I arrived home Wednesday night from the 2010 Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting held in Atlanta, Georgia. This year’s conference was an especially good one, in my experience, at least. I still look back with fondness on my first national SBL meeting in San Diego — the setting alone is hard to beat. However, as my own understanding of the field of biblical studies progresses, I think I gain increasingly more as I attend these conferences. Besides listening to some excellent papers at the various sessions I attended, I was able to meet a good number of scholars and students that share many similar interests with me, and had many great conversations.
I don’t think I’d be able to list all those who I met and talked with (I’m afraid I’d inadvertently leave someone out), but I’ll try to share here what sessions I attended and who I heard give presentations. I hope to follow this up in the near future with what notes I took from these sessions. Unfortunately my notes are not especially extensive this year as the capacity of my laptop’s battery is apparently decreasing (it lasts only 1.5 hours on low-power setting).
You should also check out Jim Davila’s PaleoJudaica.com, where he posts his “RANDOM SBL 2010 REFLECTIONS AND LINKS” — he has links to a number of other blogs by scholars who were at the conference.
Some of the best sessions that I attended were those of the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism group. I have attended the sessions of this group since my first SBL in San Diego (2007), following the lead of my MA advisor, Andre Orlov, and my current supervisor, Jim Davila. The group’s first session, Saturday morning, focused on reviews of two books: Peter Schafer’s The Origins of Jewish Mysticism and Guy Williams’ The Spirit World in the Letters of Paul the Apostle — I have read neither of these books, but after listening to the reviews at the session, I am very interested in both. Although Peter Schafer himself was not there, we heard some well-written reviews from Jim Davila and Seth Sanders. Rebecca Lesses was there, but didn’t give a presentation — not sure what happened there. I posted a link to the text of Davila’s review here. As I said there, the review was awesome and really took Schafer to task for taking lightly the possibility of real experience/praxis as a background to what was going on in these texts. Davila asked: “Why was Hekhalot literature written?” He explained that it consists of manuals that readers can use to obtain divine revelations, mystical experience, mastery over spirits–ritual practices that were intended to be used. He argued that we must grasp this notion in order to understand these texts–this was point of his book Descenders to the Chariot. Schafer minimizes these elements of the text.
Heavenly Ascents 