Episode 124 - Simeon Chavel: "Embrace the chaos."

Associate Professor Simeon Chavel from the Divinity Schools shares how he found his way to becoming a Hebrew Bible scholar at the University of Chicago through multiple chances. As he continues his research, teaching, and administrative work, Professor Chavel keeps his opportunities open, multitasks, and finds intriguing research topics to keep him passionate. Tune in for this week's episode to feel inspired by the Professor's work and outlook on life. 

Transcript

Stephen 00:00
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Simeon Chavel of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Professor Chavel is an associate professor of the Hebrew Bible and associate faculty in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

He's also the author of the book, Oracular Law and Priestly Historiography in the Torah, and serves on the board of both the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies and the Cedar Digital Humanities Project. He is also the editor of Marav, a journal for the study of the Northwest Semitic languages and literatures. He's here today to talk with us about approaching scripture as literature, the various alternative paths he started down or considered, and how he became a University of Chicago professor.

Professor Chavel, good morning and welcome to The Course. How's it going?

Simeon Chavel 00:46
It's good. thanks for having me here. 

Stephen 00:48
Absolutely. To start off to just orient our listeners, could you please tell us what your role is at UChicago and just, you know, in kind of like layman's terms what it is that you do there.

Simeon Chavel 00:59
I have an appointment. I'm a faculty member in the Divinity School, which is a graduate school, and the whole school's interest is focused on the study of religion. Ancient, contemporary, from one end of the world to the next, world religions, not so well-known religions. What is religion? What do people do? Why do they do it? What's its effect? How is it integrated into the world and how human is it?

Stephen 01:31
Okay. A lot of questions there that I hope we'll be following up on, but just to help orient people who might not be familiar, like, can you tell me a little bit about, I guess, are there people at divinity schools coming at it purely from an academic perspective? Are there people like training for, uh, some type of like religious role? Like, can you just sort of walk, what the makeup actually looks like? 

Simeon Chavel 01:52
Yeah, we have a variety of graduate programs. There are three master's programs and one PhD program. The three master's programs, the largest one is academic study of religion and it's pretty open ended. You pick concentrations as you come in and you focus on aspects of religion in general or particular religious traditions.

There is a preordination program, three year masters of divinity, where students, are doing what the academic students are doing, plus an extra year of training around community leadership, spiritual community leadership. The bulk of it is oriented towards Christians, but other religions are represented by students as well. 

The PhD program has a wide range of areas. They're called areas or somewhat equivalent to departments, but they're called areas because it's a little bit more fluid between them, that cover the range of religions and kinds of study of religion that you might find around the world and that professors are interested in.

Stephen 03:13
The bio on your UChicago page says that you studied literature of the Hebrew Bible, the religion of ancient Israel and Judea and their relationship. We oftentimes ask people if, you know, what they wanted to be as a kid and if that had any relationship to where they ended up now.

I don't know. Did you imagine yourself as a scholar of the literature of the Hebrew Bible, when you were a kid? Or if not, what did you think you might end up doing?

Simeon Chavel 03:38
Not at all. I had other kinds of interests completely. Some kind of classic ones for children. I think when I was leaving high school, getting into college, I was interested in electrical engineering, particularly laser optics was a draw for me early on I kind of liked reading, so I double majored in college in math.

I started out double majoring in math and English Lit, and it was only in my last semester of college that I discovered people read the Hebrew Bible, people use concepts from literary analysis, to read the Hebrew Bible. And that was very surprising and interesting. And so that's how I got into it.

I was very taken with the kinds of analyses that were being done. I'd come from a traditional background. And so, scripture had its own special way of being interpreted and to have this put into the framework of literature and worrying about if it's a narrative plot and character development, and if it's poetry then, the poetic voice and sentiment and things like that, that just made it so much more interesting and accessible.

Stephen 04:56
Yeah. So, I mean, just to clarify, like you're talking about reading religious scripture from the same standpoint that classes typically read works of literature, right? Like literary fiction.

Simeon Chavel 05:08
Exactly right. 

Stephen 05:09
Is that a relatively new or a sort of, recently, of mainstream way to approach these texts? Or does that have a longer history than what I realized? 

Simeon Chavel 05:18
It has two major phases. The first is what people call biblical criticism, and that starts in the late 18th century and, really comes into its own in the 19th century. And we're kind of living in the discipline that follows ever since. And there are presuppositions that one ought to read Biblical works as literature, but not as secular literature, as literature in some sense inspired by the divine, but to focus more on the literary aspects, the human aspects that go into producing literature, writing and copying and disseminating in order to emphasize human agency, and then you can write a kind of history out of it.

