The past 2 hours...

[theyellowhobbit]

...have been spent playing Katamari. I would have done work, but there was no internet, and the modem is in currentlee's room, buried under things, (and I didn't know this at the time) so I had to wait until he returned. So that's where the Katamari came in.

I got my midterm and my paper back from Shaye Cohen's class. I got an 80.5 on the midterm, which is fine because I was expecting that since I had to make up facts since I didn't really get to study, and had I had time to study, I would have done much better. However, I got an A on the paper! I totally got away with my 11 foot pole. Maybe I should walk around with an 11 foot pole for my academic research. Except I'd probably have trouble getting through doorways...

And I think I will be ok for the next paper for Nasrallah's class. I talked to Cavan, the TF, and now I know what direction to go in. I get to make up a Pauline letter, a response from a community, or a pseudo-Pauline letter. The latter would be pseudopseudopigraphy. (Would that turn it into "pigraphy"?) I'll probably do the first option, and if I want to be fancy I might reference a fake site report or something where the letter was dug up. It might have to be a huge footnote, since the paper is only 5-8 pages long. And then I get to interpret this letter. And I have sources, so I can say how they're all wrong in light of this newly-found letter. Of course, I don't know how text scholars would determine that it's an authentic letter from Paul. I'll write it in Pauline style, and hopefully I'll do a good job with it.

I'm very afraid of what happened with the Idrimi paper (which I did not get back yesterday. Maybe we should be getting half a letter grade added to our current grade for each week the paper is late in being graded. That would be pretty darn awesome.) And of course, now there's the new paper.

We did stuff on Judges ch.3 yesterday, and I got a sudden inspiration for a paper topic. Ben's dissertation was on Iron I Moabite communities. There was a whole question about the portrayal of the Moabite kingdom in the book of Judges as opposed to the archaeological findings (not that this was the focus of the dissertation. He mostly compared his work to earlier models, showing how his model of community studies was far superior to their models of whatever they were using). I want to somehow use the texts and their notion of history and integrate the shiny archaeology. Though I don't know if I can turn this into a real topic.

I kind of want to send my future draft of this to someone who knows the material who can tell me whether or not my argument is convincing, and can edit it. AK has been kind enough to edit my essays thus far, though I feel like this one is going to be very technical, and she's not a Near Eastern scholar.

I also got into a discussion today about the fact that I believe the Torah is divine, and therefore try to avoid all issues of chronology with the Torah when I write scholarly things. Fun times.

Comments

[kellev.livejournal.com]

TF?

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

Teaching Fellow. At Penn they are called teaching assistants.