Ancient Hebrew Poetry

Why Kindness is Dangerous

    Kindness, whenever it amounts to giving someone a free pass, is dangerous. It is the door abusive people walk through when they want to abuse again. More damaging still, it puts a damper on discovery and the search for truth.

Who was Judah the Maccabee?

According to Dan Friedman:

Moshe and Akiva in TB Menachot 29b

    What reward awaits the one who makes Torah, the words of Holy Writ, the foundation of her life? Judaism has a realistic view of the matter. The reward of a chasid or faithful one is the privilege of living and dying for the sake of the truth embraced. Below the fold, text and translation of a famous passage which makes the point and turns away all questions as to why it is so.

Jerome to Paula and Eustochium (394): Text and Translation

    The text of Jerome’s letter of dedication to Paula and Eustochium of his translation from the Hebrew of 1 Samuel – 2 Kings presented here is from the Biblia Sacra Vulgata (Robert Weber, ed.; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1984) 364-66. I collated the translations of W. H. Freemantle (see Michael Marlowe’s note 2) and Kevin Edgecomb, to which I am indebted, but the translation I present is my own. My goal throughout has been to bring Jerome’s wit back to life, however imperfectly, through a close translation of his words, with transliterated Hebrew and Greek, Greek in Greek script, and the Wortlaut of the Latin names of biblical books accurately preserved. For an introductory discussion, go here; for Jerome’s grasp of Hebrew, go here.

Jerome’s Twenty Two Books: The Alphabet of the Doctrine of God

    Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus (347-420), referred to as Jerome in English, is one of the most significant figures in the history of the reception of the Bible. In an age not known for polyglots, Jerome was a vir trilinguis who translated from Greek to Latin and, his crowning achievement, from Hebrew to Latin. The Christian movement of the first centuries was gifted with no greater scholar of Hebrew.