The State of the Field of Hebrew Bible Study: In Conversation with John J. Collins, The Bible After Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age (Eerdmans, 2005)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviews and responses to John J. Collins, The Bible After Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age (Eerdmans, 2005). The respondents were asked to offer “a few comments building on the book, aimed at spurring a broader discussion among colleagues about where things are going in our field.” Background The following reflections come from a forum on the state of the field of Hebrew Bible study in the Columbia University Hebrew Bible Seminar on March 22, 2006. The primary focus for the forum was reviews and responses to John J. Collins, The Bible After Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age (Eerdmans, 2005). The respondents were asked to offer “a few comments building on the book, aimed at spurring a broader discussion among colleagues about where things are going in our field.” The discussion that followed was lively, and the hope is that sharing these contributions, with much of their oral character preserved, may be useful for further reflection by a wider circle.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.034 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".