Anwar Arifin and Daniele Soares, our researchers, participated in the European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS) annual conference in Leuven from June 20 to 23. We asked about their presentations, and here’s what they shared!
Daniele's thoughts on her presentation:
"I attended several sessions whose discussions were relevant to my dissertation topic or simply interesting. My participation was in the session “The Perception of Persia by the Different Versions of Ezra-Nehemiah” with the presentation “The Representation of Persia, Work, and Food in Ezra 9.8-9.” The experience was inspiring and rewarding, as I received feedback from leading scholars in the field about my ongoing research."
Anwar participated in the ”Anthropology and the Bible” research panel session with his presentation titled "Michaelis and the Biblical Past: History, Language, and Studying the Ancient Near East". In his words, this is what the presentation was about:
"I try to explore the intellectual history of Ancient Near East Studies and how it emerged from a certain paradigm of understanding the Biblical Scriptures. The common understanding (from intellectual historians) is that some early modern Biblical scholars attempted to "prove" the historicity of the Bible and thus leading to excavation and expansion towards the Middle Eastern region. But my presentation tries to complicate this picture by exploring Johann David Michaelis' theory of language. Michaelis has been credited as an important figure in the emergence of modern biblical scholarship, because he was one of the first to incorporate anthropology, archaeology, botany, and other forms of scientific methodologies into the study of the Bible. He was also the one who planned for the Danish expedition of Arabia which ended up bringing back a complete copy of the Cuneiform scripture which would end up becoming vital for the study of Ancient Near Eastern societies.
My presentation goes deeper to see the genealogy behind Michaelis' thought. Simply put, the presentation goes into the reason why Michaelis thought it was important to study the Bible with historical evidence."