I will attempt to recap some of the highlights from the SBL annual meeting; however, there were many highlights and such a recap will likely exclude several high points.
First off, sensory overload. The weather outside was cold and crisp; the convention center and the various session rooms were hot; the book bizarre was loaded with people doing anything to receive that last copy of ________. I was immediately struck by the amount of people at this thing, which was truly amazing. It was hard to keep track of all the things going on.
Saturday
On the first day, I had lunch with a former professor of mine, Bob Stallman and we were joined by Gordon Fee. That was a fun experience filled with lots of interesting conversation. It was great catching up with Bob (and hearing about a new program that he has been working on, but more on that later) and it was very nice meeting Gordon Fee, and listening to some of his perspectives on higher education.
Sadly, during the first day, I was only able to take in one session, but it was one of the best sessions that I listen to during SBL (so I suppose that makes up for it). The session was titled The Bible, Ethics, and the Environment. Terence E. Fretheim, William Brown, Sylvia Keesmaat, and William French spoke. The two highlight in this session, for me, were Fretheim’s and Brown’s papers. Fretheim is a fantastic presenter, and his paper entitled: God Created the World Good, Not Perfect, was amazing. In the coming weeks, I will write a post about this paper (I need to chew on it a bit more first). Brown’s paper was great as well, but I most appreciated his appropriation of the sapiential tradition(s) into his discussion on creation and creational ethics.
Sunday
I went over to the Hilton and took in a session put on by the National Association of Hebrew Professors. This group (in which my former prof. was a part) presented their findings based on a 3 year Hebrew language program. The program, called cohelet, is based on Communicative Language Learning principles for learning Biblical Hebrew. Obviously Biblical Hebrew is not a living language and is no longer spoken, but using normal SLA techniques, professors are getting interesting results. Something that I was struck by was that each person involved with this project said that such an approach had made them more proficient with the language (which is impressive seeing that many of these individuals were practitioners of the language for more than a decade). I hope to implement many of their techniques and to somehow get involved with using this approach to teach the language in the future to other students.
On that evening, we had our biblioblogger dinner at Dillons. What a great time! I will echo the thoughts of Jay, it was surreal to finally meet people that you have been virtually conversing with for such a long time. So many wonderful individuals (many of the bloggers have all ready posted on this topic, here, here, here, and I am sure there are more to be published today). The thing that made me laugh about this dinner was that all of the conversations were fluid, each running into the next without any sort of formal ending before the next one began with an entirely different set of people. Those are my types of conversations! I agree with Eric Sowel meeting the bloggers and hanging out with them made SBL a great experience.
Monday
I went to a couple of sessions, heard C.L. Seow and David Clines present on Job, which was a nice treat. Had lunch with a bunch of the bloggers, once again great conversations and great people. After lunch, I skipped the afternoon session and walked around with Daniel and Tonya giving them the nickel tour of Newberry Street (I don’t think Texans are a big fan of our pre-New English Winters), and then we met up with John Hobbins and discussed poetry and language acquisition theory.
Tuesday
Tuesday was an abbreviated day. There was only one session and they were not too well attended, which is a shame. The morning session that I took in was the best one of the conference for me. Nili Shupak, Alan Millard, and Rick Hess spoke on various aspects of character formation in wisdom literature of the ancient Near East. Once again, sometime in the next few weeks I intend to post on various aspects of these papers. Plus it was nice to be useful; I was able to set up the projector to display the speakers lecture notes for the session moderator (whose name is sadly not coming to my mind), because the projector was not set up correctly.
Concluding Thoughts
This was such an amazing opportunity to meet so many wonderful people, hear great lectures, and to look at books (that I could both afford and not afford). I hope to be able to afford the trip out to New Orleans for next years SBL meeting.
