In honour of my supervisor Ian Young's ISBL paper on עַתִּ֤יק יֽוֹמַיָּא֙ in Dan 7:13 … "Bles-sing and honour *clap clap*, glo-ry and power *clap clap* be unto an elderly man." …

Given that ISBL 2026 gave me two extra citations for my thesis, a potential collab article, and a lot of time at the pub with new friends, seems to have been a productive time 😊

A reminder to those presenting at ISBL: if your slide deck is just the full verbatim text of your paper, you must at least have a bouncing ball animation so we can all say it with you.

Big fan of the thing that happens every few months where OneDrive decides it wants to dump a few dozen gigabytes of my backups onto my laptop because it made another copy elsewhere and forgot about them.

There's something uniquely gross about the AI bubble, something that feels different to me from other expressions of unchecked greed and money for the sake of money for the sake of money.

Taking one of my now-occasional train trips this morning, I am reminded that this is the time of year when the air conditioning on Sydney trains is set to "oven."

So I’ve learned that the book of Daniel (or at least Dan 1–4, but there are lions in the trailer, so mayyyybe Dan 6?) is getting a big-budget movie adaptation, complete with an actor people might actually recognise (Daniel is played by the guy who played Aladdin in the live-action 1/14

"Pseudo-Philo 6" sounds like a midrash-themed EDM artist.

As someone working in OT textual criticism, reading the phrase "only 159 manuscripts" is mind-boggling. (Brushing up on the wild world of CBGM)

I'm not a fan of the attitude toward preaching that demands the preacher come in even when they're sick. Like, if you're coughing from the pulpit, I'm now deciding whether I stay and talk to people or whether I leave early to protect my disabled, home-bound wife. 1/4

Preparation for ISBL going well, I see.

It's been available as an advance article for a while, but my paper with Pasi Hyytiainen and Tim Finney, "Comparative computational textual criticism of the Gospel of Mark and the paradigm of textual clusters," has just been published in the latest print issue of DSH: doi.org/10.1093/llc/...

WHOAH THERE'S AN UPDATE AT CAL-HUC sexy new interface #aramaic #linguistics #semitic

This is an horrific indictment.

Oh my. This is spectacular. sinceyouarrived.world/taken

I'll be at ISBL, too! Presenting on an Aramaic version of (some of) the Additions to Daniel and making the case that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego aren't the protagonists of Dan 3 (except when they are).

The collects for Good Friday go so hard.

I’ve been told that the only communion service at my church this Easter is on Maundy Thursday. At an Anglican Church. At Easter.

As the recent wars have been unfolding, I’ve been thinking a bit about Daniel 10–11, particularly the end of Dan 11. “He will come to his end, and no one will help him.” One way or another, there will be justice.

So, of course, 1) lol, this looks awful but 2) This is hardly the first 'Jesus game' attempt and it is so depressing because why would you make a game about being Jesus (a thing none of your players do) instead of a game about being a Christian (a thing rather more people do).

been thinking about "cosmic horror" a lot lately, and since writing is thinking, i tried to put some of my thoughts down in a more-or-less organization fashion over on the blog. geoliminal.com/2026/03/20/c...

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Takamitsu Muraoka (1938–2026). An obituary can be found on the IOSCS website: septuaginta.uni-goettingen.de/ioscs/news/94/

Hey look, it's the first* bit of published biblical studies stuff I've been involved in writing 😊 bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/red... *OK, technically an expansion of it, but there's more of my writing in this one, which is exciting.

Pictured: me ordering John Company 2, Pax Pamir, and the new NICOT Dan 1–6 in the space of five minutes.

If I ever swim the Tiber, it’ll be because of this

Surely there’s someone working on a modern-day retelling of Caligula that just slowly morphs into a weird drama about Donald Trump

A great🧵 One day somebody’s going to write a PhD on Charlie Kirk’s funeral as the consummation of American evangelical syncretism. Like, there’s so much text and sub-text here. Just deeply disturbing.

Jim's RPG: a system where your primary skills are: Mowing Fencing Painting Cleaning Roofing Electrical Plumbing Flooring Removals Hazardous Material Blinds Termite and Pest Control I.T. Pool Care Security Glass Security Doors Insurance Tree and Stump Removal Dog Wash Window and Pressure Cleaning …

Book Announcement: The Authority of the Septuagint

This is the kind of thing that I (as someone in a very different part of the humanities) would love to get my hands on. That academic pub price tag, though :c

If you're itching to read about "Apocalyptic" in the most arcane senses of that term, perhaps to distract you from much else apocalyptic in our times, this is the series for you! humanhistoriesofkn.substack.com/p/away-from-...

So Bluesky's a fairly glum place, but as a small piece of good news: I got married 😊

Something something Second Foundation

🎶(Shekhinah Shekhinah)🎶 Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of lying hips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of lying hips.

One day … greenroninstore.com/products/tes...

There was a young woman who visited my church this morning. I learned later (from my partner) that she and her family had fled Ukraine a few years back; she's not a Christian, but with all that's happened to her, she's looking to make some sense of life.

In Rod we trust

If you can read Tim Keller in your quiet time, you can read Judith. I don’t make the rules.

The latest Addition to Daniel

PhD thesis coming along nicely, I see

It’s not just the death of classical education, it’s also the death of the things that make individual universities unique and interesting. Biblical studies at USYD was unusual for an Australian uni, and it was all thrown away because execs wanted something more profitable.

Low-church Anglicans when the Bible Project starts covering the Apocrypha:

Broke: one day, someone will write a book about my work Woke: one day, someone will cite me Bespoke: one day, someone will be forced to explain to their readers how my system of sub-verse-level referencing works and why it’s wrong, before introducing their own equally awful system of referencing.

Me, desperately searching for information on Greek texts using the one scholar working on *Arabic* Daniel.

We’ll need to start taking up the slack;