Once you have human actors, then you can rewrite history out of the actors. What were they talking about? What were their positions on it? How did their positions change over time? Roughly in the 1980s, a long, long time into the field, there was a kind of reaction to biblical criticism. Because biblical criticism had a sub kind of field or specialty or aspect called source criticism, where you're receiving an ancient text, and ancient texts are not first published in pristine condition and then copied in pristine condition, even scripture.

And, and maybe, especially scripture isn't. and so that would fall under like the human aspect of it. People will produce a text that isn't perfect. They don't have editing processes like we do. When you write on papyrus or parchment, that is super expensive. You can't afford to go back and make too many corrections. So you do your best. And then the next copyist comes along and it's only one copy at a time. There are no print runs. And so someone might see some glitches in the text and introduce corrections, but the corrections aren't real corrections.

They're phantom corrections because they're, the mistakes are original to the text. And so you can get a lot of processes. Then if you have two works writing, let's say on the same character or period or event. Another person comes along, has access to the two works and says, I've got two works on the same thing.

I'm going to get them onto one scroll and try to produce a master text that holds them all together and not worry about synthesizing them to something readable. Now you've got a text that people can't really read so well, but if you kind of blur your vision, like those, you know, vision tests that people do, what number do you see in these colors, you get the outline of the story. 

And so now you've got like generations of this kind of work. And so what ends up happening is Bible scholars end up pulverizing the text into little units. And so there was a backlash against that in the 1980s to read it as literature, which was meant as a kind of code for reading it as coherent reading it as unitary, you know, take any work and assume that it all hangs together really well and start looking less for the divine message and more for what is it as a literary work. 

It kind of was a little bit of a flash in the pan and the source criticism is back, but the literary sensibilities have been incorporated in ever greater and more sophisticated ways together with the source criticism. And so there's a more robust approach now.

Stephen 09:09
That's interesting. And I can certainly see why someone who was, you know, studying English, someone who was interested in literature would be drawn to that type of reading of scripture. But, I mean, you mentioned your other interests, was there a turning point where you decided, no, I think I actually want to pursue this instead of, you know, pursuing math or engineering or just English literature? 

Simeon Chavel 09:33
Oh, well, the turning point I think there were a couple of turning points. One was, I think I hit a ceiling on the math. I took multi-variable calculus, which is sort of like Calc three. And it was physics heavy, engineering heavy. And I wasn't really, there was electromagnetic fields. I just wasn't cut out for it, couldn't do the visualizing that was necessary. 

So I got more interested in the English literature side. I think if I had had a different kind of advising, maybe I would have found more courses on the math side. So I think there is a certain amount of chance in who did I end up talking to on the faculty that gave me advice, that talked me through things that pointed me in directions that inspired me. I think that's a lot of how my path was crafted, was a lot of chance, things along the way. So when I discovered this kind of literary approach to reading the Hebrew Bible, it wasn't in class. It was actually outside of college. 

My Father had a friend who came over with a book. And the book was this literary readings of the Hebrew Bible and that, and I just looked at it and I said, Hey, do you mind if I borrow this? And I gobbled it up in a weekend. And that's what set me on my trajectory

When I got out of college, my first couple of jobs, we're not in this direction at all. I'd applied for a bunch of different kinds of jobs because I didn't, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. And among them was a master's program at Indiana University Bloomington, in biblical and literary studies in the department of religion. And I waited a year before I started that program.

And I had three other jobs in the meantime, a short-term job in the toy industry at a show. And then, in an investment bank, I was an analyst. looking at stocks and things like that. And then I was a sixth-grade teacher in a private school. So I'd done a lot of different things till I, yeah, I was all over the place.

Like each time was an opportunity. So I figured I'm young. I'll take the opportunities. I'll see where it leads me. Like I wasn't driven. And then I got into the master's program, moved to Bloomington, Indiana and thought, well, I'll do this for a year and see how it goes. 

And it didn't take long. And then, and I knew, okay, this is really, this really interests me. This holds my attention. And I was one of those people who I just, I just loved working late at night and having those hours reading and writing. And that just sort of sucked me in completely.

Stephen 12:23
What crystallized for you in those years? Maybe about the project you were working on or just about like yourself as a scholar?

Simeon Chavel 12:31
I realized that I need to be really absorbed in my work. I wasn't driven by external pressures. I was really very like personality wise, not in terms of my personal circumstances, but in terms of my personality, wasn't very driven by external pressures. I was very driven by would I be absorbed by what I was doing?

