Sam Boyd, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies, received a 2016 Regional Scholars award. Dr. Boyd was nominated for the award by the Rocky Mountains-Great Plains regional selection committee of the SBL on the basis of his presentation听鈥淭he Flood and听the Problem of Being an Omnivore.鈥�
Dr. Boyd's paper sets the听common tradition of two-by-two animal rescue in light of the wider听Priestly ideology. In doing so, he听argue that, despite this common tradition, the role of animals and听particularly of permissible eating plays a vitally different role in P than in the flood tradition as听attested in Gilgamesh. For P, animal consumption is the cause of the flood whereas for the听Gilgamesh Epic it is the means of population control after the flood, thereby obviating another听deluge.
By understanding the role of animal consumption in the larger narrative of P, the听distinctive uses of the biblical adaptation of meat eating in this tradition over against that in听Gilgamesh become clear. Moreover, isolating this tradition in P and juxtaposing it with a similar听motif used for a different purpose in Gilgamesh situates the retelling of the flood narrative in 1听Enoch 7 and Jubilees 5 in a more extended transmission and conversation of a stream of tradition听extending well into Second Temple Judaism.