Seven books I keep close because I love them
blog.plover.com
blog.plover.com
The NIV has so many inexcusable translations that reinforce a theological worldview that matched the conversation on atonement and justification that was happening in the 90s and 2000s. There's a great catalog out there of the most egregious translations in the NIV [1]. One such example:
> Romans 7:18 — The NIV here translates σάρξ (sarx) as “sinful nature” even though this implies later Augustinian doctrine on original sin that is not intended by the original writer. In contrast, the NRSV correctly chooses to translate this tricky Pauline term more literally as “flesh”.
Are you interested in a readable Bible that flows well to modern English ears? The New Living Translation (NLT) is fantastic and very underrated. I recommend reading the Psalms in the NLT since much of the language of the Psalms being in a higher register in the NIV and other translations doesn't land as well, but reading the Psalms in NLT makes it much more relatable and human. I find the way it reads refreshing, and it's based on more modern scholarship.
Are you interested in latest scholarly understanding of the Bible? The NRSV is the consensus version (as much as there could be one).
Are you interested in understanding the Bible as American Evangelical Christians read it today? That's currently the English Standard Version (ESV), which many churches have switched to as the NIV has lost favor in Reformed circles.
[1]: https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/articles-and-resource...
One example is that often Exodus goes from narrative to descriptions of genealogy tree in modern translations. It happens that words interpreted as names of people are also abstract nouns and these passages can also be read as aphorisms. I haven't looked deep into that but it makes way more sense to me that narrative is punctuated by such reflections on "Wisdom unites with Patience and beget Lasting Wealth than breaking into describing marriages and lineages then going back to the story...
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Books-Moses-Translation-Commenta...
Discovering that "Jonah" can mean "dove" was certainly eye-opening. And re-reading that book in light of knowing this, quite interesting!
In fact, the OT and NT alike sometimes even drop in-line translation/explanation of a name that they really want us to know. In that case, why not know all of them?
That in itself would still make a lot of sense to me though; as far as I know, property and power was mainly transfered through the lines of first born males (so a patriarchy, in the literal sense). If that, social status and so on hinges on who your father, grandfather etc. was, then I think it makes sense for geneology trees to be something important enough to write down, especially in literature that was partially written to capture/produce a peoples cultural identity (i.e. parts of the creation story where written while the jews where forcibly integrated into the babylonian empire, and struggling to keep their own cultural identity. That's another good "use case" for genealogy, I would say.)
There is no definitive reading of scripture, there is no definitive version of any of the texts, and I enjoy finding new aspects of their history and interpretation. Realizing that some of the texts that read as genealogy might have been originally a form of poetic aphorism is something I wouldn't affirm to a bible scholar but I enjoy thinking about it.
Someone else said a lot of scripture was written as poetry. Imagine people in the year 4500 trying to figure out some fourth hand translation of clippings taken from books by Neruda, Chaucer and Hobsbawm.
When was that exactly? I believe the oldest extant versions are from around 300 AD. We have a rough idea of when certain books might have been written, but that is open to debate, and strong arguments have been made that put the origin of certain parts of these books centuries apart. Even the composition of a 'canonical' version of these books collections is not really clear before a certain point that is several centuries removed from the time in which we think they might have been originally written.
Different books or even different parts of a book (even what constitutes a 'book' in the old or new testament is not well defined for any given time period before a certain point from when we have some evidence of a certain standardization at a certain place - which doesn't even mean all traditions everywhere using these books follow that same standard from that point onward) might have been written at times centuries apart and might have originated in different cultures.
My point is, sweeping statements about customs and practices of specific societies as they were between one and three millennia ago is very hard to make. Even something like "the people who wrote this book clearly practiced primogeniture" is packed with lots of assumptions. And if we could know that a certain part of some scripture was from a definite time period and originally written in a certain language... who wrote it? Where? What was the legal system there?
Take another example, a period and people we have a lot of data about: in XVII century England, for example, primogeniture and entail were standard... for the elite. Not for the middle class. You see what I'm getting at?
Put simply, what I meant with my previous comment was: we have literally no idea if the people who wrote these supposed genealogies in Exodus were in fact practicing these inheritance legal forms you mentioned.
please don't assume about me, almost all of what you wrote was known to me prior before reading your comment. That information regarding XVII century England for example is something I would have supposed, but did not know for sure; I just knew the equivalent for German society at that time.
> When was that exactly? I believe the oldest extant versions are from around 300 AD. We have a rough idea of when certain books might have been written, but that is open to debate, and strong arguments have been made that put the origin of certain parts of these books centuries apart. Even the composition of a 'canonical' version of these books collections is not really clear before a certain point that is several centuries removed from the time in which we think they might have been originally written.
Yeah, 300 AD would be a sensible starting point. I am strictly talking about ancient Israel, during the time where the old testament was composed, where the exact point in time does not even matter for my claim, because my claim is: "The society that composed the OT was primarily patriarchical during most of the perioud where the OT was written, edited, read, to such a degree that it would be a mistake to pretend it was not." Nobody claims to have a time machine, of course.
