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Books by Ed Silver
The Double Rhetorical Question Pattern and its Variants in Classical Hebrew builds on the work of... more The Double Rhetorical Question Pattern and its Variants in Classical Hebrew builds on the work of foundational figures in the field of Semitic philology to discuss the persistence and influence of a particular rhetorical trope: a catenated sequence of interrogatives employed to develop a complex rhetorical question. This pattern appears both in the 14th century BCE epic poetry from Ugarit and in poetic traditions in the Hebrew Bible that originated at least 700 years later. The structural stability of this complex rhetorical device over such a protracted period of time is a phenomenon whose significance has been widely debated. Moving beyond philology into pragmatics, this book develops a new line of analysis that draws upon the linguistic philosophy of J.L. Austin, John Searle, and Paul Grice.
Although the philological literature has described this figure as a "triple rhetorical question," pragmatic analysis makes clear that the core phenomenon is actually a double rhetorical question to which a range of augments has been variously appended. This descriptive reorientation allows us to recognize not the stability of the form, but rather its adaptability and complex relationship to the specific discursive contexts within which it is attested.
In this way, the study shifts analytical focus away from the pattern itself, from the positing of hypothetical life-settings, and from synchronic surveys of the data. Instead, it focuses on the specific sociolinguistic apparatus which has shaped its range of expressions. In particular, the study employs the idea of "doxa" as a basis for reconstructing the complex and dynamic relationship between speaker and audience. Rhetorical interrogation is a complex phenomenon dependent on subtle cues that indicate that a specific request for information is not genuinely posed, but rather, intends to affirm (or complicate) particular elements of doxic concord between speaker and hearer. Multiple rhetorical questions in Hebrew and Ugaritic, then, are complex devices for presenting contrastive or internally contradictory beliefs.
Two versions of the augmented double rhetorical question are particularly notable. One employs the Hebrew particle kî to introduce the figure's third member, developing a type of aporetic discourse by which internal mental contradictions are evoked and presented to an audience for critical consideration. Another pattern, which substitutes the interrogative particle madûa' for kî, takes this aporia out of the realm of the conceptual and turns it into a genuine request for information. This rhetorical pattern, attested only in the poetry of the book of Jeremiah, represents an important local development of this augmented double rhetorical question, one that employs it as an active persuasive device.
Following the extended description of the device and its variants in the Hebrew Bible and Ugaritic literature, this study ends with a close analysis of the latter figure's attestation in Jeremiah chapter 8. This chapter exhibits a dense clustering of this figure. For this reason, it provides an ideal occasion to demonstrate not only how the device functions as a persuasive rhetorical element, but to reconstruct its influence on the work of a single, influential corpus.
Papers by Ed Silver
This essay presents a reconstruction of the Vorlage of the LXX for Jer 25:1-7, the indictment pha... more This essay presents a reconstruction of the Vorlage of the LXX for Jer 25:1-7, the indictment phase of an oracle that comprises vv. 1-14 (LXX vv. 1-13). I contend that the interpretive difficulties this text poses in the Old Greek are best understood as a function of its Vorlage's early editorial history. A tradent encountered two parallel literary encodings of an original prophetic oracle and combined them to form the basis of the extant LXX witness. When viewed as a synthetic, consensus document, the serious problems of literary continuity in the LXX are resolved, and new purchase on the complicated structure of the MT of Jeremiah 25 is gained. Further, the nature of the discrepancy between the two traditions hypothesized here concerns the personal authority of the prophet himself. Hence, this reconstruction also provides valuable empirical data for considering the differing perspectives on prophecy and prophetic authority that were current in the period subsequent to the fall of the house of David.
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, 2014
This essay considers the image of the yoke (Akk. nīru/abšānu; Heb. ʿōl) in the context of anc... more This essay considers the image of the yoke (Akk. nīru/abšānu; Heb. ʿōl) in the context of ancient Near Eastern political discourse. It analyzes the yoke’s function in Jeremiah 27–29 as a means to developing a clearer understanding of how biblical prophecy oper- ated as political speech. The yoke finds abundant attestation in the neo-Assyrian impe- rial rhetoric that immediately preceded the period of Babylonian domination in Judah. In manipulating this image, the Jeremian poetry strategically reframed an element of imperial ideology within the discourse of the patriarchal, agrarian household. In the course of this critical engagement, the prophet also restructured the basis for his Judean audience’s political identity, grounding it not in complex bureaucratic structures, but in the lifeworld of the basic kinship unit. The prophet’s speech functioned as a type of subaltern political theorizing in a poetic mode; it discloses a coherent theory of power and models intellective practices capable of operation under conditions of political domination.
