Shemot/Exodus 13:4-8 from a modern Mikraot Gedolot (Wikipedia)
Jace Clayton, who performs music as DJ /Rupture, has an elegant demonstration of this in the Silver Shed gallery in New York right now. A spindle attached to the wall of the gallery is full of CD-ROMs, free to visitors; if you take a CD home and stick it into your computer, you'll find that it contains all of Clayton's commercially available music - 130 MP3s, 550 Mb, six and a half hours of music. One catch: Clayton has destroyed all of the metadata for the tracks. Each file is named something like "DJ_Rupture.mp3" (you can't have 130 files with the same name, of course, so the punctuation varies). Track names, album information, dates have all been erased; if you dump the MP3s into iTunes, there's the artist's name but nothing else.
A photo of the Merneptah stele
(Cairo Museum) from Wikipedia
On this view biblical studies is (almost) all about metadata. Whether one is a secular scholar, interested primarily in the history, culture or literature of the Ancient Levant, or a religious reader, interested primarily in the contemporary significance of an authoritative Scripture, it is the metadata which makes meaning.
In one case the primary set of metadata is historical: date, place of writing, author if known, other works from the same genre etc... in the other this set plays some part, but the primary metadata is the canon, whose other works provide a framework and context for reading, along with the tradition of interpreters and interpretations who have passed this canon on to us.
It is small wonder that "the guild" has such an identity crisis at present, we have moved from a situation where the religious readers were thoroughly dominant, through one where the "historians" (for want of a better term) have become dominant in the academy, but in which those willing to pay for our "product" (publications and teaching) are very predominantly still religious readers. Recognising the metadata that gives meaning to the texts, and the relative importance of different sets of such data, can help clarify this issue... ¶ 4:17 PM
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This boggles my mind. I'm tired of interacting with people that are smarter than me. I think I'm going to reactivate my Facebook account.
By 
David Ker, at
December 7, 2008 11:03 AM
In this context, the comment made by April DeConick as point 2 in her post about dating our sources is relevant. The fact that the text of the canon is not the original text, but a composite formed from a range of manuscripts copied centuries after the originals were written causes significant challenges for the average religious reader. Most would prefer just to ignore this.
