At noon will be the closing ceremony of SBL international meeting. The meeting will go on until Thursday 12.3pm but there will be a closing lunch reception hosted by Yonsei University for the SBL participants. In the past couple of days I have attended about 20 lectures as most lectures are about 30 mins long or at most 40 mins. It has been great but only a few stood out for their spiritual enlightment rather than just academic or technical. I enjoyed a textual criticism session looking at Gal 2,11-14 where if the reading is when he came rather than when they came, it would provide a clue as to the Pauline chronology of events. Anyhow, two papers really stood out one given by an Israeli professor from Haifa on angels ascending and descending on a ladder to heaven in Jacob's dream at Bethel.
Second, a Korean professor spoke on Jacob's experience of God also on Gen 28 and he applied it to Korean society being of an anxious and distorted personality very much like Jacob's. I was blessed by the former talk and the Haifa professor mentioned several times how for Jacob ascending means returning to the land of promise and descending means going into a foreign country and its idolatrous worship and wickedness. For the past 2 weeks I have been in three countries, Singapore, Sabah and now South Korea. But my heart is in the land of my birth, my land of promise though what will happen when I return is much to be determined, whether I stay or whether I go, ascending or descending. Perhaps I need a dream like Jacob's.
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