That is Avalos’s take on the book of Jonah: “distorted,” “aggravating,” “annoying,” “ugly.” Ironic, I think. The book of Jonah is delightful precisely because it is permeated by a self-deprecating humor that is altogether lacking in Avalos.
If I look into the eyes of the woman I love, what do I see? I see a reflection of the gaze of love I direct towards her. Avalos looks into the eyes of the book of Jonah, and what does he see? A reflection of the spite he directs towards it. Avalos has eyes that kill.
With rare exceptions, Avalos dismisses other biblical scholars because they are, in his words, imbued with “apologetic intent.” They traffic in “meaningless or circular rationales.” Avalos is particularly incensed that Psalm 137, which he formats as prose and quotes in its entirety, has not led to an expression of revulsion among his colleagues. “None . . . use the psalm to repudiate it, eject it from the canon, or as an argument to reject the whole Bible for endorsing violence in any portion.”
Avalos takes himself very seriously. He is a man on a mission. Behind the carefully constructed scholarly apparatus, one can still discern the child evangelist he once was.[1]
Avalos does not think highly of his fellow biblical scholars. In his “Introduction,” he says that what they have to say is “either bland, ambiguous, or outright fatuous. Since 1982, I have encountered only about a dozen truly memorable papers.” I’m not making this up. That’s what he says.
Shiver me timbers, I am a world-class Pollyanna if what Avalos says is on the mark. I can think of literally hundreds of papers I have read since 1982 that I thought advanced our understanding of the Bible in significant ways.
There is an anti-intellectual foundation to the approach that Avalos takes which is simply arresting.
I will say this: the text Avalos chooses to engage at a high point in his sermon, Psalm 137, is well-chosen. This is one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. My feeling is that if one can embrace this text rather than be repelled by it, then one has come close to understanding the human predicament.
According to Avalos, Psalm 137 is vicious. You don’t say. In my view, the fact that this prayer is found in the Bible is a remarkable testimony to that body of literature’s ability to hit the reader with truth as hard as Tarantino does in Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill.
The Bible has an uncensored quality about it that continues to offend the pious (including the secular humanist variety). I will post on this in more detail at a later date.
In my view, the humorless, missionary style of The End of Biblical Studies dooms it to irrelevance except among those on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum who suffer from the same illusions of self-importance that afflict its author.
http://ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com/ancient_hebrew_poetry/2007/09/a-review-of-cha.html
Rarely do we find a book so harshly critical of our field, our livelihood, and I dare say our collective intellectual integrity. Written by one of our own, the book may be seen by some as a professional betrayal of an angry scholar.
Furthermore, rarely do we find a book in Biblical Studies with as blatantly an atheistic orientation as Hector’s. The book could be read as a guide to losing one’s faith while studying the Bible—probably one of its goals.
Given its stated purpose, there is a fundamental problem with the book’s implied audience. Is Hector addressing scholars and their institutional/media publishing support base, the very people he most needs to convince to end, that is, to change Biblical Studies? If so, the book belabors points about the Bible that are common knowledge among this crowd. For example, are scholars really unaware that translations contain theological biases, especially ones related to relevancy? It is right, I think, to call attention to the issue of intellectual honesty, the need to eschew theological bias, and the problem of paternalism in translations, but this chapter is not writing to encourage self- awareness in scholars. Ending with the words “(m)istranslation is . . . often the goal of all biblical translations” (58),3 the chapter incites a near paranoid-level of distrust not only of biblical translations but of biblical scholars. I think this is misrepresentation and some might suggest border-line collective libel. Also, Hector takes several pages in most chapters to rehearse basics about each sub-discipline—do we need a lesson in textual criticism?—and frequently peppers the text with statements that are superfluous to scholarly readers, even to the point of annoyance. For example, do scholars need to be informed that Michael Coogan is “a (widely) respected biblical scholar” (17, 258) and Frank Moore Cross “is one of the most prominent biblical scholars alive” (228). Clearly, biblical scholars are not the primary implied audience in the text, even though, as our meeting at the colloquium and a number of biblio-blogs indicate, the book is most obviously relevant to scholars in the field. Given its stated goal, the book should have been written directly to scholars and published by a scholarly press. The fact that it wasn’t is one of the book’s great mistakes.
Is Hector addressing the interested lay person, then? Given the fact that he has published the book with Prometheus Books, a strongly atheistic publishing house, one can hardly believe he is writing for a religionist audience, a group of people, according to him, that most need convincing of the Bible’s irrelevancy.4 Even if the book does provide persuasive reasons for abandoning biblically-based faith, how many people holding such faith will buy it for themselves? And how many of those who somehow come into possession of the book will get beyond the brash Introduction before setting it aside?
What about secular lay readers? Might they be the book’s implied audience? This is probably the best bet, but is there really much of a market for this book among interested lay readers who have no biblically-based faith but sufficient interest in Biblical Studies as a field to care about its future direction? If Hector is writing the book to them, it seems that he is undermining his own goal of helping the field fade away into obscurity by preaching to the converted. Why bring up the Bible at all to such an audience? I suspect therefore that the book is actually aimed at a subset of secular readers, namely, apostate Christian atheists who would relish a thorough articulation of why the Bible and its scholarship are irrelevant nowadays. This explains not only the anti-Bible but also anti-religion stance throughout the book. The fact that atheistic blogs like infidelguy.com are featuring interviews with Hector speaks reams.
I don’t have a problem with biblical scholars writing books for atheists. But, for a book that wants to reform our profession, one wonders why he has chosen to write to such a niche audience and not more directly to us, his colleagues, those of us standing accused.5
The take-no-prisoners tone of this book and its impoverished view of the role of scholarship in society, though implied only, make it very difficult to read the book as a serious attempt to change Biblical Studies as a field. It certainly does not reach out to biblical scholars to change their ways.
I think the ubiquitous use of the words “end” and “irrelevant” promotes an inflammatory style throughout the book,6 implies a utopian or naïve conception of scholarship generally that Hector cannot possibly really mean (it undermines his own book!), and, most importantly, hides what is at the heart of Hector’s project. Concerning the last of these, what Hector really wants to end is biblical authority’s hold over humanity, as the conclusion makes quite clear (342). Biblical Studies, which he thinks currently aides and abets biblical authority, must change as a field in order to accomplish that goal.7 So why talk about the end of Biblical Studies at all? Why not call the book The Brave New Future of Biblical Studies instead? Furthermore, why advocate such an extreme idealistic position, or rather, imposition, when rejection is assured by nearly all biblical scholars with a religious commitment—who are fully within their religious freedom to study the good book? It’s simply inflammatory.
Hector writes about the illegitimacy of psychoanalyzing ancient scribes for text critical purposes (92), and he decries the poor state of a field that “cannot settle arguments by much beyond psychoanalysis of opponents” (127), and then goes on to tell us on the same page that the self-avowed atheist Bill Dever constructs his idea of ancient Israel “on the basis of his own social history,” which seems to be an implicit assertion that Dever’s Christian past continues to affect his archaeological work. Now who’s psychoanalyzing?
http://www1.pacific.edu/~alenzi/Avalos.pdf
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