The Canadian Society of Biblical Studies begins its 2005 annual meetings later this morning in London, Ontario. I am set up in my dorm room with hi-speed internet, so I figured I would highlight some of the upcoming sessions relating to Hebrew Bible/Old Testament:
Sunday Morning Sessions
- Keith Bodner (Tyndale University College) “The Fellowship of the King: Some Remarks on a Formative Interaction”
- Marie-France Dion (Concordia University) “Who was Samuel to Saul? A Critical Analysis of I Sam 9:1-10:16; 10:17-27: 11:1-15”
- Gord Oeste (Wycliffe College) “Legitimation and Delegitimation in Judges 9: Abimelech’s Rise and Demise”
- Gary N. Knoppers (Pennsylvania State University) “‘Give Me that Old-time Religion’: The Revival of Israelite Religion in Postexilic Samaria”
- Mark Boda (McMaster Divinity College) “Freeing the Burden of Prophecy: maśśa and the Legitimacy of Prophecy in Zechariah 9-14”
Monday Morning Sessions
- Tim Goltz (McGill University) “Two Rhetorical Methods for Two Historical Audiences: Reading and Hearing Texts in Ancient Israel”
- Ken Ristau (Pennsylvania State University) “Of Prophets and Monarchs: The Death of Josiah in Chronicles”
- Christine Mitchell (St. Andrew’s College) “Temperance, Temples and Colonies: Reading the Book of Haggai in Saskatoon”
- Robert Culley (McGill University) “Reading the Complaints of the Individual”
- James Linville (University of Lethbridge) “Bugs Through the Looking Glass: The Infestation of Meaning in Joel”
- R. Glenn Wooden (Acadia Divinity College) “Daniel against the wise-men: the nuanced use of wisdom terms in Daniel 1-2”
Tuesday Morning Sessions
- Arthur Walker-Jones (University of Winnipeg) “Myth Criticism of the Psalms”
- Tyler F. Williams (Taylor University College) “The Psalm Superscriptions and the Composition of the Book of Psalms”
- Ehud Ben Zvi (University of Alberta) “The Account of Amaziah in 2 Chronicles 25”
- David Shepherd (Briercrest College) “‘Strike his bone and his flesh’: Reading Job 2 from the Beginning”
- Derek Suderman (Emmanuel College) “Towards an Improved Description of Biblical Prayer: Form-Critical Approaches to Direct Address in Psalm 55”
- John Van Seters (Waterloo, ON) “The Myth of the ‘Final Form’ of the Biblical Text”
It looks like a good slate of papers (I hear the one by Tyler Williams is awesome!). I may blog a few reports for papers which I find particularly interesting.
A full programme with abstracts is available from the CSBS website here.
Then I went over to the dark side. I didn’t want to. I resisted for many years. But my workplace signed a deal with Darth Gates and went all Windows. At first I was able to co-exist with my Mac being the shining beacon of hope on the network, but then a new printer/photocopier was bought that didn’t support Macs. At that point I bought myself a Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop — but I still used my Mac, admittedly less and less as I migrated more software over to Windows. The one primary reason that I kept my Mac running was to use Accordance Bible Software. While I also ran Accordance on my Dell laptop with Basilisk’s emulator, I preferred my Mac. But my old PowerCentre was beginning to show its age.
If money wasn’t an issue, I would buy a brand-spanking new Power Macintosh G5 Dual Processor supercomputer like my friend did. But my wife insists that money is an issue, so I did the next best thing: I bought my friend’s used Power Macintosh G4 Dual Processor computer. Considering that this Mac is really only around so I can use Accordance, it will be more than enough computer. Now I can finally run MacOS X! I can finally use Accordance with MacOS X! And I can finally integrate my Mac with my Windows network seamlessly. So, while I haven’t totally come back from the dark side, I am the proud owner of a “new” G4 PowerMac and am in my own way continuing the resistance!
According to my count there have been a total of nine films based on the book of Esther. Besides the 1916 silent film directed by Maurice Elvey, the French produced three silent films inspired by the biblical character: Gaumont studios produced two films in 1910: Esther and Mordecai directed by Louis Feuillade and The Marriage of Esther, while C.G.P.C. made another movie called Esther directed by Henri Andréani. In addition, the Dutch director-actor Theo Frankel directed Esther: A Biblical Episode in 1911.
As a biblical scholar I found Esther and the King quite interesting — especially how they modified the king’s reason for getting rid of Queen Vashti. In the film they have Vashti cheating on the king and actually showing up at the banquet and performing a striptease (see picture of Daniela Rocca as Vashti above right), while in the biblical account she is dumped because she refused to come at the king’s command (Esther 1:10-12). What is perhaps ironic, is that some scholars (such as Michael Fox in his excellent book, Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther (Eerdmans, 2001; 
I have uploaded a new section on 
As a biblical scholar I have always been fascinated how the screenwriters and directors adapted the biblical narratives and solved some of the critical problems in the biblical text. Many of these films make fascinating hermeneutical studies in and of themselves. It has been a real treat watching some of them for the first time.