’ve always wanted to learn biblical Hebrew or Greek on your own (or Ugaritic or Aramaic), now you can.

 

To register, follow the link.

Naked Bible Fantasy Football: Year 4

It’s that time of year again – the Naked Bible Fantasy Football league has openings. This is the fourth year running.

This year’s *LIVE DRAFT* takes place on Saturday, August 24, at 9:30 am *Pacific* time.

If you are interested in joining the league (there are about a half dozen openings), send me an email (the address is under “About”) and I will send you a league invitation. First come, first serve!

Introducing Noet: Scholarly E-Books for Classical Literature and Philosophy

My employer, Logos Bible Software, announced a new brand today – Noet, the beginning of our effort to do for classical Greek and Latin literature what we did for biblical studies. You can read our CEO’s blog post about the launch to get introduced to what Noet’s all about. Here are some excerpts:

Noet (rhymes with “poet”) is the Logos platform repurposed for scholarly ebooks outside biblical studies: Greek and Latin classics, philosophy, literature, Shakespeare, Judaica, etc. We will reuse the key Logos platform components with Noet branding, from the online bookstore to desktop software to web viewers to mobile apps on iOS and Android.

But more excitingly, we’ll customize Logos 5′s tools to support the special needs of disciplines beyond biblical and theological studies: we’ll support powerful searching of philosophical themes, interlinear editions of classical texts, word-for-word comparisons of different editions of Shakespeare, and even specialized timelines and infographics.

Logos has offered a wide range of content for many years, and there’s a lot of content in other fields that our users find useful: Greek and Latin classical literature is important to serious biblical study and lexicography; philosophy is of interest to theologians and seminary students. We want to develop the tools that will support students of the Bible in these adjacent disciplines.

Learn more at Noet.com.

Technorati Tags: classical, classics, greek, judaica, Latin, noet, philosophy, Shakespeare

Biblical Theology, Poverty, and Social Justice: Part 9

In the preceding eight posts on this topic, we’ve focused on defining key terms so as to reveal how the Bible defines poverty and justice with respect to the poor. A lot of the discussion has been “negative” in the sense of focusing on what the Bible prohibits (i.e., abuse of the poor and how that is depicted). I’d like to shift gears a bit and look at what the Bible affirms.

One thing the Bible affirms with clarity is private property. The idea derives from the dominion mandate (better: the steward-kingship mandate) given to humankind in Genesis 1:26-28. While this original mandate doesn’t demand private ownership, private ownership is consistent with it, and private property is assumed in other passages of Scripture. Toward stimulating your thinking a bit in this direction, I recommend reading Jay Richard’s short essay, “The Biblical Roots of Private Property.” Richard’s essay contains a link to a more detailed essay by Walt Kaiser that is also recommend: “Ownership and Property in the Old Testament Economy.” 

Another affirmation that is clear with respect to biblical theology is that having wealth is not a sin. We’ve talked about this in previous posts — specifically, rejecting the notion that having wealth somehow automatically will result in oppression of someone with less, or that wealth creates the predisposition to oppress those with less. These are demonstrable falsehoods, both in terms of Scripture and real life experience. (Exhibit A: the existence of philanthropy and charity; Exhibit B: using wealth to create jobs in business). And let’s not forget a simple, axiomatic truth in all this: you cannot use wealth to love your neighbor if you don’t have wealth in the first place. I’ve never made my own living by working for a poor man or woman. I don’t know anyone else that has either.

Though the above is certainly true, Scripture also contains plenty of warning about the exploitation of the poor (or “less rich”) by the rich. We saw, for example, Jesus’ warnings about such things often included this theme. The reasoning is transparent. Wealth often brings opportunity to participate in or influence political rule. Such power, when used selfishly or egotistically – even “for the good” of people – can often end up restricting legitimate liberties or manipulate the governed in ways that result in the personal benefit of the ruler, or to exact revenge on someone (or some group) in the ruler’s cross-hairs. Such things cannot be Scripturally justified. However, Jesus also had a good deal to say about handling money that was positive – even handling money in such a way that wealth could grow. Toward stimulating some thought in regard to these issues, I’d recommend reading the following:

“Are There Wealthy People in the Bible?“

“Wealth from A Christian Perspective”

“A Wealth-Creating vs. A Wealth-Hoarding Culture”

“Income Inequality from a Biblical Perspective”

There’s a lot to ponder in these essays. The broader point I’m trying to drive home is that Scripture does not endorse the kind of negative stereotypes we see so often today with respect to Western profit-driven economies. It also doesn’t endorse what many business owners (and employees) do with the wealth that’s generated (e.g., hoarding, political leverage, courting political favoritism). With respect to both those areas (gaining wealth and using wealth) the real issue, like so many issues, goes back to the way God wants humans to image him and relate to fellow imagers: Does your pursuit and use of wealth show that you love God and love your neighbor?

Next: Back to the “all things in common” / “Christian communism” myth in the early church. (I just wanted to do something positive this time around!)

Technorati Tags: Bible, economics, New Testament, Old Testament, poor, poverty, rich, wealth

Logos Mobile Education

This past week Logos Bible Software announced the creation of a new division at the company: Logos Mobile Education. I’m involved in that division. Logos Mobile Education is producing seminary-level courses that are delivered completely within Logos and tethered to the digital library resources and other research tools. These are not Logos tutorials. They are content-oriented courses. Entry level courses will have academic content at the level of beginning seminary courses. Elective courses will have more detail and presume a certain level of content knowledge on the part of students. We will also be creating a couple courses for people who have no knowledge of the Bible. One of those (an OT survey) is a course of mine (see below).

Course components include HD video lectures by experienced scholars, screencast videos that focus  on how Logos could be used to validate a professor’s claim or show the basis on which a claim is made, directed links into the library that target the best articles or paragraphs on a given subject covered in lectures, and our own private social networking platform (Faithlife) for interaction with others working through the same course. There are also links that perform searches for students on various points of the lecture material, syllabi, custom graphics, and self-assessment tools. Videos are searchable at the word level within the software (for Logos users, basically every element of a course works like a Logos book does within the software). Video content is also delivered in short segments (5-7 minutes is the norm). Everything is platform agnostic and can be watched on handheld devices. In short, while there is video content in any given Mobile Ed course, these are much more than video courses of some guy standing at the back of a classroom.

I’m not sure which courses will ship first or in what order. We’re still making those decisions. We’ve already had ten professors from around the country contribute video content (some for more than one course). I’ve also been videoed for five different courses.1 We have another half dozen scholars booked to film courses this summer. It’s a good start on what we hope will be a revolution in the way people learn about the Bible and theology. If you’re interested, read the launch post and follow the discussion. We’ll be blogging more at the Logos blog about what Mobile Ed is and isn’t, as well as the rationale of the approach we’re taking.

Those courses are: OT Survey – a basic OT survey that presumes no knowledge of the OT; Introducing Bible Interpretation – an introduction to Hermeneutics; How we Got the Old Testament; Howe we Got the New Testament; and an elective we’re calling “Jewish Trinity” – a course going through the evidence for godhead thinking in the Old Testament – my dissertation material on the two powers. ↩

Technorati Tags: courses, distance, education, Logos, Mobile, video

Hebrew, Ugaritic, and ANE Archaeology Titles That Need Some Love

As readers know, every once in a while some items that we’re working on at Logos Bible Software are in need of a a little push to get them into production. There are hundreds of such items on the Logos website, but these are near and dear to someone like me. I’m hoping that some readers out there looking for a Father’s day present or (early) Christmas present will be able to order these at the low pre-pub price and push them over the edge. They’re all close.

Ancient Near Eastern Studies

This bundle has several titles that are just the thing for those who love OT and archaeological research. I’ve used the volumes by Richard and Dever in print, and both are excellent resources.

Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic

Don’t let the bundle title fool you. This is a seven volume bundle that contains several volumes that are indispensible if you’re working in Hebrew and care to work in Ugaritic. They include:

A Manual of Ugaritic by Pierre Bordreuil and Dennis Pardee. This is the premier reference grammar in Ugaritic
Phonology and Morphology of Biblical Hebrew: An Introduction by Joshua Blau. In my opinion, there’s no better reference manual for understanding Hebrew morphology.
Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb: The Expression of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Biblical Hebrew by John A. Cook. John and I went through the UW-Madison doctoral program together. This work is drawn from his dissertation, which was on the Hebrew verbal system. For those who know biblical Hebrew (and if you don’t, you should take it through my MEMRA online Institute), this is the best work on how Hebrew verbs work and should be understood.
Biblical Hebrew Grammar Visualized by Francis I. Andersen and A. Dean Forbes. If you use Logos for Hebrew Bible research, you (should) know about the Andersen-Forbes syntax database of the Hebrew Bible. The two men behind that database have since produced this visualized grammar, which illustrates their discussion throughout using screenshots and searches from their database. In short: this book will help you understand their database and their method.

Texts and Studies on Ancient Judaism

I hate the title on this bundle. It obscures the fact that one of the three volumes in this set is Stuckenbruck’s critical edition of the Book of the Giants from Qumran. (Yes, it’s scholarly Enochian stuff).  If you can handle Hebrew and Aramaic (and even if you can’t – the discussion of the results of the textual reconstruction of the book’s content is fascinating)
The other two works are on the Essene problem related to Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Samaritan Pentateuch.

Technorati Tags: archaeology, book, giants, grammar, hebrew, Old Testament, Qumran, samaritan, Ugaritic, verb, verbal

Biblical Theology, Poverty, and Social Justice, Part 8

In the last installment of this series we got into the NT vocabulary for the poor. My focus was the first of two essays I linked to earlier:

“Poverty and Poor: New Testament” from Anchor Bible Dictionary

“Rich and Poor” from the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels

My criticisms of the first of these essays focused mostly on mis-defining the gospel, an unfortunate error that colored other parts of the essay. We also saw that, at least in that essay, we didn’t get any information that would contradict the conclusions we reached after looking at the OT material on poverty, the poor, and just treatment of the poor. In simplified language, those conclusions were:

1. The poor are mostly said to be poor without a description as to how they became poor. There were some exceptions (war, laziness), but by and large, explanations were absent.

2. God was not pleased when the poor were exploited and mistreated. Some passages do describe both private wealthy individuals and wealthy state officials exploiting the poor, but there is no scriptural warrant for concluding that wealth is some sort of inherent corrupter of persons that invariably prompts them to oppress the poor, or that always peripherally leads to the oppression of the poor.

3. A biblical theology of poverty is focused on the individual being compassionate to the poor. There is no sense of handing this responsibility off to an impersonal state. A welfare state should consequently be viewed as a sign of the failure of the Church, not as a clever and useful creation of the human state so the Church can move on to more “spiritual” pursuits.

4. If the question is what is a biblical theology of the care for poor, the answer is the individual, or individuals operating as a like-minded group, under the guidance of biblical revelation from a God who hates poverty and injustice. The answer is not the empowerment of a corruptible state. That is the secular God-less answer.

More NT Theology of Poverty and the Poor

In this installment, I want to turn to the second essay listed above (“Rich and Poor”) and make some observations about it’s content. I found it more helpful and less politicized than the ABD essay. For the most part, the essay’s subject headings provide convenient touchpoints for following what I’m referencing.

1. Neither the OT, NT, or 1st Century Judaism viewed wealth as inherently evil.

The essay does a good job parsing this issue. Wealth was not inherently evil, but it was certainly viewed as a spiritual danger. I think most readers would have no trouble parsing this distinction. The rich have little inclination to seek God, as they see no lack in their lives, or assume any problem can be solved via their wealth. Material prosperity moves one’s trust to that prosperity. People seek God when they know they need to seek him. Wealth impedes this perception.

2. Personal wealth creates more opportunity to abuse the poor but there is no axiomatic cause and effect relationship between wealth and exploitation.

The NT, like the OT, contains examples of the rich exploiting the poor, but it also includes examples of people who discerned the scriptural truth that care for the poor is a spiritually healthy use of wealth, motivated by the decision to trust God more than one’s wealth. Regardless of the era, that’s a radical decision. It points to the “impossibility” of the wealthy entering the kingdom of God (apart from divine intervention: “with God all things are possible”). In effect, the decision comes down to where one puts one’s faith for the future: one’s own wealth and ability to get wealth, or God? But choosing God does not mean wealth cannot be held. It means it must not displace faith. And the best way to ensure that is to use wealth to help people.

The context for all this, of course, is not a modern economy. As the essay points out, there was very little in the way of what we’d call a middle-class in 1st century Judea. The major classes were the rich and poor (“people of the land”). In a modern capitalist economy (and I;m not talking crony capitalism here – that’s different), wealth can be – and must be, for business survival and health – used to expand markets and therefore to create jobs and provide material prosperity for more people. This is a ripple that will extend well beyond the people in your own employ. Investment of wealth to effectively create livelihoods for more people and raise their standard of living – which means more of their wealth goes to others, by purchase or charity – is exponentially more successful than just giving wealth away. And so there are many ways today that wealth can be a tool to caring for the outright poor or those who aren’t poor, but certainly aren’t rich, either. For today’s Christian, the choice is not between giving everything away or turning from Jesus. That is a modern either-or fallacy that misunderstands the poor can be substantially helped in more ways than one. But the spiritual issues are still the same: are you working for mammon or not? Translation: where is your trust? That is easily discerned by the next question: Where is your industry? Your effort? Are you hard at work protecting your assets and endeavors to increase your own wealth, or are you hard at work coming up with strategies to help more people knowing that God is pleased and will honor that use of wealth?

3. God’s “special interest” in the poor” isn’t an idea that exists in a theological vaccuum.

Many NT scholars and social justice activists point out that Jesus saw wealth as a hindrance to entering the kingdom of God and blessed the poor who were seeking God. This makes sense, but usually not for the reasons assumed by social justice advocates. Put simply, when people are prospering they are rarely focused on their needs, including spiritual ones, assuming that they are captains of their own fate. When someone thinks they have it all together or have won life’s lottery, it’s fairly axiomatic that the last thing they want to hear is how needy they are in God’s eyes or about the next life — they’re too busy enjoying this one. So what Jesus says makes good sense.

