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Dr. Carly L. Crouch

~ Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, Tanakh

Dr. Carly L. Crouch

Category Archives: Prophets

Tell Fekheriyeh, Deuteronomy, and the Assyrian Treaty Tradition

09 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by carlylcrouch in Assyriology, Deuteronomy, Prophets, Treaties

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This book was unexpected, to say the least! It all began when I was finishing up Israel and the Assyrians, in spring 2013, and sent the manuscript to Jeremy Hutton, who was reading in Descriptive Translation Studies and in Optimality Theory. The opportunity for collaboration came with an invitation to edit a special issue of the journal Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, for which Hutton chose the theme ‘Epigraphy, Theory, and the Hebrew Bible’, proposing that we co-author an article on the translation technique of the Tell Fekheriyeh inscription and its implications for the study of Deuteronomy.

The article, we thought, might be a bit long – 15,000 words or so. We were aiming for a deadline of December 2016. By November 2017, we had written nearly 40,000 words on just the first half of the inscription (Fekh. A) and were apologising to the editors for holding up the volume! Very kindly, the editors proposed that we produce an abbreviated version of the article for the journal, then develop a slightly longer version for Mohr Siebeck’s series Forschungen zum Alten Testament.

A year later, we were still wrestling with how to defend dealing with Fekh. B as an instance of translation, bringing in more work on bilingualism and cognitive theory – along with several video conference-style writing sessions – in the process of finding a solution. The overall result is less the “short monograph” that the editors envisioned than it is a full-size monograph, but we’re no less delighted with the results!

Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Social Scientific Study of Involuntary Migration

17 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by carlylcrouch in Israel & Judah, Prophets

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Absolutely delighted to see this special issue of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, on ‘Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Social Scientific Study of Involuntary Migration’ finally out! The essays originated at the conference ‘Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Social Scientific Study of Involuntary Migration‘ co-hosted by the Nottingham Centre for Bible, Ethics and Theology and the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies. Kudos to my co-editor, Casey Strine, and all the contributors to the conference and the volume for their amazing work!

Contents

C. L. Crouch (Fuller Theological Seminary) and C. A. Strine (University of Sheffield)

Editorial Introduction: Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Social Scientific Study of Involuntary Migration

C. A. Strine (University of Sheffield)

Is ‘Exile’ Enough? Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Need for a Taxonomy of Involuntary Migration

Mark Leuchter (Temple University)

A Resident Alien in Transit: Exile, Adaptation and Geomythology in the Jeremiah Narratives

C. L. Crouch (Fuller Theological Seminary)

Before and after Exile: Involuntary Migration and Ideas of Israel

David Reimer (University of Edinburgh)

There—But Not Back Again: Forced Migration and the End of Jeremiah

Dalit Rom-Shiloni (Tel Aviv University)

Forced / Involuntary Migration, Diaspora Studies, and More: Notes on Methodologies

C. A. Strine (University of Sheffield) and C. L. Crouch (University of Nottingham)

Final Thoughts: Reflections on Methodology

 

Special issue on Jeremiah and migration now out!

05 Friday Oct 2018

Posted by carlylcrouch in Ethics, Prophets, Theology

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Pleased as punch at the arrival of this special issue of Political Theology on ‘Migration, Political Power and the Book of Jeremiah’, arising from the Centre for Bible, Ethics and Theology conference by the same name. Kudos to Steed Davidson, Casey Strine, Anna Rowlands and Susanna Snyder for their amazing work!

Contents

Migration, Political Power and the Book of Jeremiah
C. L. Crouch
The Imperial End: How Empire Overtakes Refugees in Jeremiah 
Steed Vernyl Davidson
Embracing Asylum Seekers and Refugees:
Jeremiah 29 as Foundation for a Christian Theology of Migration and Integration
C. A. Strine
The Art of Wounded Hope: Forced Migration, Prophecy and Aesth/Ethics
Susanna Snyder
Temporality, Dispossession and the Search for the Good:
Interpreting the Book of Jeremiah with the Jesuit Refugee Service
Anna Rowlands

Enemies and Friends of the State

22 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by carlylcrouch in Prophets, Warfare

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The much-anticipated Enemies and Friends of the State: Ancient Prophecy in Context has appeared at last! Chris Rollston has shepherded this volume over the course of several years, and it’s a real pleasure to see it in print. My own essay is on ‘Nahum, Habakkuk and Zephaniah‘ and, amongst other things, was the provocation for my contribution to the Hans Barstad Festschrift, New Perspectives on Old Testament Prophecy and History. Both draw on my early work on theologies and ideologies of warfare in the royal biblical traditions.

An Introduction to the Study of Jeremiah

14 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by carlylcrouch in Prophets

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Better late than never: happy to report that An Introduction to the Study of Jeremiah came out with Bloomsbury earlier this year. It all started because I was asked to give the Old Testament lectures at the Vacation Term for Biblical Study in 2015, at the same time that I was in Germany working on Jeremiah for my Israel and Judah project. It made sense to lecture on Jeremiah and, when I’d come up with my lecture titles, they looked rather like an introduction to Jeremiah. I’d been impressed with other volumes in the Bloomsbury series, so it was a natural place to approach about working the lectures up into a book.

