The Hermeneutics of Chutzpah: A Disquisition on the Value/s of “Critical Investigation of the Bible”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this address, I argue that the value of the Society of Biblical Literature as a learned society and a scholarly community must be measured not by the experiences of those who flourish but by those who struggle. To live up to our own values, and to be of value to society at large, we must commit to equity and justice; we must engage in our teaching and scholarship with a spirit of collegiality, collaboration, and openness to change. To do so we must be accountable to one another as scholars and as human beings. As one way forward, I suggest a “hermeneutics of chutzpah” that challenges the norms of biblical scholarship that were developed in Europe of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. One model for this hermeneutical mode can be found in African American biblical interpretation. The hermeneutics of chutzpah exercised by African American scholars benefits other marginalized people as well as those who have traditionally situated themselves at the core of our guild by helping us all to perceive the workings of whiteness, and to engage more honestly with the deep structures of our intellectual enterprise.
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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 | 0.025 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.104 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".