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It is our great pleasure to invite you to the seventh meeting of the Semitic Philology Workshop.
The speaker is Dr. Raanan Eichler of Harvard NELC. We will meet on February 4, Thursday, 6:15pm at Semitic Museum 201.
Title Date Palms, Dust Clouds, and Big Digs: Recovering Forgotten Meanings of Ancient Hebrew Words
Abstract In this talk I will examine several Hebrew terms from the Bible and from Iron Age inscriptions whose standard interpretations are unsatisfactory. Relying on literary context, a closer look at the realia of the ancient Near East as it pertains to this context, and cautious use of etymology, I will propose novel and hopefully correct interpretations for each of them.
Bio Raanan Eichler is a Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellow spending this year at Harvard NELC, where he is working primarily on the biblical opposition to image worship. He wrote his dissertation, titled "The Ark and the Cherubim", at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published papers in VT, ZAW, Biblica, JSS and Tarbiz, and his article "The Poles of the Ark: On the Ins and Outs of a Textual Contradiction" is slated to be published in JBL in the coming months. He was formerly a Fellow at the Mandel Scholion Center, where he focused on ancient Near Eastern iconography, and at the Israel Democracy Institute, where he investigated biblical ideas that have contributed to the development of modern liberal thought.
As always light refreshment will be served.
Best regards,
MEI Hualong and Jae-Hwan Kim, Coordinators of the Semitic Philology Workshop