Nicole L . Tilford

Biblical Themes in Science Fiction is a handbook for exploring how biblical themes appear in contemporary science fiction. Contributors Frank Bosman, Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch, Krista N. Dalton, Tom de Bruin, James F. McGrath, Kelly J. Murphy, Steven J. Schweitzer, Jason A. Staples, Nicole L. Tilford, Christine Wenderoth, and Jackie Wyse-Rhodes examine the relationship between ancient and modern depictions of Adam and Eve, the tower of Babel, Noah’s ark, handmaids, utopian cities, the promised land, the city of Babylon, messiahs, resurrection, and the apocalypse. Works of science fiction explored range from book series such as Lilith’s Brood to television shows such as Doctor Who and video games such as Fallout 3. Essays are supplemented by images and key science fiction sources for diving deeper into how the Bible influenced authors and creators. An afterword considers the imaginative impulses common to both science fiction and biblical texts.

The Bible is full of metaphors. On the surface, these metaphors seem like simple literary flourishes that have been added to the text for artistic effect. This book, however, argues that biblical metaphors reflect more basic, prelinguistic cognitive structures. These conceptual metaphors developed out of common concrete experiences and only gradually developed into the complex metaphors that one finds within biblical texts. This book explores how common sensory activities like seeing, hearing, touching, eating, breathing, and walking developed into the abstract metaphors for wisdom that one finds in Proverbs, Job, and Qohelet. Because it traces the cognitive development of a set of related metaphors across several congruent texts, it provides a model by which scholars can trace the cognitive development of biblical metaphors more generally in the Hebrew Bible and other early Jewish and Christian texts.

Fourteen years after eight male biblical scholars met in Philip Schaff’s study to create the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, the Society admitted its first woman, Anna Ely Rhoads, in 1894. Since Rhoads joined, the careers and lives of women in SBL have changed radically from those earliest members, whose careers were largely tied to the careers of their fathers or spouses and to institutions concerned with the education of young women. Current members now serve on editorial boards and committees; women present papers and publish books; they teach and mentor students. More than thirty leading women biblical scholars from around the world reflect on their experiences studying the Bible academically in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This volume is a valuable tool for scholars and students interested in the lives and experiences of women in academic fields, the history of the SBL, and developments in the academic study of the Bible.

Modern science fiction writers often draw upon the biblical flood story as inspiration for their own narratives. It is not uncommon to find humans fleeing on space arks to escape some cosmic disaster. In the process of adapting the biblical narrative to contemporary circumstances, these writers also frequently transform the unnamed female characters in the biblical story. Noah’s wife, Noah’s daughters-in-law, and the daughters of men become dynamic characters that actively shape the narrative and are vital to the survival of the human race. This article examines the character type of the “Noahic woman” as it appears in three early twentieth century science fiction narratives.

This article explores how collaborative technologies like Wikipedia can be used in the classroom to teach students about the composition history of biblical texts. Practical strategies for implementing this lesson in the classroom are also included.

Scholars have debated whether the ancient Israelites believed in the evil eye. Biblical passages that mention a “bad eye” (Prov. 23:6, 28:22) or “to do bad with the eye” (Deut. 15:9; 28:54, 56) seem to suggest that such a belief existed in ancient Israel; however, some scholars have argued that such passages are simply idioms for greed or stinginess. This paper reexamines this issue. Drawing upon recent insights from cognitive linguistics, I argue that perception was commonly understood in ancient Israel as a means of positively and negatively affecting the environment and that it was this affective dimension of Israelite thought that prompted biblical writers to describe the character of an individual by his or her physical qualities.

