Ancient Hebrew Poetry

All you need is love

    Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the great works of modern literature. His premises and conclusions contain more truth than a “fast food” and “fast sex” culture like ours can assimilate. Civilization is, according to Freud, a space of conflict in which conflicting instincts struggle to find expression. Neuroses and pathologies a psychoanalyst seeks to treat in the individual play themselves out, writ large, in society. A society no less than an individual is a house divided against itself, an organism subject to fits of “cutting,” bulimia, and, to use one of Freud’s root metaphors, narcissism. Christopher Lasch argued that the culture of narcissism is the mother of all American pathologies. Philip Slater suggested “the pursuit of loneliness.” The social pathologies of contemporary civilization continue to be a focus of social-science research. Clearly, Freud was on to something.

Bart Ehrman is a Reverse Fundamentalist: A Fisk of his HuffPo Op-ed

    It is not too much to say that Bart Ehrman is one of the most brilliant scholars to have come out of Moody Bible Institute, a conservative Protestant institution located in Chicago. Labeled a recovering fundamentalist by many, Ehrman self-identifies as an agnostic. It may be true, as James Hannam is reported to have said, that the worst atheist is the recovering fundamentalist; the saying “once a fundamentalist, always a fundamentalist” also has some merit. Still, let’s be fair: Ehrman can be harsh but he weighs his words a little bit more carefully than Richard Dawkins is known to do when he takes on his ex-co-religionists.

    It is also the case that Ehrman is, to quote Dawkins’ self-description, “a cultural Christian.” That is, even if Ehrman can no longer say “I know that my Redeemer lives” (Job 19:25); even if he no longer finds strength and comfort in the God of the Bible for the task of being an altruist, an altruist is what he wants to be. If he dresses up as a reverse fundamentalist, it is because he believes that someone must crusade against his former co-religionists. Who better than he.

    I am neither a fundamentalist nor a reverse fundamentalist. I am a student of ancient texts who can think of nothing better than to defend said texts from modern mis-interpreters. In my view, fundamentalists and reverse fundamentalists alike are prone to expect the wrong things from the Bible. In the following, I fisk a few of Ehrman’s unreconstructed fundamentalist expectations. I quote:

“My God is an Awesome God” vs. the Religion of the Enlightenment

    According to the Westminster Catechism, a classic formulation of the Christian faith, the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. The accent is put squarely on doxology. That is where the accent most often is, when Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists gather, go on pilgrimages, and pray. The thickness of the phenomenological reality the catechism points to reaches as far as the eye can see. The Catechism goes on to distinguish true from false worship. Every faith does.

The Angel of History

    I quote from Walter Benjamin’s Thesis IX on the concept of history:

This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. What appears to us as a chain of events he sees as one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreck upon wreck; it hurtles all before his feet. He would like to pause, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise which has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm carries him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of wreckage before him grows to heaven. This storm is what we call progress.

PETA is right about the Bible

    PETA is right about the Bible (HT: James Davila). At an alpha point beyond time rather than within time, told in a protology that fuses a description of the ways things are with a description of the way things should be, the God of the Bible enjoins vegetarianism, to man as well as beast (Genesis 1:29-30). At an omega point beyond our time, a point which stands in judgment of all time, that same God imperiously predicts that the wolf and the lamb will graze together; the lion like the ox eat straw (Isaiah 65:25).

    As Yael Shemesh argues (summary here), Rashi, Aquinas, and Descartes, the modern anthropocentric worldview in particular, represent a huge step backward with respect to the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible and the book of Jonah in particular think of God as full of compassion for animals no less than human beings.

Three Reviews of Hackett’s A Basic Introduction to Biblical Hebrew

    SBL’s Review of Biblical Literature stands apart from other review venues because it accommodates (1) lengthy detailed reviews of items normally accorded a review of a few paragraphs; and (2) multiple reviews of the same item. Bernard Levinson’s and James Robson’s respective reviews of Jo Ann Hackett’s A Basic Introduction to Biblical Hebrew (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2010) are a case in point. In the following, I touch on both and another review of the same volume that appeared elsewhere. From there I go on to evoke broader issues that remain unresolved in the field of learning and teaching ancient Hebrew.

Ten reasons why it is worth living

    This evening I am homesick for Italy. It happens to me more often than I like to admit. This time it was Roberto_Saviano who made me wish I was not in my beloved Wisconsin, but in my beloved Sicily. Saviano, whose intellectual and literary biography is splendid, is collecting week by week “ten reasons why it is worth the trouble to live” in La Repubblica, a widely-read Italian newspaper. He begins with his ten reasons, the following (audio/video here):

SBL “pisses off” Jim Linville

    Jim Linville is a hoot. Anyone who dresses like he does is assured a spot in the kingdom of something. The latest: he is up in arms about the treatment the proposal to start a unit entitled “Secular Biblical Criticism” has received from the powers-that-be at SBL. I quote:

Barack O-bomb-a: The Pros and Cons of Liberal Warfare

    Ross Douthat of the New York Times provides a detailed analysis. A feature of this "liberal intervention": the key role of three extraordinary women in making it happen: Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Powers. Regardless of how the intervention works out, the backstory sounds terribly interesting.

Good and bad translations of John 3:20-21

    Is it hard to translate the gospel of John? Not really. Its diction in the original is clean and terse. The author relies on a bundle of bright oppositions expressed through cascades of words that repeat. Why do so many modern translations take away from the text by adding to it? Why set aside repetends and parallelisms in the source text if they can be reproduced? It boggles the mind. A faithful translation does well to mirror the style of its source text.