ASOR and SBL 2024

Introduction

Last week, I attended the 2024 annual meetings for two academic societies: the American Schools of Overseas Research (ASOR) in Boston, MA and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) in San Diego, CA. These back-to-back conferences brought together scholars from around the globe to share groundbreaking research, engage in thought-provoking discussions, and reconnect with colleagues in the fields of archaeology, ancient Near Eastern history, and biblical studies. Below is a list of a few of the talks that I attended, specifically the ones that I think were worth attending. Additionally, I presented my own research on Saturday morning at SBL.

ASOR 2024 (Boston, MA)

• Fikri Kulakoğlu (Ankara Üniversitesi), “Transition from Early Bronze Age to Middle Bronze Age at Kültepe: Architecture, Figurines and Seals” + welcome reception
• David S. Vanderhooft (BC), “Psalms and the Perils of Travel”
• Noga Ayali-Darshan (Bar Ilan), “Dumuzi of Mari: Mesopotamian and West-Semitic Traditions”
• Andrew R. Burlingame (Wheaton), “Hittite Administration at Ugarit: More Evidence from the House of ʾUrtēnu”
• Jessie DeGrado (UMichigan), “Had-yiṯʿī as Governor-King of Guzan: Hereditary Governorship and Local Kingship in the ‘Age of the Magnates’”
• Eric Jarrard (Wellesley College), “Monumental Mimicry and Megalith Mockery: Damnatio Memoriae and the Deuteronomic Anxieties of Imperial Inscription”
• Andrew Peecher (PTS), “Grindstones and Goddesses: (Cultic) Life at Khirbet Qeiyafa’s Building C10”
• K. Lawson L. Younger Jr. (TIU), “The Sirqu Stela Once Again”
• Jonathan Greer (GRTS), “Who—or What—are “The Souls They Made”? Genesis 12:5 in Light of Syro-Hittite Mortuary Stelae”
• Early Career Scholars Brown Bag Lunch and Panel (with Seth Richardson)
• Michael A. Chapin (JHU), “The Cuneiform Tablets of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum”
• Jana Matuszak (Chicago), “Establishing Guilt in Sumerian Model Court Cases and Related Texts”
• Matthew J. Suriano (UMaryland), “A Preliminary Report on a New Edition of the Royal Steward Inscriptions”
• Andrew Zulker (Chicago), “Add No Letters, Remove No Things: History of Research and a New Reading of KAI 259:2”
• Eythan Levy (Zurich), “A Quantitative Look at Repeated Names on Judahite Private Jar-handle Impressions”
• Glenn M. Schwartz (JHU), “The Case for Early Alphabetic Writing from Umm el-Marra, Syria, ca. 24th Century BCE”

While in Boston, I also visited Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, especially the Museum of Fine Arts and the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (previously called the Semitic Museum). I also passed through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Charles River, and the historic Bell in Hand Tavern, one of the oldest bars in the United States established in 1795.

