ASOR and SBL Conferences

I spent the week before Thanksgiving in San Diego at the overlapping conferences of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). I presented a paper at ASOR titled Enoch and Sothis: Is there a connection between Genesis chronology and Egyptian King-lists? I also attended several interesting panels at SBL. One intriguing presentation came from Mark Goodacre, who demonstrated some places where Matthew’s underlying Greek matched that in John or Mark in similar stories. I also enjoyed some book panels One focused on Paula Fredriksen’s new book When Chrisians Were Jews: The first generation. Another focused on Joel Marcus’s new book John the Baptist in History and Theolgy.

I’m not sure about this but it seemed that the traditional SBL book sellers’ exhibition was somewhat smaller than usual. There were ten aisles but four of them were only half aisles. I think past exhibit halls had more aisles, almost all full. I’d have to check past program guides to see how many exhibitors there were.