Tyndale House at SBL 2019
News
20th November 2019
Look out for Tyndale House staff speaking at the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion Annual Meetings 2019.
The SBL/AAR Annual Meetings are being held on the 23- 26 November at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California.
Research Fellow and Tyndale House Onomastics Project Co-ordinator Elizabeth Robar will be presiding at the 2019 Institute for Biblical Research meeting of the Linguistics and the Biblical Text research group on 22 November.
Tyndale House Research Associate, Kaspars Ozolins, will be presenting on Linguistics and Dating the Biblical Text at the same meeting from 4:30pm - 5:00pm.
The Linguistics and the Biblical Text research group explores applied linguistics within the field of biblical research. The theme for this first session will be the role of linguistics within biblical studies.
Linguistics has proven unique in its ability to expose just how the biblical message is presented and how interpersonal communication is portrayed and effected. But, simultaneously, linguistic studies are notorious for incoherent jargon that only distance their readers from the Word of God. Four invited scholars, a mix of experienced and younger, will present a review of the history of linguistics and the biblical text and a recommendation for how linguistic studies should be presented in order to promote fruitful engagement with all of biblical studies (and, conversely, what other biblical studies scholars ought to be able to expect from linguistics).
Elizabeth Robar will also be presenting on Qatal and yiqtol in Poetic Parallelism: Opposites Attracting? in the National Association of Professors of Hebrew's Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew session on 24 November, 5:00 - 5:25pm.
Elizabeth's paper will address parallel uses of QATAL and YIQTOL verb forms in biblical poetry, along with what the phenomenon says about poetry as well as what it says about the verbal system.
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Some of our New Testament team will also be speaking at SBL, including Research Associate Elijah Hixson who will be a panelist in the New Testament Textual Criticism session on 23 November, 1:25pm - 1:50pm.
This session will be a panel discussion on issues around the announcement of a first-century fragment of the Gospel of Mark, and its subsequent publication as a second/third Oxyrhynchus papyrus.
Tyndale House Academic Vice Principal Dirk Jongkind will be speaking on what biblical Greek studies can learn from textual criticism, in the Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics session on 25 November 16:00 - 16:30
The Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics session will look at the interfaces between the study of Ancient Greek and other disciplines—biblical studies being only one. This session will address the ways in which biblical Greek studies can benefit from the knowledge and advances yielded from other disciplines, such as Hebrew linguistics, textual criticism, and linguistics.
Dirk's paper will address the discipline of textual criticism, which attempts to understand changes in the text that occur in the copying process. Unless a textual variant is the result of deliberate intervention (whether or not theologically motivated), the change is likely the result of some linguistic process. There are quite a few linguistic phenomena that can be illustrated from changes found in the transmission history, and perhaps, sometimes, textual criticism can help to formulate new questions for the grammarians.