MARGARET EATON
Academic Qualifications:
Doctor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology
Faculty of Arts, Summer Institute of Linguistics, Auckland, N.Z., 1999
Bachelor of Divinity (Linguistics)
Teaching Experience:
Tutor, Ecumenical Institute of Distance Theological Studies (2001--)
Teaching Fellow, Dept. of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Otago (1997--)
Tutor, Department of Religious Studies and Faculty of Theology, University of Otago (1990-4)
Relieving Lecturer, Dept of Religious Studies, University of Otago, (March-April 1993)
Lecturer (women in religion & spirituality) at Dunedin Workers' Educational Association (1986-7)
Education officer, Catholic Archdiocese of Wellington (1980)
Research assistant, Dept of Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington (Nov 1979 - Feb 80)
Competence to Teach in the Following Areas:
Classical Hebrew (to an advanced level), Old Testament issues, such as oral tradition, literature, history, exegesis, theology.
Koine Greek (to an advanced level), New Testament issues, such as "from spoken story to written Word , history, exegesis, theology.
Introductory Religious Studies courses, with a speciality in Western religions, especially the many features they hold in common, e.g. revelation, written scripture, common source, ethical considerations, after-life, prophecy, etc.
History of biblical interpretation, including its influence on social issues (e.g. slavery), sexual issues (e.g. contraception), and ecological issues (e.g. destruction of species' habitat).
Biblical texts in the light of linguistics, enabling a deeper understanding of the richness found there. For example, there is semantics, including the historical development of word meaning, in association with pragmatics to illuminate aspects of social history, while both throw invaluable light on exegetical questions.
Issues in orality and literacy, comprising, for example, stylistics, the way information is transmitted in oral cultures, and comparison of biblical tradition with other orally transmitted traditions.
Publications:
Study & Writing Guide, Ecumenical Institute of Distance Theological Studies, 2002
Conversational Strategies in the Hebrew Bible, presently undergoing revision for publication.
"The Intractable Servant of the Septuagint: translating ebed , The Bible Translator, March 1997.
Introduction to the Study of the Bible, Suva, Fiji: PTC Publications, 1996.
Word-Pairs & Continuity in Translation in the Ancient Near East, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 1994.
"Some Instances of Flyting in the Hebrew Bible , Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 61 (1994): 3-14.
Assessment and Consulting:
Pss 43 - 106 -> Korean Zechariah -> Awadhi (a dialect of Hindi).
Education Assessor and Advisor, Ecumenical Institute of Distance Theological Studies (2002-) I assess all Education for Ministry (EFM) Old Testament students now coming under NZQA guidelines.
Translation Consultant, World Bible Translation Center, Ft. Worth TX (2001-) I have compared English back translations of the following books with the Hebrew text:
Psalms 1-71 ® Awadhi (a dialect of Hindi)
Nehemiah ® Gujarati
Nehemiah ® Korean
Song of Songs ® Serbian
Haggai ®Urdu
Joel ® Urdu
Malachi ® Urdu
Obadiah ® Urdu
Assistant Director/Editor, Pacific Theological College Education by Extension, Suva, Fiji (1995-6). My brief was to organise, design, market, prepare, and distribute courses for a Diploma in Theological Studies throughout the Pacific. It remains a successful and developing venture.
Research:
I'm putting the finishing touches on a monograph with the working title Conversational Strategies in the Hebrew Bible. It makes use of modern socio-linguistic insights to analyse conversations as though they were in real time. This approach provides clues to new ways of looking at both translations and exegesis in narrative portions of the Hebrew Bible. An issue in the Hebrew Bible I feel to be neglected is the significance of parallelism. Though long recognised, its pervasive nature and the implications of its use are largely ignored. More than this, it is present in the languages of many traditional cultures, most I would venture to say outside the Indo-European stock. Consequently, I am interested in developing a methodology that would allow a two-way traffic between biblical translators and such traditional languages. Biblical translators could render into traditional tongues the parallel structures already present in the Hebrew in a way that comes naturally to those tongues, while speakers of traditional languages can assist us in our understanding of the way parallelism functions. Fortunately, since many traditional languages are dying out even as we speak, detailed work specifically to do with parallelism has already been done on one of these.
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