This paper reexamines Philo’s metaphor of “spiritual childbirth,” that process by which the male philosopher allegorically assumes the role of a “virgin” woman in order to produce the spiritual offspring of God (i.e., wisdom). Drawing upon the prevailing Hellenistic medical theories about reproduction and aging of Philo’s time, I argue that Philo’s perception of the spiritual child bearer is not  that  of  a callow  youth,  unacquainted  with  the  pleasures  of  the  flesh,  but  rather  an  experienced sage who, like an older woman, has suffered through the bearing of fleshly children  (encyclical knowledge), cast off his “feminine ways” (sense-perception), and has now returned to a virginal masculine state, dry and ready to bear spiritual children (wisdom). This process is exemplified in Philo’s interpretation of the biblical figure of Sarah, an aged woman-turned-virgin. Although seemingly a positive adoption of feminine imagery, this understanding of the philosophical pursuit reinforces the negative portrayal of women found elsewhere in Philo’s writings.

Annotated bibliographic reference list of scholarly works related to the "evil eye" phenomenon in biblical literature. Categories covered include General Overviews, Theoretical Explanations, the evil eye in the Ancient Near East, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Greece and Rome, New Testament, Rabbinic Literature, Early Christian Literature, Islamic Tradition, and Biblical Reception History

Educators have traditionally relied upon written assignments and exams to assess student comprehension. This paper explored how teachers might instead use “digital storytelling” to assess student progress in a biblical studies classroom. Simply put, digital stories are short videos that use audio narration, music, still pictures, and video clips to tell a personal story or describe a historical or cultural phenomenon. This medium is becoming increasingly popular among educators because of its ability to test student comprehension, practice research skills, and increase digital literacy in a manner that is fun and engaging for students. This paper assessed the benefits and challenges of using digital storytelling in the biblical studies classroom. In particular, we  considered how the medium can be used to trace the reception history of important biblical figures. We argued that digital stories provide a more appropriate medium for analyzing the reception history of a biblical figure than traditional forms of assessments, since they can display a broader range of source material and thus more accurately represent the variety of mediums in which the reception history of a biblical figure manifests itself (texts, two-dimensional and three-dimension art, music, and oral narratives). Examples for the paper were drawn from two recent undergraduate liberal arts classes in which students traced the reception of such figures as Jesus, Jezebel, Hannah, Priscilla, and Sarah.

Syncretism is a cross-cultural phenomenon. As it has been traditionally understood, syncretism occurs when the cultural values of one group impose themselves upon the belief system of another group. Each group is thought to be self-contained and unadulterated prior to the melding. By such a definition, Christianity has often been understood as a “pristine” cultural system that became “polluted” over time by non-Christian beliefs. Cognitive scientists have challenged this understanding. Syncretism, they argue, is not the blending of two separate, self-contained cultural systems but a selective blending of an infinite number of conceptual structures. By such a reading, no culture exists in a pure, unadulterated form; rather, religious traditions are constantly transformed by new data, and each community must negotiate between multiple conceptual frameworks as it formulates its beliefs. This paper considers how cognitive models might enhance the study of ancient syncretism. By way of example, I focus on early Christian syncretisms involving Lady Wisdom. A semi-divine figure from the biblical book of Proverbs, Lady Wisdom was a popular image in early Christianity: to some, she was a type for the mother of Jesus; to others, she was the Holy Spirit or the Christ Logos. Such diversity of interpretation was possible, even within a single community, because early Christians simultaneously blended ideas from multiple Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian conceptual frameworks. This paper uses the syncretisms of Lady Wisdom to reexamine the nature of ancient syncretism and explore the challenges of applying modern cognitive models to the study of ancient religion. Questions considered include: How does one recover the cognitive frameworks of ancient communities? How does the elite provenance of our sources bias our access to the cognitive frameworks of non-elite Christians? Can universal models even be applied to specific historical circumstances?

Christianity was destined to become a dominant religion, wasn’t it? Zoroastrianism is fated to disappear, isn’t it? As Religious Studies scholars, we know that a variety of factors influence the emergence and development of religious traditions. Yet, situated in the present, our students often think that the current states of religions were inevitable. They often have difficulty conceptualizing the inherent complexity within religious traditions. In the spring semester of 2015, I intend to use interactive fictions to help my undergraduate students think about the emergence of Christianity and the various ways it would have been perceived by individuals in the ancient world. In this THATCamp session, we experimented with this genre. We made our own interactive fiction and considered the pedagogical possibilities and limitations that this genre has for the study of the history of religions. We used the program inklewriter (www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter/) to construct our story, and the topic of our story and its overarching message was determined at the meeting by the participants. A link to our basic (unfinished) narrative has been included in the links section of this entry.

