Antiquitopia

I have known for a while now that David M. Carr's 2011 book, The Formation of the Hebrew Bible , included most likely the very first citation of anything I wrote - in this case, my dissertation.  Luckily, this past year, someone bought me a copy of the book (it is a bit pricy), and I have been slowly working through it.  I finally got the part where he discusses the implications of my work on the relationship between the Sabbath and the Sanctuary (in the Hebrew Bible, the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, and the Epistle to the Hebrews) specifically for how I characterize the Holiness materials.  He writes: Consider, for example, the strong focus in H materials (as in Ezekiel) on Sabbath that has been outlined with particular clarity in a recent dissertation by Jared Calaway.  Resonating with similar Sabbath foci in Ezekiel, Exod 31:12-17 makes the Sabbath "covenant" a central focus of the P Sinai episode, applying to it concepts of profanation previously reserved f...

For those of you who do not know, my research right now primarily investigates the various ways ancient Jews and Christians bring together holy space and holy time, particularly the Sanctuary and the Sabbath, focusing on priestly traditions or traditions that reflect upon or respond to such traditions (particularly P, H, and Ezekiel; Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice; and Epistle to the Hebrews). Nonetheless, I was struck by the passage in Is. 56:1-8, which, although evincing some general conceptual similarities to P, H, and Ezekiel, takes a different tack in articulating how the Sabbath relates to the Sanctuary by universalizing the relationship. In the priestly framework in the Priestly source of the Pentateuch (including the Holiness Code) and Ezekiel, improper reverence of the Sanctuary and lack of observance of the Sabbath, or their profanation, leads to being cut off from the community. The inverse corollary to this is that proper observance and reverence of the Sabbath and the S...