Antiquitopia

Columbia University Press just emailed me to inform me, to my great pleasure, that Alan Segal's book, Sinning in the Hebrew Bible:  How Its Worst Stories Speak for Its Truth , has been posthumously published. I was Alan's TA for his Hebrew Bible class (a few times) where he developed many of the ideas found in this book.  He had been mulling these stories long before I started graduate school, however.  It has had ripples beyond his own classes:  his focus on the seedier elements of the Bible has influenced how I teach the Bible in my introductory classes.  I remember our discussions, either over lunch or visiting his home in New Jersey, on how he was going to frame this book--though I never read the manuscript itself.  He passed away while it was in the final stages of publication, but now it finally sees the light of day. Here is the blurb from CUP's webpage: Stories of rape, murder, adultery, and conquest raise crucial issues in the Hebrew Bible, ...

            I have been contextualizing treatments of Moses in the first to fourth centuries CE, particularly pertaining to his visions in early Christian sources (see my discussion here ):  particularly how those visions are alternatively highlighted, expanded, or suppressed and diminished in the sources--and why?  In order to do this, however, it is important to see what the earliest Christians' contemporaries were doing with Moses, how they were using his visions, promoting or suppressing them.  While the earliest Christians, represented in the NT, largely suppressed Moses' visionary abilities, later Christians sought to affirm and even expand them.  Many Jewish (and don't forget Samaritan) trends in the first to fourth centuries also sought to expand what Moses saw and heard on the mount.  Josephus, however, proves to be more exceptional in this regard.       ...

It turns out that many of the Loeb Classical Library volumes have now become public domain.  Get a copy of your FREE LCL volumes here or here .

I have been fascinated with the traditions of Moses in the first to fourth centuries CE lately.  In connection with my "Christian Moses" project, I have been reading up on how his reputation developed in contemporary sources.  For this, there are many important scholarly works, but perhaps one of the most helpful ones in considering his broader significance in the ancient world is John Gager's Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism .  Of any figure from the Jewish tradition, Moses was the best-known to outsiders.  And while many erudite Greeks and Romans (and Egyptians) tended to refer to Moses as a lawgiver (usually as one inferior to Plato, among others), perhaps the most widespread view of Moses was that of a magician.  He is invoked among the Greek and Demotic magical papyri as an authority--sometimes works are written in his name (such as the much under-studied Eighth Book of Moses) or his name is invoked in surviving amulets because it was thought to have power in ...

Tolerance, particularly religious tolerance, is often touted as one of the achievements of modern secular societies, such as in the U.S.  It, however, also involves an assumption of power:  who gets to tolerate whom?  The one who tolerates is in a different position than the one tolerated.  Perhaps we can think of something as mutual toleration as something equivalent to peaceful coexistence.  This alignment is, perhaps, the best one may get in some times and places.  But, if one seeks mutual respect, then something more active than toleration and coexistence is necessary.  To prevent stereotyping and caricatures of people who worship differently than you do, then something more active is necessary.  In a Huffington Post article , Rev. Lyndon Shakespeare of the National Cathedral, suggests that what can unite us is the ancient activity, persistent social custom of hospitality: Unlike some political options taken to address the poor treatment of ...

There has been seemingly increased discussions of what unites the humanities and the sciences.  One area that seems to unite different branches of knowledge is creativity , as well as a sense of wonder.  In a more limited scope, the ancient historian Robin Lane Fox reflects on the limits and potentials of creativity in historiography versus fiction.  In his Travelling Heroes , he begins with what looks like the basic assumptions of those writing fiction versus those writing history: Novelists, surely, need to imagine, whereas earthbound historians have only to collect as mundane information as survives. (p. 4)  Yet he begins to break down this dichotomy of data gathering versus creative imagination, showing the constraints in fiction and the role of the imagination in history-writing: Yet novelists become constrained by their own creations and by the need for them to be coherent as they develop.  Historians must amass and collect but they then have freedoms...

I just read this interview with Trappist monks just outside of Montreal on silence.  This paragraph caught my eye: Are all your actions done in total silence? How do monks coordinate work? There must be a small amount of words that are absolutely necessary to get through a day?   Father B: No, not all work is done in silence, though we try to keep a silent atmosphere whatever we do, even common work. We talk to convey necessary information; the point is to get to the point and stick to the point and the capacity for that varies from person to person. The ideal isn't to see who keeps the strictest silence but for all to help maintain a silent atmosphere. This says on one level that silence is in our lives to create an ambience of recollection so I'll remember and honor God's presence. On another level, silence reminds me that the misuse of words, the abuse of language can also be the sinful abuse of people; silence for us means not talking , more t...