The volume is written to get the reader quickly up to speed on the current state of the field, whether that’s a student and a complete Jeremiah novice or an established scholar whose main research lies elsewhere and needs a refresher. The series has a special emphasis on method, so the Introduction is focused on introducing readers to the panoply of approaches that scholars have taken to the book of late, including postcolonial theory, feminist criticism, trauma studies, canonical criticism, and theological interpretation. If you spend time with Jeremiah yourself, you’ll realise that corralling the last few decades of scholarship into any semblance of order is akin to wrangling a determinedly rebellious clowder of cats. I elected to structure the book around a series of case studies, looking at what happens when we approach a chapter or group of chapters from a number of different interpretive angles. Given it’s Jeremiah it’s hardly surprising that there were moments when the book made me want to tear my hair out, but I’m quite pleased with the results in the end.

You can find the paperback version here.

Forced Migration, Political Power and the Book of Jeremiah

24 Saturday Jun 2017

Posted by carlylcrouch in Ethics, Prophets

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I’m delighted to report that the papers from our conference on forced migration and political power, focussed on and using the book of Jeremiah as a springboard, are going to be published as a special issue of the journal Political Theology in 2018. The conference itself was fantastic testament to the effectiveness of bringing together biblical scholars and systematic theologians for sustained conversation—thanks and kudos to Casey Strine, Steed Davidson, Michelle Fletcher, Claire Carroll, Anna Rowlands, and Susie Snyder for being willing to venture outside their disciplinary comfort zones. I’m really looking forward to bringing the results of these conversations to a wider audience.

David Noel Freedman Award 2017

24 Saturday Jun 2017

Posted by carlylcrouch in Israel & Judah, Prophets

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I’ll admit: pretty chuffed by this!

The essay that won the award, ‘Playing Favorites: Israel and Judah in the Marriage Metaphor of Jeremiah 3’, is part of my current project investigating the histories and relationship of Israel and Judah. At the moment my attention is focussed on the crucial years either side of the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE.

I’ll be presenting the paper in a panel session at the SBL Annual Meeting in November; stay tuned for details.

War and Ethics now in paperback

14 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by carlylcrouch in Assyriology, Ethics, Prophets, Warfare

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War and Ethics is out in paperback! Just 19,95 € / $19.95 / £14.99—bargain.

Check it out here.

War and Ethics in the Ancient Near East

09 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by carlylcrouch in Assyriology, Deuteronomy, Ethics, Prophets, Warfare

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War and Ethics in the Ancient Near East: Military Violence in Light of Cosmology and History. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 407. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009.

War and Ethics in the Ancient Near East (or War and Ethics to its friends) is the result of my doctoral research at the University of Oxford, where I studied for both my M.Phil. and my D.Phil. with John Barton, then Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture (a title that never, ever fit on an application form).

In good fledgling doctoral student fashion, I set out with grand ambitions, intending to undertake a comparative study of the ethics of ancient Israel and Judah and those of the rest of the ancient Near East. Having been raised in the United States, where the public discourse surrounding religion and ethics usually presumed that the interaction of ‘biblical’ ethics with the moral considerations of contemporary American culture meant their deterioration or degradation, I was interested in the relationship of these biblical ethics to their own contemporary culture, in the form of the wider ancient Near East. Whilst there is now a small cottage industry in study of the ethics of the Hebrew Bible from an historical perspective, with monographs appearing at the rate of a few a year, at the time this was still quite unusual.

Having decided to focus (somewhat) on violence, with the idea of doing a series of case studies at the familial, local and international levels, I began with the last of these, in the form of ethical ideas about the conduct of warfare. It soon became clear, however, that a dissection of the military ethics of the ancient Near East was not going to happen in the space of a chapter; having sat down one weekend to bash out a few thousand words on the Assyrian royal inscriptions for some application or other, I came up on Monday with 14,000—without having gone anywhere near the rest of the Assyrian sources, not to mention the biblical material. The dissertation, it seemed, was destined for war.

That the dissertation—and ultimately the book—became something other than a mere catalogue of gruesome practices owes its inspiration to a book by Klaus-Peter Adam, Der Königliche Held, which drew attention to the parallel presentation of the human and divine kings in Psalm 18, and an article by Elnathan Weissert, which noted something similar occurring in the accounts of Sennacherib’s battle at Halule, with particular attention to the use of language stemming from Enuma elish. With my antennae up, I realised that this language—the language of the creation accounts—was all over the military accounts of the Assyrian kings, as well as being visible in the biblical material.

This use of specific phrases and imagery drawn from the creation accounts had two significant implications for our understanding of the ethics of ancient Near Eastern warfare. First, the use of the same language to describe both the human king and the divine king had the effect of mirroring their activities, creating an image of the human king as the divine king’s earthly counterpart, who acted on his behalf in the terrestrial realm.

At the same time, the origins of this language in the accounts of creation imbued the human king’s actions with cosmological significance. If the human king was fighting on behalf of the creator god, his enemies were allied with the destructive forces of chaos which threatened that creation (and are indeed described as such). The violence involved in the conduct of warfare was thus justified as necessary for the preservation of creation.

War and Ethics is in use in courses in Europe, North America, the UK and Australia and continues to be available in hardback from de Gruyter. In fact, it’s been so successful that they’ve brought it out as one of the first books in their new paperback editions. Of course, if you prefer to try before you buy, it is also available in preview mode from Google Books.

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