Teachers often complain that it is difficult to motivate students to learn. Lee Sheldon proposed a novel solution to this problem: run the classroom as if it were a multiplayer video game. In Sheldon’s classroom, students are assigned different “quests” to complete (e.g., quizzes, exams). For each quest a student completes, he or she earns a given number of points (e.g., up to 5 points for a quiz, up to 400 points for an exam). After earning enough points, students achieve a new rank. Since ranks equate to letter grades (e.g., Level 1=F, Level 12=A), students are motivated to complete tasks and achieve the highest rank possible. Under this game system, students have a better grasp of how they are doing in class at any given time. They have fun seeing their scores rise and feel more in control of their own progress.

Sheldon’s “game” concept fit well with the content of his class: he was teaching students about video games. In this session, THATCamp participants and I discussed the possibilities of using Sheldon’s game system in other courses. We considered: What benefits does the game system have for the humanities classroom? What challenges does it pose? How can one implement the game structure without distracting from the content of the course? Can the game be used in large, introductory lecture courses with 90+ people? What technology could be used to facilitate its implementation?

Why do Jews and Christians consistently portray their interaction with God as an act of speaking? Why do they rarely think of human-divine relationships as a wrestling match or a dance? Each of these images has precedent within the biblical text, yet only one of them has continually captivated the hearts of Jews and Christians throughout history. According to cognitive anthropologist Paschal Boyer, the reason for such discrepancy in the reception of religious ideas lies in the way that the human brain processes information. Religious concepts are inherently “counterintuitive,” that is, they defy our expectations about the world around us. Yet, religious concepts that are too counterintuitive, too divorced from normal sensory experiences, are harder to remember and thus less likely to survive within popular religious imagination than those concepts that conform to a community’s sensory expectations. In this paper, I explore how sensory expectation and counterintuitive representations influenced the transmission of biblical traditions in early Judaism. In particular, I consider how Abraham interacts with his God in the book of Genesis and which of these interactions are remembered by early Jewish authors. It is my contention that those divine-human interactions that conform to the sensory expectations of the community are more likely to be remembered by early Jewish communities than those interactions that do not. I also consider what constitutes a “normal” sensory experience in ancient Judaism and how groups modify traditions to accommodate their sensory expectations.

Each generation has produced its own model for explaining how the Pentateuch was formed. Jubilees had its angel, the early Christians their Logos, Wellhausen his JEDP, and Noth his tradition complexes. While it is certainly important that our students are aware of how individuals in the past have explained this complex unit of material, such models often say  more about the perspectives and values of the individuals who produce them than about the formation of biblical tradition. In this paper, I offer an alternative model, one more suited to our current students’ experiences as the consumers of cultural knowledge that takes into account recent theories of textual formation and multiple authorship. Using illustrative examples from Wikipedia and the Abrahamic narratives, I  demonstrate how we can use modern forms of collaborative technology to teach students about , communal authority, accidents of transmission, and alternative biblical traditions. While I recognize that the use of modern technological forms to describe the production of ancient texts is anachronistic, it is my contention that such a “Collaborative” model of Pentateuchal authorship can better illustrate to our students the fluid, anonymous nature of Pentateuchal traditions during their formative years than more traditional models can.

One hundred years ago, biblical scholars believed that Israelite brains worked differently than modern brains do. The Israelites, they argued, were more primitive. Their thought was impressionistic, passionate, and synthetic. Modern individuals are more evolved. Their thought is cool, rational, and analytical. Current scholarship, however, no longer believes that ancient cultures were physically less evolved than modern cultures, and most scholars, if asked, would likely say that the Israelites did not think differently than we do. They just used different metaphors to describe their world. Yet, the suspicion that Israelite thought was in some way different from that of modern cultures continues to haunt contemporary biblical scholarship, as grammars and literary scholars alike teach students that the Israelites lacked the sophisticated descriptive capabilities that our own abstract rationalities demand.

