SBL Program Book is Up

The SBL program book is finally up on their website (here). I will be following Frederick Greenspahn in the Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures section on Sunday at 9 AM:

S24-147

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Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures
11/24/2013
9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: Key 6 – Hilton

Jacqueline Lapsley, Princeton Theological Seminary, Presiding
Frederick E. Greenspahn, Florida Atlantic University
Canon and Codex (30 min)
Daniel O. McClellan, Trinity Western University
YHWH and El: The Conceptual Blending of Their Divine Profiles (30 min)
Rebecca Hancock, Harvard University
“They Were Struck Dumb Like a Stone”: The Rhetoric of Silence in Exod 13:17–15:18 (30 min)
Kevin Joseph Haley, Saint John’s Seminary (Camarillo, CA)
The Poor One Cried and the Lord Heard Him’ (Ps 34:7): The Significance of the Psalms in Developing a Theology of the Poor (30 min)
Margaret Odell, Saint Olaf College
All Lives are Mine: Ezekiel, Child Sacrifice, and Political Theology (30 min)

My abstract is here:

The point of departure for this paper is the theory that the patriarchal and exodus traditions represent originally independent traditions of Israel’s ethnogenesis. The most explicit—and perhaps original—attempt to link the two traditions and their concepts of God (Exod 6:3) acknowledges distinct divine names associated with the two traditions, namely YHWH and El Shaddai. Quite different theological profiles emerge from the disentangling of the traditions most closely connected with those names, but by the time of the composition of Exod 6:3, those profiles were fusing. Within the resulting composite view of Israel’s God, certain concepts associated with the earlier profiles were emphasized while others were marginalized. New concepts also developed out of the process and the socio-religious exigencies of the authors and editors. The complex and tensile conceptualization of YHWH found in the Hebrew Bible’s final form represents several centuries of conceptual blending and innovation against the backdrop of Israel’s scriptural heritage. Scholars of early Israelite religion have dedicated a great deal of attention to the socio-religious impetuses for and results of the conflation of YHWH and El, but there is little that examines the cognitive processes that may have attended and influenced that conflation. This study seeks to fill that need. It will first isolate and schematize each tradition’s conceptualizations of its central deity, paying close attention to the centrality of the imagery to that deity’s representation. It will then evaluate the conceptual blending of the two schemas, highlighting the analogous and complementary concepts that facilitated that blending, as well as the conditions that contributed to the development of new divine conceptualizations. The fundamental goal is insight into why God was represented in the texts the way he was.