Ancient Hebrew Poetry

A Lutheran converts to Judaism – and brings her childhood Bible with her

    C. A. Blomquist’s journey into the Jewish faith began as a Lutheran child. She could not have known it then.  As an adult who has embraced Judaism, she has this to say:

The Desirability of Metaphor-for-Metaphor Translation

    Some draw an analogy between Bible translation and simultaneous translation. I resist the analogy. The translation of classics like Homer, the Bible, Vergil, and Dante is subject to a different set of constraints than the translation of texts fit for simultaneous translation. I was reminded of this yesterday since the girls of the house were preparing for Anna’s dance recital and Betta’s pictures before prom. In a conversation we had, the salience of metaphor smacked me in the face.

Trafficking in Women and Slavery of Foreigners: A Redemptive Response

    Some people take the God of Jews and Christians to task because the world he is said to sustain runs over, like a river in flood, with acts of aggression. Why doesn’t God do something about it, since he can? The question comes up often in the Bible. It is a question that believers pose, if in fact they are believers. Jews and Christians know this, if they have read the Torah, the Psalms, the Prophets, and the books of Job and Qohelet.

    It is not a question non-believers necessarily pose, unless they want to aggravate believers. Ayn Rand atheists in particular are convinced that God does not care, and neither should they. Live and let die.

  An ethically responsible way of approaching the question of God’s justice is to turn the question against ourselves. For example, why don’t we do something about human trafficking, since we can?

The Moshe Held principle

    As Daniel Bodi put it, “if one can show how insights gained from the study of newly discovered ancient Near Eastern texts have been anticipated by medieval rabbis who did not have access to these buried ancient Semitic documents, then the probability that one’s interpretation is plausible may be increased.”¹ The principle goes back to Moshe Held, a scholar and teacher who was a competent reader of a wide range of texts spanning millennia in numerous languages including Akkadian and Hebrew.

Khirbet Qeiyafa Roundup

    The biblical blogosphere is abuzz with comment in the wake of the recent Khirbet Qeiyafa press conference (go here for the press release). Two facts are indisputable. (1) Khirbet Qeiyafa continues to produce finds of exceptional interest that threaten closely held theories and scholarly commonplaces. (2) In a first blast of scholarly output which resembles a case of Montezuma’s revenge, the finds at Khirbet Qeiyafa are engendering new hypotheses and new scholarly reconstructions that are even less grounded than the ones they threaten. The comments online of greatest interest so far are those of Todd Bolen, George Athas, Victor Avigdor Hurowitz, and the joint reflections of Seth Sanders, Matthew Suriano and Jacqueline Vayntrub. Below the fold, an analytical roundup.

Jonathan Paradise’s Garden of Hebrew Delights

    Are you looking for ways to hone your skills in biblical Hebrew? One of the best ways to do that is to read texts written in the Hebrew of the talmudim, midrashim, piyyut, and miqraot gedolot, and the Hebrew of medieval and modern poets like Dunash ben Labrat, Bialik, and Amichai. Sages, scholars, and poets draw on the linguistic resources and fund of metaphors Hebrew offers them in the age they write. They often drink from the well of biblical Hebrew. Figuring out the biblical sources of the diction and concepts a later Hebrew author adopts is a great exercise.

Reactions to Hurtado’s Claims of Academic Injustice and Shameful Cowardice

    Larry Hurtado’s post in which he laments examples of academic injustice and shameful cowardice has attracted a host of interesting comments and pushbacks.

The Revised Grail Psalter is online

    Here. The revisions move in the direction of bringing the diction of the original Grail Psalter into greater conformity with the Hebrew. The result is laudable. 

Quotable Smijer

    Life is multidimensional. The online dimension is not or should not be the most important one, even if you have an ongoing commitment to maintaining a presence on the web. I am updating my community list of blogs. I include active and currently inactive blogs that have content worth pondering. In the process of adding my favorite Unitarian Universalist blogger to the list, I ran across this delightful quote. 

Friendly Fire in the Direction of Pete Enns

    Peter Enns, a senior fellow of the Biologos Foundation who blogs on the Foundation’s website, has written an important book entitled The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins. The most compelling reviews I have read so far are written by fellow evangelicals who are not out to cast aspersions. Their purpose: the classical one of faith seeking understanding. The reviews I have in mind are those by James K. A. Smith, C. John Collins, Michael Heiser, and Peter Leithart (here and here). Like Enns, each of these authors seeks to stand at the intersection of everything we know (or think we know) about human origins, from (1) the book of Scripture and (2) the book of nature.