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1. For Black History Month today, I watched The Great Debaters, starring Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, a nice looking lady whom I last saw as a young girl on Eve’s Bayou, a little kid named “Denzel,” people good at playing stuffy Harvard snobs, etc. Denzel Washington played Melvin Tolson, a professor at the African-American Wiley College in Texas, as well as a union organizer on the side. He coached a debate team, made up of a know-it-all who drops out because his dad thinks Tolson’s a Communist, an attractive co-ed named Samantha Booke, some hot shot who thinks he’s a gift to women, and a 14-year-old prodigy named James Forest, Jr., who grew up to found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
The 1930’s was a time of racism and lynching in the South. This was the setting of Tolson’s debating team. In the movie, we see Tolson’s debating team beat rival after rival, until it’s finally invited to debate the Harvard team. James is a poor debater at first, but he wins at Harvard after giving a stirring speech about the mistreatment and murder of African-Americans in the Jim Crow South, necessitating some form of civil disobedience (which Tolson’s debate team was defending, against the Harvard team’s pompous appeal to the “rule of law”). In real life, Tolson’s team didn’t go to Harvard, but it did get an opportunity to debate the University of Southern California, the reigning debating champions at the time. And, as on the movie, Tolson’s debating team won!
In terms of Denzel Washington’s role, the movie reminded me of Remember the Titans, in that the movie didn’t focus a great deal on Denzel, as important as his part was. Rather, he was one strong character among other strong characters.
The scene that sticks out to me most is when James Forest, Jr. learns that Samantha is sleeping with the hot shot, and he’s hurt because he had a crush on her. But James’ anger is quickly interrupted because Tolson is soon arrested by the white Southern sheriff (played by a surprisingly bulky John Heard), who doesn’t care much for Tolson’s union activities. But James is proud of his dad, a Ph.D. from Boston University, who stands up to the Southern sheriff and gets Tolson released from jail. Earlier in the movie, the dad had grovelled to a couple of pig farmers whose kids put a pig in front of his car, causing him to run it over. He ended up paying a huge amount of money to the bullying farmers. In light of that humiliating experience, James was happy to see his father stand up to Sheriff Heard. Afterwards, James didn’t have much puppy-love for Samantha, although he was happy when Samantha slapped the hot shot across the face, since he had cheated on her to relieve his tension after seeing a lynching. I’m can’t adequately articulate why this part of the movie speaks to me. Perhaps it’s because I’ve wanted to be shaken out of puppy-love in the past and have failed, so I was pleased that James found a way!
One thing that was puzzling about the movie was that Tolson’s debating team was always defending the liberal or progressive position. Okay, “puzzling” may be the wrong word, for it’s not surprising that a Hollywood movie would present the heroes speaking for the causes of righteousness. But real-life debating teams don’t work that way. From what I’ve heard, people often have to advocate positions that they personally don’t hold.
But this was a good movie. I’m not entirely sure if I want to see it again, but it was an enjoyable two hours!
2. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Phyllis Bird’s “The Place of Women in the Israelite Cultus.” It’s late, so I’m in no mood to comb through the essay right now. But what I got out of it was that only the men were priests, while the women did the grunt work of the cult. So my overall impression is that she deems the Israelite cultus to be sexist, though she does note exceptions, such as Deuteronomy’s insistence that both men and women can participate in worship.
I don’t care for feminist theology (if that’s the right label), unless it says that the Bible or the Judeo-Christian traditions are pro-woman. And, even then, it’s not my favorite topic. I’m not sure why. Is it because I’m not a woman? But I like Roots, and I’m not African-American. I also like James Cone. So I don’t know what my problem is. But, just because I don’t like something, that doesn’t make it unimportant.
3. In Mitchell Dahood’s Psalms I: 1-50, I read the introduction. Dahood is controversial because he tries to emend Psalms to conform to the Ugaritic. In my reading today, I got a glimpse into his rationale for that. For example, Psalm 4:7 says (in my translation of the Hebrew): “Many say, Who will see good? Lift on us the light of your face, LORD.” Through comparison with the Phoenician, Dahood argues, “Lift on us” can be rendered “has fled from us,” so Psalm 4:7 can mean “The light of your presence has fled from us, O Yahweh.” For Dahood, that’s a clearer rendition of the passage.
On page xxiii, Dahood refers to Psalm 35:16, which uses the infinitive absolute in a manner that has baffled critics. In the Hebrew Bible, the infinitive absolute serves to emphasize a verb. The verb will appear in a perfect, imperfect, or participial form, and also in its infinitive absolute form for emphasis. So there are usually two verbs when the infinitive absolute is used: the verb, and the infinitive absolute that emphasizes that verb. But, in Psalm 35:16, the infinitive absolute appears all by itself, without the other verb, the one it’s supposed to emphasize. But Dahood states that such a puzzle vanishes when we consider Ugaritic, which has multiple functions for the infinitive absolute.
At least that’s my quess as to the critics’ problem with the infinitive absolute in Psalm 35:16. I can’t find examples, but I have encountered passages in the Hebrew Bible in which the infinitive absolute stands all by itself. I think I saw such passages in my Isaiah reading this past week. Do we need to go to Ugaritic to conclude that the infinitive absolute can have multiple uses? Maybe the Hebrew Bible already indicates that, so it needn’t baffle critics.
4. On pages 4-5 of Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries, Theodore Mullen describes various scholarly approaches to the Deuteronomistic History (DtrH), which consists of Joshua-II Kings. Martin Noth contended that a single author wrote all of it during the Babylonian exile. Others hold that it had two stages: the first, Dtr1, was produced during Josiah’s reign to support his reforms, and the second (Dtr2) emerged in exile to “explain the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah.”
I already knew this. But I’d never encountered the third alternative that Mullen presents. Mullen associates it with R. Smend and W. Dietrich. It states that the basic Deuteronomistic History (DtrG) “was produced during the exile and was revised by a redactor interested in the fulfillment of the law, hence DtrN.” Then, a later redactor, DtrP, added prophetic materials to the work.
I suppose that this is one way to approach the Deuteronomistic History. When I was doing my paper on the Deuteronomist’s contribution to II Samuel 7 and I Kings 8:1-30 (see Dtr/II Samuel 7/I Kings 8), I discussed on this blog P. Kyle McCarter’s approach to these texts. For him, the part of II Samuel 7 about David wanting to build God a temple was produced during the Solomonic period. The anti-temple parts were from a later prophetic hand. And stuff about the monarchy’s continuance being conditioned on the king’s obedience to God was from the Deuteronomist.
But Smend and Dietrich would probably attribute the story about David wanting to build the temple to DtrG, the prophetic source to DtrP, and the stuff about obedience to DtrN. And, unlike McCarter, they’d date it all to the exile, at the earliest.
5. I didn’t get to read much of John Dillon’s The Middle Platonists, but I did finish his section of the first century C.E. Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria. On page 178, Dillon says that “we may note in Philo traces of a notion popular in later Platonism that this world is really the Hades of the poets.” Dillon refers to the Neo-Platonist Numenius, who says that Pythagoras had a secret doctrine that Hades—the world of the souls—is “the whole area between the earth and the Milky Way…” Is that saying that this world is hell? Or that departed souls are wondering the earth, as occurs on Ghost Whisperer?
