FINAL SBL THOUGHTS: Here are some random thoughts about the conference that I've been meaning to post.

One paper I should note is Ken Penner and Ian Scott, "Publishing Critical Texts on the Web: Issues in Mounting the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha," in the CARG session on Monday morning. This told a little about the history, organization, and objectives of the project and also discussed technical issues. [UPDATE on 24 Nov: Here's a photo of Ken Penner giving his part of the presentation.]

I also attended the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism Section session on Monday evening and I especially enjoyed the papers by Kelley Coblentz Bautch on "To Rest in the West, to Feast in the East? How Geography and Traditions Relating to Afterlife Interrelate in Early Jewish Mystical Literature" (afterwards she and I discussed whether the realms Enoch visits in the second half of the Book of the Watchers were earthly or otherworldly) and by Andrea Lieber on "'How Great is His Measure': Mapping the Divine (Male) Body upon the Cosmos" (which applied "cognitive mapping theory" to the Shiur Qomah mystical texts that describe God's enormous body). After the session the steering group met for dinner and we have hot topics lined up for 2006, including a session to celebrate the EJCM group's tenth year.

On Tuesday morning I attended the Pseudepigrapha Section session. Tuesday morning sessions are frequently poorly attended, because people are leaving throughout the morning, and the very big and not very full room was freezing cold. But the low attendance was not indicative of low quality in the papers. They were excellent. My favorites were Daniel Machiela's "Divinely Revealed History and Geography in Noah's Vision: Genesis Apocryphon cols. 13-17" and Kelley Coblentz Bautch's "All about Eve: How the First Woman Fares in Enochic Literature." Daniel had an excellent handout (which is surprisingly hard to produce): it translated the main text, had relevent excerpts of parallel texts in the margin, and included an outline of the paper. Kelley's was the last paper of the last session, which must have been frustrating, but the problem of the origin and development of Eve traditions in Genesis and the Enochic literature is fascinating and I stayed for the whole thing -- after which I ran to my room to get my suitcases and managed to meet the 12:00 noon airport shuttle.

One session I really wanted to go to was the Pseudepigrapha session on "Jewish Pseudepigrapha in the Slavonic Tradition." Alas, it was on Sunday morning and this conflicted with the biblioblogging session. I hear it was excellent. It was too bad also that the Pseudepigrapha session on Aramaic Levi was canceled.

I heard many other good papers during the conference, but I don't have time and energy to comment on all of them. Apologies if I've left yours out.

One last thing: this year was the most confusing I've seen in terms of publicizing where sessions take place. I am not sure it was a good decision to remove room listings from the main program book. I appreciate that this made it easier to update the room bookings online to note late changes, but even the downloadable PDF files (which I printed out) had a lot of errors. Next time I will know to ignore them and just go with the Annual Meetings At-A-Glance booklet distributed at the meeting, which did have accurate information.

I have a few pictures to add to the conference posts, but I think that will have to wait until tomorrow.

UPDATE (24 November): Several photos now added to conference posts. I had also meant to mention another paper in that Tuesday Pseudepigrapha session: Don Polaski, "1 Enoch: Writing the Sectarian Subject," which looked at 1 Enoch from the perspective of post-colonial theory. Incidentally, you can find abstracts for all these papers archived here.

And finally, let me second Mark Goodacre's comment:

The SBL is an enormous meeting, and perhaps because of that fact one can take the organisation for granted. In spite of the odd problem here and there, in my experience there are only ever minor glitches. The meeting is superbly organized, and it struck me this year that we really ought to say thank you a bit more often. I suppose that because we can't put a face on the organizers, we often don't take the opportunity to praise them.

In particular, Matthew Collins gets lots of flack (not least from me) when things go wrong, but he deserves great praise for all his work on making them run very smoothly most of the time. Thanks Matthew.