SBL 2024

• Julian Chike (Baylor), “Palimpsests of a Premonarchic Past: Revisiting the Question of Second Millennium Sources and the Biblical Traditions”
• James Duguid (CUA), “Decrees of the First God: Egyptian Oracular Amuletic Decrees and the Epithet “First” in Isaiah 41–48”
• Matthew Saunders (JHU), “The Canaanite Shift in Late Bronze Age Canaano-Akkadian: Methodology and Implications” (see more below)
• Ambrose Arralde (UT Austin), “Simul iustus et peccator? Righteousness, Wickedness, and Sin in the Psalms”
• Ted Erho (Universität Hamburg), “Changes in Ethiopic Manuscript Production in the Sixteenth Century”
• Michael Hensley (Universität Hamburg), “From Book Inventories to Libraries: Reconstructing the Materiality of Medieval Ethiopian and Eritrean Monasteries”
• Na’ama Pat-El (UT Austin), “Lexical Comparison: The Role of Morphological Features”
• Uri Mor (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), “-m/-n Interchanges in Classical Hebrew and Aramaic”
• Matthew McAffee (Welch Divinity School), “A Little Lower than Elohim? The Exaltation of Humanity in Psalm 8”
• Daniel Bodi (Sorbonne), “The Deir ‘Alla Topos of the Reversal of Fortunes in the Stream of Tradition”
• Jay Weimar (JHU), “Revisiting the Compositional History of Solomon’s Speeches (1 Kings 8): Insights from Absences in Chronicles”
• William Morrow (Queen’s University), “Shared Motifs in Ancient Near Eastern Treaties and in Deuteronomy”
• Andrew Litke (CUA), “A Duality Problem in Narsai’s Memra ‘On Samson’”
• Jason Penney (PBT), “Typology, Pluractionality, and (Possible) Semantic Unity: How Cross-linguistic Studies Make Sense of the Biblical Hebrew Piel”
• Tania Notarius (University of the Free State), “Impersonal Experiential Constructions in Biblical Hebrew in Its Ancient Northwest Semitic Context”

My SBL Talk

During the Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature session on Saturday morning, I enjoyed presenting my recent research on the sociolinguistics of Canaanisms evincing the Canaanite Shift in the Canaano-Akkadian language of the Late Bronze Amarna letters. As the initial step in a broader study on Canaanite in the Amarna letters, I explored potential reasons why a Canaanite scribe might deliberately opt to use a native (i.e., Canaanite) term instead of an Akkadian one in correspondence written in Akkadian. In this case study, my data set was the dozen or so examples of words evincing the Canaanite Shift, and I focused on methodology and sociolinguistic implications. Here’s my abstract for the talk:

“Previous investigations of the presence of the Canaanite Shift in the Amarna Letters have typically offered only brief references to the phenomenon, frequently citing isolated examples without providing a broader context for why the Canaanite Shift occurs where it does. The primary questions these scholars have addressed have been of interest for the historical linguistic reconstruction of early Canaanite in its Northwest Semitic setting, such as issues of dating, the number of attestations, and any relevant conditioning factors. The present paper seeks to advance our understanding of the appearance of linguistically marked Canaanite forms by addressing a set of related questions from a sociolinguistic perspective: In what specific administrative, diplomatic, or personal contexts do Canaanite words appear within the Amarna corpus, and how does the context in which they appear influence our understanding of their function in communication? Why might scribes choose to deviate from standard Akkadian forms in favor of Canaanite words, and what does this suggest about the individual scribe’s linguistic competence and that of their audience? How does the preference for Canaanite forms reflect the dynamics of language contact, multilingualism, and cross-linguistic diplomatic correspondence during the Amarna period? In light of recent research in the sociolinguistics of Canaano-Akkadian, Levantine scribal education, and the multimodality of ancient inscriptions, this paper attempts to categorize the sociolinguistic reasons why scribes might choose to use explicitly marked Canaanite forms in various contexts. It examines how these choices reflect broader socio-political and educational dynamics within Levantine scribal communities, shedding light on the way that language can function as a tool for navigating and negotiating cultural identities and power structures in ancient cross-cultural diplomatic communication.”

Conclusion

Attending the ASOR and SBL annual meetings last week was a professionally enriching and personally inspiring experience. I reconnected with past and current professors and friends as well as enjoyed the dynamic exchange of ideas, insightful presentations, and opportunities to connect with fellow scholars. These gatherings reaffirm the vibrant, collaborative nature of our field, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s meetings and the new conversations they’ll bring.

Postscript

I especially thank Alice Mandell who arranged for me to present at SBL and also encouraged me to present my research on the sociolinguistics of Canaanisms in Late Bronze Canaano-Akkadian after our Akkadian seminar on the Amarna letters at Hopkins during the spring 2024 semester.

About The Author

Matthew Saunders

Matthew Saunders is a PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He researches the languages and literatures of the ancient Near East, especially Aramaic Studies, Ugaritic Studies, and Comparative Semitics.

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