SBL: The Bible as Colonial Handbook
Biblical scholarship is being reshaped by anti-colonial ideology at the expense of history and context.
In Adelaide, the once proud City of Churches, so named by Anthony Trollope in 1872 in a book on Australia and New Zealand, the meeting of the International Society for Biblical Literature was taking place, incognito. No banners, no welcome signs, left Adelaideans unaware that SBL, founded in 1880, is the oldest and largest society of Biblical scholars, with over 8,500 members across 100 countries.
The upwards of 500 participants, coming from 39 countries, must have felt as if they were members of a secret society, as they had to find their way without the benefit of signage to the relevant lecture rooms in the large and impressive campus of ‘UA’, the newly amalgamated University of Adelaide and University of South Australia.
As I searched for the SBL registration hub following the map on my phone, I did notice one sign that kept reappearing on fences and walls that read: “The Adelaide University supports the lawful freedom of expression and allows peaceful protests by its students that do not reasonably cause others to feel threatened.”
Such is the ‘new normal’ on university campuses, which have become hotbeds of anti-Israel, antisemitic protests that victimised Jewish students and faculty alike since October 7th 2023, and which the hearings of Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion have documented in raw detail. In fact, this and other aspects of the ‘new normal’ are what drew me to attend the largest conference on Biblical Studies in the Southern Hemisphere.
Fortunately, during the University’s recess, there were no such actions on display, but I wanted to see how the bedrock tradition on which Western civilization and its universities were founded was holding up against a more insidious internal assault by the current academic zeitgeist. I did not have to look far to discern deep fissures in what was once holy ground.
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