Ancient Hebrew Poetry

The Verbal System of Ancient Hebrew: A Postscript

A few weeks ago, this blog hosted a lively discussion about tense, mood, and aspect in the verbal system of ancient Hebrew. A number of top researchers in the field participated in the debate, and clarified their points of view in the process. The exchange is informal in style, and would be hard for those concerned to revise according to the more formal conventions of peer-reviewed publications in the field. This became clear in follow-up correspondence. The exchange, therefore, will remain as is, but I thank those who suggested that it was worthy of publication elsewhere, and Ehud Ben-Zvi of JHS for his willingness to consider publication there. For the convenience of future readers, Here is the whole thing as a single downloadable file with an attached cumulative bibliography.

So you want to be a preacher?

From Kyle Covett at Mayfly comes this luscious George Eliot quote:

The Suffering of the Innocent is not a Transcendental

Lévinas is at great pains to emphasize that the suffering of the innocent is not a transcendental, but a historical and physical reality. But he does interpret said suffering within the framework of the divine withdrawal / human maturity dialectic referred to in a previous post:

Worshipping God under an Empty Sky

In the journey of Yossel as told by Emmanuel Lévinas, the path to the one God must be walked in God’s absence. The certainty of this truth is affirmed by those who survived the Shoah with renewed faith in God. Yossel's memoir, as noted in an earlier post, is the lament of a lone survivor in the last days of the Warsaw Ghetto, after he has lost his children to the wolves of the Third Reich.

Divine reproach as an instrument of self-reproach

The Bible is full of prophetic reproach of human behavior. In a previous post, I pointed out a long tradition in which scriptural report of divine censure of human behavior became a means through which believers, liturgically, reproached themselves. I also pointed out that Christianity appropriated the tradition, in origin, not as an instrument of self-reproach, but as an instrument of blame.

Any attempt to deflect the critical force of prophetic reproach onto an “other” is benighted by definition. The dynamic principle of biblical prophecy hinges on the fact that the objects of God’s ferocious criticism and the heirs of his promises are one and the same. If you are unwilling to absorb the first, you have no claim on the second.

But it has seemed to many Christians now and before, in the context of remembering the events of the Cross, that self-reproach is very much in order. If that is the case, it becomes appropriate to draw from biblical tradition in such a way that the full weight of human sin as it has worked itself out in Christendom becomes palpable in the language of accusation. In this post, I offer a set of six reproaches based on divine accusations in the Hebrew Bible (scroll down for a translation).

Magdi Allam: A Faith Forged on the Anvil of Recent Events

Allam’s Letter to the Editor published in yesterday’s edition of Corriere della Sera attests to the glories and miseries of our age. The letter in full is available in English: here is the link. Here is the letter in full, in Italian. Below the fold, I excerpt a few paragraphs. For those who read Italian, I provide the Italian; the English translation is my own.

A prominent Muslim becomes a Christian: is he taking his life into his own hands?

Magdi Allam is a fine journalist. I have always enjoyed reading his op-eds. He writes for Corriere della Sera, the Italian equivalent of the New York Times. A man of reasonable and civil opinion, an Egyptian gentleman who loves his adopted country with a passion that outstrips that of most natives, he has now become a Christian. This Holy Saturday, he will be baptized by Pope Benedict.

Is Magdi Allam taking his life into his own hands? If he is, is it tolerable in our day that someone becomes a potential victim of a religious vendetta because he followed his conscience?

Here is a site set up by friends of Magdi Allam. Even if you cannot read Italian, you can probably get an inkling of what Allam stands for. Here is an article in English which gives you a sense of who Allam is. Here is the news item itself.

The Reproaches: Christ’s Lament against his Faithless Church

One of the hallmarks of the Jewish liturgy of the Ninth of Av is the stark assumption of responsibility for the destruction of the First and Second Temples:

 Because of our sins the Temple was destroyed,

because of our iniquities the Palace was burned.

 With wayward hearts we forgot the Sabbath,

and the Lord failed to remember our merits.

Pure and Holy, Tried and True

Holiness. Supposedly, the concept is passé. To be sure, nothing frightens people more than holiness, if they have done everything to banish it from their lives.

But holiness is not passé, nor will it ever become passé. Human beings sense transcendent reality when a child is born, when a loved one dies, in the thick of battle with a disease which overwhelms them, when they accomplish something into which they have poured heart and soul. Human beings long to transcend themselves.

A Zwingli factoid in honor of Jim West

I’ve been asked to say something evil about Zwingli by Jim Getz. That’s harder for me to accomplish than one might think. Two Waldensian friends, Emidio Campi and Fulvio Ferrario, are top-notch Zwingli scholars. I have no intention of getting in their bad graces.

But here’s a tidbit from Zwingli’s youth, before he became a Reformer. It’s a fine example of how an old boys network worked back then: