Bible Scholars to Gather at Boston College

Chestnut Hill, MA – The Boston College Institute for the Liberal Arts is hosting an academic conference entitled “The Spirit of Scholarship: Biblical and Mesopotamian Studies in the Roman Catholic Academy”. An international team of over 20 scholars in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible with expertise in a range of sub-disciplines including biblical theology and Mesopotamian archaeology will gather to discuss the trajectory of their field with an eye to the accomplishments of Bible scholarship since Vatican II, and their significance for the Roman Catholic Church.

The conference will run Sept. 22-24 and cover such topics as ethics in literature, the control and use of knowledge, and divination in ancient Judean culture as it interacted with the larger Mesopotamian world. There will also be discussion of the importance of the Al-Yahudu tablets, a collection of writings connected to Judean exiles in Babylon from the 6th century BCE, which were discovered in Iraq in 1999.

A plenary session, open to the public on Sept. 22 will feature Prof. Mark Smith of Princeton Theological Seminary whose scholarly work has focused on using Ugaritic literature as a backdrop for understanding how beliefs about God originated and developed in Israelite society.

For more information visit: https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/schools/stm/continuing-education/campus-events.html