But let’s ask a question. When Jesus blesses the poor who are seeking the kingdom does he bless them because they are poor or because they are seeking — because they are giving him a hearing? I think it’s obviously the latter. Being poor is no more a mark of God’s favor (!) than being rich. Being poor also doesn’t mean one is more spiritual. A poor person might even be more concerned about the “cares of this life” (for obvious reasons) than someone who had enough or who was wealthy. There is no cause-and-effect relationship between poverty and walking with God. Social justice advocates often assume such a relationship, but there is no social science data (or scriptural evidence) to support it. The homeless are not more averse to crime than other people, though the types and levels of crime may differ. Why would we expect that they spend more time in prayer? Devote themselves more to serving others? Spend more time studying Scripture? None of this is intended to malign the poor; rather, it is intended to malign poor thinking.

What Jesus says isn’t hard to parse. The poor listened to Jesus because they had needs, because he did not avoid them or threaten them, because he was kind, and because the thought of an escape from their circumstances was comforting. We know from the gospel accounts that some listened only because the odds were better Jesus would miraculously feed them than they could feed themselves, but it would be hermeneutically malicious to assume that all the poor listened only because of what they could get. In more charitable terms we might say they knew life was tenuous and short, and so talk of a kingdom and life that transcended the one they were living had appeal. Hence they were more interested in what was being said.

4. “Eternal reward” shouldn’t be thought of as earned salvation, and so the idea that care for the poor results in reward from God doesn’t mean the NT teaches that giving to the poor washes one’s sins away.

This is another error of the social gospel that I think is adequately addressed in the essay. The context for this idea (divine reward) is a radical faith decision – choosing not to trust in wealth, being willing to lose it all or give it all away in favor of the kingdom of God. It’s an issue of the heart. John 3:16 doesn’t say that “whosoever gives his wealth away shall have everlasting life.” Jesus said he came to give his life as a ransom for sinners, not that sinners should just give away their wealth and they’d be forgiven. The path to the cross was not an unfortunate necessity after it was evident that not enough rich people would give away their wealth so as to usher in the kingdom of heaven. The nature of the gospel shouldn’t be this obtuse to anyone who reads the NT, but that’s no longer a given.

All the above is also consistent with the OT theology that care for the poor is an individual responsibility, especially for the believer. It is not a responsibility to be passed to bureaucratic overlords or a (nearly) all-powerful state. Preferring the state handle this is an abdication of the gospel (and OT) ethic about care for the poor.

Next up . . . the early church “having all things in common.”

Technorati Tags: Jesus, New Testament, poor, poverty, social justice, state, wealth

Abba Doesn’t Mean ‘Daddy’

Earlier today I saw something come up in my Twitter account that I appreciated. It was a tweet from New Testament professor Will Varner. The link Will provided led me to this online post at the Gospel Coalition site: “Does Abba Mean ‘Daddy’?” The brief post outlines why the answer is no.

Scholars have actually addressed this issue in academic journals several times, most famously James Barr’s essay in the Journal of Theological Studies (“Abba Isn’t ‘Daddy’,” vol 39, 1988). Barr’s essay isn’t available online, but the one below is, and I recommend it to readers:

Sigve Tonstad, “The Revisionary Potential of ‘Abba! Father!’ in the Letters of Paul,” Andrews University Seminary Studies, Vol. 45, No. 1 (2007): 5-18.

Basically, scholars have demonstrated that (a) the Aramaic term abba was not exclusively used by children, but frequently by adults in adult discourse, and (b) reducing the term to childish (though affectionate) prattle guts it of important interpretive nuances. Tonstad’s article demonstrates this nicely.

Be warned — this is a scholarly article, and so it’s long and can get technical. The “Daddy” discussion is only a page or so at the end (pp. 17-18 of the PDF). And you divine council fans will appreciate that there’s (again) another touchpoint with the divine council worldview in this issue, brought out nicely by Tonstad when he comments on the “elemental rulers” in the essay (though Tonstad doesn’t appear to be thinking about the divine council when he writes — normal for a NT specialist).

Technorati Tags: abba, Aramaic, daddy, translation

Five Years of the Naked Bible

According to my blog’s records, this week marks five years since I started the Naked Bible. Hard to believe, I know.

As many of you know, I have three blogs. As far as a five-year track record for this blog, here are some stats:

Number of Posts: 583

Word Count: 299,337

Naked Bible Podcast on Hiatus

Those of you who listened to the podcast have already figured this out. I haven’t been able to really do anything with it for quite a while. The reason is that basically all my free time is being absorbed by the sequel to my novel. That’s good news for Facade fans, of course (I’m approaching sixty percent of the way through the sequel). I suspected this would happen, so there it is.