How did an ancient Near Eastern cultural practice of generating authority by attributing one's sp... more How did an ancient Near Eastern cultural practice of generating authority by attributing one's speech to a divine source develop into an adaptable corpus of authoritative oracular literature? This essay approaches this problem in sociolinguistic terms, investigating how ancient scribes--acting as autonomous social agents--effected a shift in understanding how language worked. It maintains that the process of entextualizing ancient prophecy was accompanied by a metalinguistic transformation in understanding the basis for prophetic discourse. The movement from speech to text was also a movement away from considering prophecy in connection with the immediate, extra-discursive reality it indicated and toward treating it as stable, patterned discourse capable of generating new meanings in response to changing conditions. To better understand this development, we survey a key corpus of entextualizing discourse--the Jeremian sign-acts and prophetic performances. These texts are variously concerned with the relationship between sign and imputed significance. They treat the presentation of various classes of objects--verbal, physical and performative--and show how many sorts of interpretive actions can proceed from these. Some of these texts show the refiguration of ambiguous orthographic signs, as for instance the interpretive shift from "shaqed" to "shoqed" in Jer 1.11-12. Others describe phonic acts in which meaning and the utterance are bound, as in the case of Jeremiah's "sir nafuach" in Jer 1.13 or the fired clay "baqbuq" of Jer 19. Still others represent material objects in various states of cohesion which are then situated in new referential contexts, either through performance (e.g., the "mota" and "'ol" of Jer 27-28) or in speech (e.g., the "sefer" of Jer 51.60-64). Taken in aggregate, these texts developed a genuinely critical (though non-systematic) indigenous inquiry into the relationship between discourse and meaning. Through them, the scribes who laid the foundations for the Hebrew Bible made sense of the text-culture they were creating.
Conferences by Ed Silver
Thursday, Sept 24, 2015 Collins Cinema • Wellesley College 106 Central Street, Wellesley MA Ses... more Thursday, Sept 24, 2015
Collins Cinema • Wellesley College
106 Central Street, Wellesley MA
Session 1: 9AM-12PM
Session 2: 2PM-5PM
Participants:
Prof. Morag Kersel
Department of Anthropology
DePaul University
Prof. Clemens Reichel
Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations
University of Toronto
Prof. Jytte Klausen
Department of Politics
Brandeis University
Prof. Patty Gerstenblith
College of Law
DePaul University
Dr. Salam al-Kuntar
Department of Anthropology
University of Pennsylvania
Prof. Jeremy Hutton
Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Prof. Stephennie Mulder
Department of Art and Art History
University of Texas at Austin
Charles E. Jones
Penn State University
Nina Burleigh
Newsweek Magazine
Hugh Eakin
New York Review of Books
The full program for Aesthetics and the Analytical Study of Religion, #SORAAAD2016, SORAAAD & Arb... more The full program for Aesthetics and the Analytical Study of Religion, #SORAAAD2016, SORAAAD & Arbeitskreis Religionsästhetik
9/9/2016 Update contains suggested readings for J. Sorett and S. Promey.
Method and Theory of the Aesthetics of Religion
Alexandra Greiser, “Aesthetics of Religion – What It Is, and What It Is Good For”
Sally Promey, Respondent
Somatic Approaches to the Aesthetics of Religion
Jens Kreinath, “Somatics, Body Knowledge, and the Aesthetics of Religion”
Rebecca Raphael, “Disability, Aesthetics, and Religious Studies Method”
Deborah Green, ““In A Gadda Da Vida” (In the Garden of Eden)”
Sound and the Senses in the Aesthetics of Religion
Annette Wilke, “Sound Matters: the Case of Hindu India and the Sounding of Sacred Texts. An Applied Aesthetics of Religion”
Jason Bivins, “Immersion, Transcription, Assemblage: On Sonic Impermanence and the Study of Religion”
Religious Diversity, Collective Cultural Agency, and the Question of Aesthetics
Birgit Meyer, “Religious Diversity and the Question of Aesthetics”
Josef Sorrett, “The Abiding Powers of AfroProtestantism”
David Morgan - Respondent
Media and Transmission in the Aesthetics of Religion
Jolyon Thomas, “Framing Religious Subjects in an Irreligious Place: Procedural and Ethical Hurdles in Studying the Religion of Japanese Manga and Anime”
David Feltmate, “Should I Laugh Now? The Aesthetics of Humor in Mass Media”
S. Brent Plate - Respondent
Book Reviews by Ed Silver
The Double Rhetorical Question Pattern and its Variants in Classical Hebrew builds on the work of... more The Double Rhetorical Question Pattern and its Variants in Classical Hebrew builds on the work of foundational figures in the field of Semitic philology to discuss the persistence and influence of a particular rhetorical trope: a catenated sequence of interrogatives employed to develop a complex rhetorical question. This pattern appears both in the 14th century BCE epic poetry from Ugarit and in poetic traditions in the Hebrew Bible that originated at least 700 years later. The structural stability of this complex rhetorical device over such a protracted period of time is a phenomenon whose significance has been widely debated. Moving beyond philology into pragmatics, this book develops a new line of analysis that draws upon the linguistic philosophy of J.L. Austin, John Searle, and Paul Grice.
