2018 SBL

2018 SBL Annual Meeting
November 17–20, 2018
Colorado Convention Center
Denver, CO

Beyond Use and Abuse of History:
Constructed Memory in Ezekiel 20

The (ab)use of historical data in Ezekiel 20 is often alliteratively characterized by scholars as revisionist (Block, Allen), rhetorical (Osborne; Krüger), and radical (Evans, Idestrom). Many of these efforts, though, assume an extant literary source (Exodus, Joshua 24) upon which Ezekiel has based his historiographical efforts, and from which Ezekiel is intentionally departing. This paper abandons those attempts at reconstruction and comparative analysis. Rather, in this paper I will engage the emerging and promising contributions of memory studies in order to argue that Ezekiel 20 represents a divinely constructed counter memory. I will undertake this argument in three parts. First, I will briefly outline the cyclical nature of the exodus pattern in biblical memory. Second, I will examine the reciprocal impulses between divine and Israelite remembrance and forgetting throughout this cyclical pattern. Third, I will demonstrate how and why Ezekiel 20 constructs a specific memory of the past in the imagined present to define and shape future identities.

"Now You're in the Sunken Place”:
Constructed Monsters in Daniel 7 and Get Out

This paper seeks to explore constructed monsters in Daniel 7 and the 2017 film Get Out. Specifically, it examines the similar ways in which the biblical text and film both externalize their respective social anxieties by fictionalizing their oppressor in monstrous form. I will undertake this investigation in three parts. First, I will examine dread and fearfulness around white appropriation and abuse of black culture and bodies in Jordan Peele's Oscar-winning screen play Get Out. Second, I will review the four beasts of Daniel 7 with particular attention to each beast's capacity for destruction and their prophesied demise. Third, I will propose that the construction of monstrous beings in both texts function as creative expressions of political resistance in their respective eras, and that both serve to empower oppressed groups with an imagined escape from tyrannical structures of political abuse.

Feel free to contact me if you would like to hear more about these projects or get together at the meeting.