Time for the second attempt at a reading group in this bad boy

Right, new post, first in a while, forgive me I am sickly and suffer much

As a graduate student in a biblical studies programme I don't think this is correct - everyone in the field has stories of people they've encountered who thought like this, gone to uni to study the bible, learnt the requisite languages, and then realised how much more complicated everything is.

Right, new post, first in a while, forgive me I am sickly and suffer much

the Hebrew here is the least of the problems but like.... what do you even say about that treatment of Hebrew

I'm experiencing anti-philology discrimination rn

studious but naive voice: it's good to see so many of my friends are really into gemara today, b"h

I push my fingers into my eyes it's the only thing that slowly stops the ache and it's made of all the things I have to take Jesus, it never ends, it works its way inside and if the pain goes on aaaaAAGHHHHGH

The best I've read recently have been more about the history of scholarship: Bruce Lincoln's Secrets, Lies and Consequences, on Eliade's hidden past Jeb J Card's Spooky Archaeology, about how archaeology produced "pseudoarchaeology" and Roberta Mazza's Stolen Fragments on ilicit manuscript trade

I'm sorry but Kotsko seems straightfowardly correct here, and I'm confused by this response - I don't see him appealing to "long tradition rooted in Christian supremacy" - and I think the PWJ crew has a very unfortunate apologetic tendency to downplay or ignore the parts of Paul that are...

teeing up my final paper on the Book of Job:

Man I have incredible friends when I can say "I've been really interested in this stuff" and have someone just send me a copy of this as a birthday gift

type of guy who finds out the race has been called from yeshiva world news

man I just remembered balam acab insane nostalgia, remember when music was like, hey, here's a future that's fragile and both heavy and weightless at the same time what happened to that vibe

mythicist they always are

crazy to pop on here briefly during a break from studying for my Hebrew and Aramaic exam to see someone calling people dogmatic and blinded by religious faith for believing that the Talmud wasn't written in the 8th C BCE but instead c. 1k years later

this should be an excellent read

I wrote a 5k word essay on Les Enfants du Paradis in less than 48 hrs drawing super heavily from Deleuze and Guattari because I knew the lecturer marking the paper had not read them, and would not read them, so I could justify anything I wrote by appealing to them. A-

the trajectory from being one of the primary subjects of Rose's "The Shadow of Spirit" to twitter is quite something

what's up I'm just adding paragraph numbers from the Schafer Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur to the translation of Sefer Hahekhalot/3 Enoch in the Charlesworth Pseudepigrapha vol

Aramaic is so cool

ok new theory: the "debate me" new athiest culture of the 9/11 ara was highly beneficial to both that crowd and particularly conservative evangelical Christians, and so those were their primary interlocutors, and that conditioned an entire generation...

help, I need either a concordance to the Hekhalot Literature or a pdf of the Schafer Synopse which is keyword searchable this is an emergency (I have realized something cool I might want to write a paper on which needs some intense lexography) This is also very much serious and only 20% a joke

#birdbot

I miss the good old days when lack of consensus reality was due to Kant's arguments about objectivity in the Critique of Pure Reason and not due to fascists successfully infiltrating 21st century tech consensus machines and useful idiot liberals cheerleading the process

Slightly diminish a book from the Bible in a needlessly contrarian voice: Anniversaries

I find this pretty stunning (it's on his blog for the curious) as the information provided makes it pretty likely that a) this was Sheffield Phoenix, and b) they've learnt from the criticisms levelled at them last time, and the reviewers rejected the MS outright, no revisions could salvage it

building on this I think it's very doable, and that there's a pipleline here: evangelical -> athiest -> biblical minimalist crypto-conspiracism -> crypto-gnostic/perennialist idealism -> jungian "cultural christianity" and/or just fascism there are a lot of different off-ramps ofc bc this is real

I see that our friend Richard Carrier, PHD is keeping up with the zeitgeist by announcing that failing peer review is actually passing peer review if you take into account the fact that the reviewers failed to recognize his incredible, unsurpassed maverick genius, and that this is a scandal

it's crazy to me to think that this text, written down around 2000 years ago, was already ancient when it was written down (Song of the Sea, 4Q14/4QexodC)

Here's an owlet showing off his flexibility last week.🪶

I'm currently looking at irony in the bible, which a lot of people don't really thing about, and if I were teaching it the best intro, I think, would be to show the clip from Prince of Egypt where the writers place Ex 11:6 in the Mouth of Pharaoh, not G-d

Ok I am very excited to read this paper:

When the essay on Job cites Benjamin's notes on Kafka, Assyrian and Hittite treaty documents, James Joyce, and Ugaritic poetry you can tell it's gonna be a doozy

some religious studies person needs to do a study of the youtube economy of ex-vangelicals getting really into ultra-fringe biblical minimalist stuff and treating that in the same awed tones as some kind of liberatory/soteriological secret

@jamescrane.bsky.social et al - I think this is probably a big part of the solution to the old and now I think fairly outmoded Scholem vs Adono theology vs marxism debate about B's legacy - the absence of theology is a symptom, and a problem B is trying to address without retreat into nostaliga

Obviously I disagree with that with how much I've written about it but I have some more thoughts on this, boiled down from all that stuff (which I need to finish):

I'm imagining hebrew-language reporting on this being very confusing

Slightly diminish a band name - table lamp0)))

Jesus voice: Oh, you may be a friend of Yochanan, Moreh Hatzedek and you may agree You may get along with Gamliel and with Judas of Gallilee You may be an old-time Kohen, and think Dorshei hachakalot are fine Yes, you may be a comrade to all of these folks, but you ain't no Comrade of mine

#birdbot

If you see this, quote post with a title screen that is iconic to you

it's crazy how nebuchadnetzar got so worked up about a dream of a statue that got hit by the rock the bible is so cool

I love being able to just say "I disagree" in bible class and have a great argument it's so cool

hello long time no see i have been dealing with my legs not working properly but also just about put together my own translations of literally every passage in Deutero-Isaiah containing the root גא״ל and I think it doesn't really mean what most people think it does

Beyond what is already said, emphasizing the mutual exclusivity - religious diversity is predicated on difference, often differences which are multually exclusive. This kind of thing looks nice and relativist and pluralist in the abstract - but only in the abstract, in fact it is the opposite

Books on my mind while housing is deeply insecure and history is, unfortunately, happening:

Article calling for articles that focus on texts later shown to be forgeries to be retracted. www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2025/5/...

ואין דורש ואין מבקש ואין שואל על מי לנו להשען על אבינו שבשמים

Rosean Futures … Thoughts and recollections on the late Gillian Rose, philosopher.