It happened again. Yesterday I finally finished the nearly final draft of my SBL paper on the verbal aspect of the historical present. The paper has taken a completely different direction than I had intended in the beginning. I essentially had intended to expand on my description o f the discourse function of the HP as found in the forthcoming Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament. Various issues I came across in the literature survey continued to lead me in a different direction. I began working on this survey in July, just to avoid the pressure of trying to complete my second paper in a short time line. But the more I read, the more I ended up shifting my task list.
What ended up coming out of all of this research was really three different papers, each with a slightly different focus. One was the expanded description of the pragmatic effects achieved by the HP. The second is the paper I will actually be presenting in the Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics section, addressing the thorny issue of the aspect of the HP. The third paper is one that I was completely unprepared to stumble across, it just happened in my research. The further I read, the more confirmation I found for the ideas, regardless of what I wanted to find. I wrote up a 12 page summary of what I found, and will set it aside until the New Year. It will probably be the most significant paper I have written to date, but there is little joy in it.
My verbal aspect paper continued to grow as well, based on the amount of attention the topic had received and based on the significance of the HP to the overall tense-aspect debate. It now weighs in a 30 pages, and still needs a bit more content added to one section. The content is written, I set it aside yesterday to begin work (finally) on my other paper for the Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew section. I began shifting gears yesterday from Greek to Hebrew, trying to figure out how I would tackle this paper. The folks in the Hebrew section scare me. They don’t just use linguistics, they are linguists, and from some of the top universities around the world. They shred poorly formulated ideas so fast that it makes your head spin, I have seen it. The last time I presented a paper there was 2005, my very first SBL paper.
Like I said, I set the Greek paper aside yesterday, and planned on beginning work on the Hebrew one. As is my habit, I read the literature with a basic idea of the direction I will go until things come together. I did a post earlier this summer about waking up and “seeing” the HP paper in my head—the whole thing—I just needed to write it down. It just happened to happen on vacation, and my wife wasn’t well pleased that I got up at 3:00 am to write. Neither was my nephew sleeping on the couch in the living room. Well, it happened again, last night about 2:00 am.
Psalm 127
1 Unless the Lord builds the house,
They labor in vain who build it;
Unless the Lord guards the city,
The watchman keeps awake in vain.
2 It is vain for you to rise up early,
To retire late,
To eat the bread of painful labors;
For He gives to His beloved even in his sleep. (NASB)
I will not go so far as to say that the Lord has given me my paper, though I will gladly give Him credit for whatever good comes out of it. All I know is that I end up having most of my problems solved as I sleep. I “saw” the flow and outline of the Hebrew paper two hours ago. I saw what examples to use, what order to put them in, what anecdotes to use in the introduction. Now I just need to write it, and pray that I will not hit the kinds of snags I found in my last literature survey. I am running out of time. While my wife might affirm the truthiness of v. 2a, I love getting up early and reading. If I have learned or found something new in a day, it has been a good day despite whatever other things may have happened.
I have been fretting about getting started on my other paper. This increased with each passing week that my Greek paper drug on past Labor day. This experience reminds me again that my scholarly journey has really been more of a spiritual one. I am not talking about a path to enlightenment or something, but more an ongoing dependence on God to direct my path. I could recount bunches of times where I would hit a wall, not understand something, need access to a book, need a mentor that could teach me about some aspect of some obscure thing. Sometimes I would beat my head against a wall trying to do it on my own. Other times I moved straight to prayer about it, skipping the “striving” and “beating” part. Sure enough, there would be the improbable Google hit, the find in the used book store, the scholar that was willing to respond to my emailed question and devote some time to mentoring me. It has been a spiritual adventure, complete with discipline and pruning of things like, oh say pride and self-confidence. There have also been times of great blessing, like seeing someone use what you wrote to edify and build up others in the Church, or to solve some problem in their research or Bible translation.
My anxiety about my Hebrew paper has been dispelled. I still have a lot let (like the whole thing), but this morning was a great reminder that solving problems is really a pretty simple thing for the Lord, and He is far better at it than I am. My wife has been on vacation for a week now, returning from touring the fall color in New England Saturday morning. I have been writing like a fiend since she left, typically rising by 4 am so as not to squander my morning. I have played with my kids, made sure they were fed, kept the house fairly clean, and tried to balance scholarship with being a good dad and housekeeper. I find it a very hard thing to do, being very drawn to one extreme or the other. But the glimpse I saw this morning of the paper just saved me who knows how many hours brainstorming, writing and deleting. God is so very good to us, and honors efforts to seek Him. I do not completely understand why, but I am very thankful that He does this. Gott go, time to get this paper out of my head.