And so I tried a lot of different things. I liked them all. The teaching stayed in my head for a long time, years. I'd still suddenly find myself thinking, okay, what am I going to do with this next year? Like, wait, I'm not teaching next year. And it really was in my, it got into my blood. And so I like to be absorbed.

I want it to be absorbed by, you know, the subject matter of my work. I was driven by it. I found the nature of the material super interesting and it connected with me in a personal way because I'd grown up in a traditional religious background, so I knew the material and felt like this was a really interesting way in that, kept my mind active. So I enjoyed that. 

Once I got into the Ph. D. program at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I still had my hand in other things. That was a little bit by external pressures. I had to work. And so I worked in education. I was doing curriculum writing and curriculum development and teacher training, and I was doing academic translation.

People wrote their works in Hebrew and I translated them into English. Then they would get published as academic works. And so those were things that were themselves professions. And up until my job offer at the University of Chicago, I was willing to pursue any of those, it never had to be Bible.

Never had to be this field. I always loved it. I loved the work at it, but I always felt like I could do something else and be happy too. And whatever came along, like there would be opportunities along the way. Once I picked a path that closes some doors, but it opens a lot of others that you can't even see down the hallway, always a long hallway.

And so I was never too anxious, which I think puts me in a very different era. 

Stephen 14:58
Yeah, I had based on the conversations I've had, I would say so. But yeah, that's cool to hear. We often ask people about what kind of travel they've done. So you studied in Jerusalem, has your work required you to actually spend a lot of time there? Like then have you done a lot of, on the ground research?

Simeon Chavel 15:18
A little bit, not so much. The nature of biblical studies for the bulk of it, there are subfields that have different kinds of needs, but the bulk of my research is in the biblical text and that's been around a long time and the copies of it are available in a lot of places, did their digital copies of ancient copies.

Once upon a time, you may not have had so many copies of scholarly works until you'd want to go to another library or you want to look at ancient copies of manuscripts or something like that.

I do more reading of archaeological reports than going to archaeological digs to dig. But I send some, you know, some of my students like to go. It's fun. It's a good experience. It's a phenomenal way to break from all the reading and writing during the year, is to just go work with your hands.

You get up really early, you go, you finish early, the weather's crazy, the people are all doing this together, and it's young people, and it's a nice collaborative effort in what is otherwise a very individual oriented field. I haven't done much of that. Most of my travel has really been conferences where faculty and advanced students get together and do presentations and talk about their work and get feedback on it. 

Stephen 16:41
Turning to, you know, what you do in your current role, you mentioned some students just then, and you've also mentioned a while ago, you know, the teaching stuck with you even when you weren't teaching. Are you doing a lot of teaching right now? Like sort of what is the balance of responsibilities?

Simeon Chavel 17:01
So academia, certainly on the humanities side is pretty interesting, because You're really trained professionally, as a researcher, mainly as a researcher. You're trained as part of that also to be a writer, but you usually don't have so many writing courses. You usually have content courses for which you write papers and you get critiqued on it, a lot of programs will have a certain amount of pedagogical training for teaching and developing courses and things like that. And a certain amount of actual teaching, but it's secondary. 

Then you get to a job and you're actually going in front of a good number of students and you've got to teach your real professional training as research, your secondary training is teaching, and then you get to a job and teaching doesn't feel secondary.

You're actually facing real life people. You want them to succeed. You want to be clear. You want to be interesting. You want to then to be able to take what they've done and go forward with it in some form or another. You're helping people teach themselves. So, that is a little bit of a jump.

The biggest job, and everybody has to teach it. Most people who come out of academia who then get an academic job will have a teaching component in a college. A 3rd component is administration, which nobody prepares you for. So you sit on committees. You basically have to run your unit together, faculty governance.

And you have to get used to the paperwork, you have to get used to the pace of things, you have to get used to decision making processes, long term planning on the unit. You don't really kind of know that that's coming in any kind of a useful way. So that comes as a bit of a surprise. 

Some units will protect your time. And say, until you get tenure, we're going to keep you at a minimum. Some units will say, we're going to treat you like an adult as a beginning. You're going to sit on all the committees. And it's six of one half does the other. What's better? So it's very nice to have your time protected until tenure review, but then you're also feeling like you're not in control of your place of employment where other people are. And if you are working on that stuff from the beginning, then you've got a lot of ownership, but you might have a little bit more anxiety and stress around what you're producing towards tenure. That can go either way, it depends on the institution. So administration is a kind of a, is a surprise.

Stephen 19:40
That's an interesting breakdown. The trade-offs of, spending a lot of time on that kind of thing when that's not really what you were trained for versus like not being involved in the governance, as you said. 