Although the philological literature has described this figure as a "triple rhetorical question," pragmatic analysis makes clear that the core phenomenon is actually a double rhetorical question to which a range of augments has been variously appended. This descriptive reorientation allows us to recognize not the stability of the form, but rather its adaptability and complex relationship to the specific discursive contexts within which it is attested.
In this way, the study shifts analytical focus away from the pattern itself, from the positing of hypothetical life-settings, and from synchronic surveys of the data. Instead, it focuses on the specific sociolinguistic apparatus which has shaped its range of expressions. In particular, the study employs the idea of "doxa" as a basis for reconstructing the complex and dynamic relationship between speaker and audience. Rhetorical interrogation is a complex phenomenon dependent on subtle cues that indicate that a specific request for information is not genuinely posed, but rather, intends to affirm (or complicate) particular elements of doxic concord between speaker and hearer. Multiple rhetorical questions in Hebrew and Ugaritic, then, are complex devices for presenting contrastive or internally contradictory beliefs.
Two versions of the augmented double rhetorical question are particularly notable. One employs the Hebrew particle kî to introduce the figure's third member, developing a type of aporetic discourse by which internal mental contradictions are evoked and presented to an audience for critical consideration. Another pattern, which substitutes the interrogative particle madûa' for kî, takes this aporia out of the realm of the conceptual and turns it into a genuine request for information. This rhetorical pattern, attested only in the poetry of the book of Jeremiah, represents an important local development of this augmented double rhetorical question, one that employs it as an active persuasive device.
Following the extended description of the device and its variants in the Hebrew Bible and Ugaritic literature, this study ends with a close analysis of the latter figure's attestation in Jeremiah chapter 8. This chapter exhibits a dense clustering of this figure. For this reason, it provides an ideal occasion to demonstrate not only how the device functions as a persuasive rhetorical element, but to reconstruct its influence on the work of a single, influential corpus.
This essay presents a reconstruction of the Vorlage of the LXX for Jer 25:1-7, the indictment pha... more This essay presents a reconstruction of the Vorlage of the LXX for Jer 25:1-7, the indictment phase of an oracle that comprises vv. 1-14 (LXX vv. 1-13). I contend that the interpretive difficulties this text poses in the Old Greek are best understood as a function of its Vorlage's early editorial history. A tradent encountered two parallel literary encodings of an original prophetic oracle and combined them to form the basis of the extant LXX witness. When viewed as a synthetic, consensus document, the serious problems of literary continuity in the LXX are resolved, and new purchase on the complicated structure of the MT of Jeremiah 25 is gained. Further, the nature of the discrepancy between the two traditions hypothesized here concerns the personal authority of the prophet himself. Hence, this reconstruction also provides valuable empirical data for considering the differing perspectives on prophecy and prophetic authority that were current in the period subsequent to the fall of the house of David.
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, 2014
This essay considers the image of the yoke (Akk. nīru/abšānu; Heb. ʿōl) in the context of anc... more This essay considers the image of the yoke (Akk. nīru/abšānu; Heb. ʿōl) in the context of ancient Near Eastern political discourse. It analyzes the yoke’s function in Jeremiah 27–29 as a means to developing a clearer understanding of how biblical prophecy oper- ated as political speech. The yoke finds abundant attestation in the neo-Assyrian impe- rial rhetoric that immediately preceded the period of Babylonian domination in Judah. In manipulating this image, the Jeremian poetry strategically reframed an element of imperial ideology within the discourse of the patriarchal, agrarian household. In the course of this critical engagement, the prophet also restructured the basis for his Judean audience’s political identity, grounding it not in complex bureaucratic structures, but in the lifeworld of the basic kinship unit. The prophet’s speech functioned as a type of subaltern political theorizing in a poetic mode; it discloses a coherent theory of power and models intellective practices capable of operation under conditions of political domination.
How did an ancient Near Eastern cultural practice of generating authority by attributing one's sp... more How did an ancient Near Eastern cultural practice of generating authority by attributing one's speech to a divine source develop into an adaptable corpus of authoritative oracular literature? This essay approaches this problem in sociolinguistic terms, investigating how ancient scribes--acting as autonomous social agents--effected a shift in understanding how language worked. It maintains that the process of entextualizing ancient prophecy was accompanied by a metalinguistic transformation in understanding the basis for prophetic discourse. The movement from speech to text was also a movement away from considering prophecy in connection with the immediate, extra-discursive reality it indicated and toward treating it as stable, patterned discourse capable of generating new meanings in response to changing conditions. To better understand this development, we survey a key corpus of entextualizing discourse--the Jeremian sign-acts and prophetic performances. These texts are variously concerned with the relationship between sign and imputed significance. They treat the presentation of various classes of objects--verbal, physical and performative--and show how many sorts of interpretive actions can proceed from these. Some of these texts show the refiguration of ambiguous orthographic signs, as for instance the interpretive shift from "shaqed" to "shoqed" in Jer 1.11-12. Others describe phonic acts in which meaning and the utterance are bound, as in the case of Jeremiah's "sir nafuach" in Jer 1.13 or the fired clay "baqbuq" of Jer 19. Still others represent material objects in various states of cohesion which are then situated in new referential contexts, either through performance (e.g., the "mota" and "'ol" of Jer 27-28) or in speech (e.g., the "sefer" of Jer 51.60-64). Taken in aggregate, these texts developed a genuinely critical (though non-systematic) indigenous inquiry into the relationship between discourse and meaning. Through them, the scribes who laid the foundations for the Hebrew Bible made sense of the text-culture they were creating.
Thursday, Sept 24, 2015 Collins Cinema • Wellesley College 106 Central Street, Wellesley MA Ses... more Thursday, Sept 24, 2015
Collins Cinema • Wellesley College
106 Central Street, Wellesley MA
Session 1: 9AM-12PM
Session 2: 2PM-5PM
Participants:
Prof. Morag Kersel
Department of Anthropology
DePaul University
Prof. Clemens Reichel
Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations
University of Toronto
Prof. Jytte Klausen
Department of Politics
Brandeis University
Prof. Patty Gerstenblith
College of Law
DePaul University
Dr. Salam al-Kuntar
Department of Anthropology
University of Pennsylvania
Prof. Jeremy Hutton
Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Prof. Stephennie Mulder
Department of Art and Art History
University of Texas at Austin
Charles E. Jones
Penn State University
Nina Burleigh
Newsweek Magazine
Hugh Eakin
New York Review of Books
The full program for Aesthetics and the Analytical Study of Religion, #SORAAAD2016, SORAAAD & Arb... more The full program for Aesthetics and the Analytical Study of Religion, #SORAAAD2016, SORAAAD & Arbeitskreis Religionsästhetik
9/9/2016 Update contains suggested readings for J. Sorett and S. Promey.
Method and Theory of the Aesthetics of Religion
Alexandra Greiser, “Aesthetics of Religion – What It Is, and What It Is Good For”
Sally Promey, Respondent
Somatic Approaches to the Aesthetics of Religion
Jens Kreinath, “Somatics, Body Knowledge, and the Aesthetics of Religion”
Rebecca Raphael, “Disability, Aesthetics, and Religious Studies Method”
Deborah Green, ““In A Gadda Da Vida” (In the Garden of Eden)”
Sound and the Senses in the Aesthetics of Religion
Annette Wilke, “Sound Matters: the Case of Hindu India and the Sounding of Sacred Texts. An Applied Aesthetics of Religion”
Jason Bivins, “Immersion, Transcription, Assemblage: On Sonic Impermanence and the Study of Religion”
Religious Diversity, Collective Cultural Agency, and the Question of Aesthetics
Birgit Meyer, “Religious Diversity and the Question of Aesthetics”
Josef Sorrett, “The Abiding Powers of AfroProtestantism”
David Morgan - Respondent
Media and Transmission in the Aesthetics of Religion
Jolyon Thomas, “Framing Religious Subjects in an Irreligious Place: Procedural and Ethical Hurdles in Studying the Religion of Japanese Manga and Anime”
David Feltmate, “Should I Laugh Now? The Aesthetics of Humor in Mass Media”
S. Brent Plate - Respondent