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55 4 The Dynamics of Scripturalization The Ancient Near East Hugh R. Page Jr. The launching of the new Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS) and the programmatic vision articulated for it by Vincent Wimbush in the introductory essay of this volume create an opportunity for reflection on an enormous number of issues related to the creation of “scriptures” and the social, political, and other dynamics that obtain when individuals and other social aggregates inscribe themselves on, read their life experiences through, or employ as basic building blocks for their identity construction and community formation, texts of various genres. In particular , scripturalization itself appears to convey, both covertly and subtly, some interesting issues, themes, motifs, and tropes. In my several endeavors as scholar, priest, academic administrator, and public intellectual, it has been my experience that the chief vehicle for the communication of the aforementioned has been the authoritative texts (i.e., the “scriptures”) generated by the process itself. The database on which I will base my observations consists of the multifaceted anthology of texts that has come to be known as the Hebrew Bible, Tanak, Old Testament, or First Testament, as well as the corpus of extant texts hailing from ancient Egypt, Syria-Palestine, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia. I have taken seriously the arguments made by Wimbush in his introductory essay about the starting point for the new institute’s endeavors, the life experience of the marginal and subaltern; and so I have used such arguments as an opportunity to establish a tone for my remarks that accentuates exploration and play. The linking of these two processes is rarely given positive sanction by the institutions in which academic research takes place. Nonetheless both have long been the lifeblood of those specialists charged with the stewardship of intellectual and folkloric traditions throughout the world. Whether we are speaking of the ummia (“school-father”) of the Sumerian edubba (“tablet house,” “school”),1 the African griot, or the faculty of today’s colleges and universities, scholarship requires mastery of established disciplinary concepts, investigation of hitherto unexplored vistas, and the free-associative interaction with and response to a host of data drawn from the length and breadth of the human experience. It is both an art and a way of life. By reengaging the body of primary texts with which I routinely work, my goal is to do some preliminary reconnaissance on the literary territory under consideration—from a perspective that is oblique—and offer an initial report of my findings. I also hope to take an Hugh R. Page Jr. 56 important step toward embracing the kind of intellectual activity that Cornel West described more than a decade ago: “The central task of postmodern Black intellectuals is to stimulate, hasten, and enable alternative perceptions and practices by dislodging prevailing discourses and powers. This can be done only by intense intellectual work and engaged insurgent praxis.”2 Such work, for West, is best undertaken within settings that privilege collective effort and promote the building of infrastructures that stimulate, promote, and affirm intellectual activity on the part of black scholars. These endeavors, and the institutions that support them, enable the unique experiences of African Americans to be of central rather than peripheral concern in the larger arena of humanistic and social scientific research and open the way for new forms of scholarship that are global in scope: Black intellectual work and Black collective insurgency must be rooted in the specificity of Afro-American life and history; but they are also inextricably linked to the American, European, and African elements which shape and mold them. Such work and insurgency are explicitly particularist though not exclusivist—hence they are international in outlook and practice.3 The launch of the ISS presents me with an opportunity to look at my discipline and its texts without having to set aside or negate the sociocultural particularities that have shaped my identity. It also allows me to use these ideas and experiences as points of departure for an examination of those aspects of my perception of black diasporan life that resonate with other subaltern peoples and to be mindful of them as I reconsider a discrete set of ancient texts. Issues, Themes, and Tropes: General Observations In the work I have conducted thus far on literary corpora in the ancient Near East, I have noted a number of distinct activities concomitant with the formation of authoritative text collections—that is, bodies of lore to which individuals and groups ascribe controlling influence in the...

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