I'm curious, like what you're excited about currently, or if there's anything, you know, in the works, or even just that you're like, hoping to get into right now, like what paths of research are of interest to you at the moment? 

Simeon Chavel 20:03
I have a few paths of research that I'm working on, at the same time, which doesn't mean two computers open at all times. And I'm typing with one hand on each. But like I'll work for a few days on one thing or a few weeks or even a few months, and then I'll go to another one and I'll go back and forth between them in an uneven pace.

Some people I think are a little bit better about being single minded. I'm working on this and then they finish it and then they move to the next thing. Much more serial and I'm much more of a multitasker. And I think as we now know, multitasking is not efficient. So I have a few different projects running at the same time.

Some of them I hire students to do certain kinds of research for me, and that helps train them a little bit in the ways of research. One project is on the idea of doing history. How does one do a history? It should be obvious. We've been doing histories for a very long time, but academics never stop thinking about what they're doing and saying, am I, are we doing this right? Are we thinking about it in the best possible way? Do we really understand what we're doing? Are we assuming certain things? 

And so I'm interested in, I have really all the chapters written. They just need revising. I've got four chapter work on a history of failed religious ideas. And so, it's a kind of contrarian history, I take the biblical works, not as recording popular ideas and reflecting what institutions or mainstream or important figures are thinking, I take them more as works by individuals, who are proposing how to think about God and Israel or Judah, the future, the past. 

And they're proposing ideas, the implications of that approach are that, you know, their ideas didn't have to be accepted. They might have been looked at and said, are you crazy? Or brilliant, but totally impractical. Or that's heretical. Like there are a lot of different approaches that people could take. Sometimes you can miss that there are works embedded in other works. And you can miss what their ideas, what their driving ideas are. 

So I'm interested in recovering those ideas and then evaluating, is there any follow up to this idea? Where's the evidence for a follow up? And I've got four cases, where the idea I feel like I can recover the original idea and it was not followed up for centuries.

And by the time it lands, it's in a different world with different circumstances and ideas and it’s received in a different way than it might have been originally. So it's already kind of encumbered by a different kind of past and present. So that's one work. 

Another work, which in my mind, has a shared kind of aspect, but will sound very different is a work that argues for literary coherence. What are the limits of literary coherence? How do we know when a work, is a cohesive, coherent, unitary work, not so much with a single idea by the author, but that the work as literature presents a coherent world, you know, story world, or lyric world, poetic world, that the character and the event, hold together in a literarily coherent way. What are the limits of that? Because we're so driven by this source critical approach that things don't fit together. How can we be more theoretical about how things do fit together so that I can see the limits of when they don't rather than assuming when they don't. 

So, the way I like to put it in good UChicago terms is, source criticism of the Bible is all well and good in practice, but does it work in theory? The Chicago way. So that's a second approach. So I'm looking at a bunch of biblical books like Ecclesiastes and Ezekiel and Song of Songs and a bunch of Psalms texts that have classically been looked at within biblical criticism as having many layers and additions and whatnot that create literary incoherence and discontinuity and arguing for sophisticated forms of continuity.

Stephen 24:51
Those both sound really interesting. I would love to just spend an entire episode talking about, really any type of failed ideas, so I wish we had more time to spend talking about that, but I actually need to wrap up soon.

So, what advice would you have for someone who is considering Divinity School or maybe just, you know, more broadly like considering their options. What advice would you give? 

Simeon Chavel 25:18
That’s a tough one. So most advice comes from so far down the road that it may be useless, right? I can look back and say, you know, sounds smart, but I don't know if that lands and feels right in the moment for someone looking forward. 

I think it's useful to live with two minds. You give what you try your all, but you remain open to the possibilities of doing other kinds of things. Because there's always curveballs and surprises along the way, and instead of, you know, you can be knocked off your path and be reeling, or you can embrace the possibility and say, no one thing defines me, I can find my, you know, myself, or I can create myself through any bunch of possibilities.

So I think embracing the chaos, at the same time that once you're doing something, give yourself the best possible chance to be great at it and, you know, throw yourself into it. So you can grow the most out of it. That's very general. That's not specific to academia. 

Stephen 26:30
No, I mean, it's good advice and, it seems to have served you well. And embracing the chaos also sounds a little bit like the two projects that you were just describing actually,

Simeon Chavel 26:39
Very much.

Stephen 26:40
So a theme might be emerging, thank you so much for, for joining us. 

Simeon Chavel 26:43
Thank you for the opportunity. 

Stephen 26:46
Thank you, Professor Chavel, for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu. or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening.