In an earlier post , I had noted Moses' importance in Greco-Egyptian magic, riffing off of a statement that John Gager made. I wrote: The Moses of the magical papyri provides another piece of the puzzle of what Jews, Christians, and others on the ground thought, what they did, and, again, reasons for his exaltation and, just as often, suppression. It is a clear example, here, of exaltation. I wonder, what Christians did with this view of Moses as magician? Does his exaltation here mirror his exaltation in contemporary Christian sources of the mid-second to fourth centuries? How does it compare with contemporary Egyptian Christian sources of different opposing parties of the hierarchy, the monks, and the traditions of Nag Hammadi? Indeed, it is fascinating territory into which the magical Moses takes us. It is a messy, difficult terrain, but ultimately a fruitful one. In this post, I would like to delve a little deeper in the Mose...
Comments
Which Torah portion?
Which פסוק רחוק does it begin with?
We just discussed petichtaot in my Biblical Interpretation class - the first one in Genesis Rabbah. Still a very cool literary form.
My point is thinking about the intersections or interdependence of different forms of knowledge, which, I think, is part of the basis of the Liberal Arts.
So, we could start with one thing, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, and try get to another, such as Darwin's Origin of Species, and consider the different pathways and intersections of knowledge that could ultimately lead from one to the other.
Thereby demonstrating that the variety of forms of inquiry in a Liberal Arts education are ultimately interrelated, even if often in tension with one another.