At the heart of this debate lie the human senses. Whether asserting the distinctiveness of Israelite thought or exploring Israelite metaphor, modern scholars have relied upon sensory language to delineate the contours of Israelite cognitive activity. In this paper, I examine this sensory rhetoric. In particular, I argue that how early twentieth century scholars understood sensory experience profoundly influenced how they described Israelite cognition and that the perceptual models that these early twentieth century scholars established continue to influence biblical scholarship, thereby perpetuating the notion that the Israelites fundamentally thought differently than we do. By examining how sensory rhetoric influenced this particular subset of academic discourse, I suggest that the rhetoric that scholars use today to describe knowledge production often reflects more about their own sensory preconceptions than it does about the cognitive experience of the cultures they study.

The book of Proverbs is full of corporeal imagery. Whether commanding the sage to “keep straight the path of [his] feet” (Prov 4:26), promising that Wisdom will reward his commitment by placing “on [his] head a fair garland” (Prov 4:9), or admonishing against inappropriate bodily behavior (e.g., having “haughty eyes” or a “lying tongue”; Prov 6:17), the text consistently utilizes corporeal imagery to proscribe to its audiences the appropriate behavior for the pursuit of wisdom. This abundance of this imagery begs the question: how should these metaphors be read? Do they simply evoke mental pictures in the mind of the readers, or do they evoke the entire body such that the reader actually physically experiences the sensations described? In other words, is the pursuit of wisdom intended to be a purely intellectual endeavor or a pursuit that engages the entire corporeal experience?

In this paper, I explore the ways in which the human perceptual facilities (sight, hearing, etc.) and their physical apparati (the eye, ear, etc.) interact within Prov 1–9 to create a complex web of metaphors about the pursuit of wisdom. Drawing upon modern anthropological and cognitive studies on the embodied nature of metaphor, I argue that the pursuit of wisdom is not purely an abstract, mental activity; rather, it is an embodied enterprise, relying upon the wholistic, corporeal experience of its readers to communicate its meaning. In this reading, metaphors are more than just literary devices; they are insights into the ways human beings develop and communicate abstract meaning. By employing such bodily metaphors, the text can turn what is at once an incomprehensible and abstract concept—the pursuit of wisdom—into an endeavor that can be experienced in a very corporeal fashion within the rhetoric of these texts.

In this paper, I argue that an “embodied” literary approach can provide a fresh angle from which to read biblical texts, one that recognizes both the literary artistry of the text and also the various levels upon which that artistry has operated. Many literary readings seem to operate with the unspoken assumption that the “mind” and the “body” are two distinct spheres of study. Texts become mental discourses, with little or no direct relationship to the lived, corporeal experiences of the people that produced or received them, while the body is regulated to the realm of sociology or anthropology. Contra this presupposition, I argue that words, especially those that reflect the human sensorimotor processes, are effective means by which to convey meaning precisely because they invoke the embodied experience of the authors and audiences who utilized and encountered them. Building upon the work of cognitive philosopher Mark Johnson, I examine one particular text, Jacob’s encounter at Peniel in Gen 32:23–32, and demonstrate that biblical texts create meaning for various audiences by skillfully weaving together a wholistic, multimodal experience of the human sensorimotor realms. In doing so, I show that an “embodied” literary approach can help scholars recognize the way biblical texts appeal to both the particular embodied experience of its author and original tradents and also more universally to the lived experience of the various peoples who have heard or read the biblical texts throughout history.

Having taught this course before (see the syllabus for the Fall 2013 semester), I decided to redesign the syllabus for my Fall 2014 semester to make it more like a multiplayer game. The goal was to create a more interactive experience in a class with 50-100 students. Students were told that they had to "save" Georgia State University by learning about the world's major religious traditions. Students could go up in "levels" (raise their grade) by gaining "experience points" by completing quizzes, coming to class, and taking exams.