Announcements

Post to Announcements     Print Page

The 2008 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature is in Boston from November 21-25 at the Hynes Convention Center on Boylston Street.

Politics was central to the life of ancient Israel, and certainly found throughout the Hebrew Bible. Despite the obviousness of this assertion, politics has been a relatively neglected area of investigation, with the exception of some of the essays of Albrecht Alt and recently Norman Gottwald's The Politics of Ancient Israel. The aim of this unit is to rectify this inattention by concentrating on the politics of the Hebrew Bible, both for better understanding ancient Israel and in its implications for political theory.

This year's inaugural unit will feature papers that examine biblical texts through the prism of political theory, broadly conceived. As other program units already explore feminist ideology and African-American hermeneutics, this new unit features interdisciplinary papers that employ theoretical models concerning, for example, notions of nationhood, citizenship, law, class and hierarchy, economic distribution, kingship, and the like.

More information is available at the website of the Society of Biblical Literature at:
http://www.sbl-site.org/congresses/Congresses_AnnualMeeting.aspx