Here are some well-reputated sources that strengthen my claim, and are congruent with what I rememember from my own readings of the Code of Hammurabi and the Old Testament way back:
- "Hennie J. Marsman, Women in Ugarit and Israel: Their Social and Religious Position in the Context of the Ancient Near East (Brill, 2003)". Massive comparative study of the ANE, her conclusion: [AI/]She concludes that while women had more rights than often assumed (they could sometimes buy land or engage in trade), the societies were undeniably patriarchal in their legal architecture. High priesthoods, kingships, and tribal elderships were exclusively male domains.[/AI]
- "Hans Jochem Boecker, Law and the Administration of Justice in the Old Testament and Ancient East (1980)", summary: [AI/]Analyzing the biblical Covenant Code, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, and Middle Assyrian Laws, Boecker points out that women were legally disadvantaged. For instance, in many ANE legal codes, a woman's sexuality was treated as the property of her father or husband. Boecker writes regarding ANE legal codes: "There cannot either, of course, be any question of the legal equality of men and women"[/AI]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Bible:
"Ancient Near Eastern societies have traditionally been described as patriarchal, and the Bible, as a document written by men, has traditionally been interpreted as patriarchal in its overall views of women.[1]: 9 [2]: 166–167 [3] Marital and inheritance laws in the Bible favor men, and women in the Bible exist under much stricter laws of sexual behavior than men. In ancient biblical times, women were subject to strict laws of purity, both ritual and moral.
Recent scholarship accepts the presence of patriarchy in the Bible, but shows that heterarchy is also present: heterarchy acknowledges that different power structures between people can exist at the same time, that each power structure has its own hierarchical arrangements, and that women had some spheres of power of their own separate from men.[1]: 27 There is evidence of gender balance in the Bible, and there is no attempt in the Bible to portray women as deserving of less because of their "naturally evil" natures."
Heterarchy being present would not render the society non-patriarchical, especially when it comes to matter like the one that started this subthread, in that geneology trees should be viewed through a patriarchical lens, and that it is more likely that those elements are something familiar to the intended audience (which is not some small religious elite, mind you, the opposite, those narratives were written for a deeply religious society, with a scripture-based religion).
> Put simply, what I meant with my previous comment was: we have literally no idea if the people who wrote these supposed genealogies in Exodus were in fact practicing these inheritance legal forms you mentioned.
Of course not, put that way, we know basically nothing about anything and could simply abandon the discipline of academic history.
Scholars have to make and do make educated guesses though, which forms a consensus if enough do agree, and the current consensus is still that ancient israel had a patriarchical legal framework, and for example also that women were economically dependent over large amounts of time. Which is also reflect in a lot of books in the OT, which makes sense if 1) the stories where intended to be relatable and 2) the authors used what they observed around them to describe it. That depends on the genre of course, for prophetic books or lyricals books, there are different rules, but when it comes to the stories that have a narrative core, then this absolutely is something that historians consider when it comes to how the intended audience of the literarical work is structured. Constistently so, across regions and times.
The position that "many instances of primogeniture in the old testament would have been something not deeply known and likely experienced first hand by the typical reader" is pretty hard to defend, as I argued above. That is as close to knowing as we can get without a time machine - but if one does not make such (well-founded) assumptions, then much of the humanities, including hermeneutics, stands on shaky grounds.
Did these authors write genealogies because they were practicing primogeniture? Unclear. Were they? To answer that we'd have to figure out who wrote these excerpts, when, where did they live, what was the legal system then and there and did these exact rules apply to them? Short answer is we don't know.
We know very little of history prior to a few hundred years ago. We know a lot of well documented episodes but to do social history even of the renaissance is a serious undertaking and shouldn't be trivialized in terms of "surely it was like so back then". Even the early medieval period has a lot of blanks. Did you know a homossexual bishop called "Flora" lived in first millennium France?
Early iron age? Attributing authorship and writing sociological analysis when we don't even know in which century exactly they lived is far fetched to say the least.
Anyway, you don't seem to be taking me seriously, and to be reading as a confrontational argument something that I meant as a friendly and helpful nudge towards digging deeper instead of making assumptions.
> Of course not, put that way, we know basically nothing about anything and could simply abandon the discipline of academic history.
This to me indicates this is something else than a friendly exchange between history nerds so I'll drop the issue.
I did not, but like all the facts you mentioned so far, this is not a surprise at all for me (if that was the intention), since it does not contradict any belief I had about first millenium france. It is an interesting fact, though!
> Anyway, you don't seem to be taking me seriously
That's not the case, and I am sorry if I came over as such; I would not have tried to argue my points if I would not have taken you seriously. English is also not my native language, which might contribute to more subtle points being missed/misscommunicated.
> to be reading as a confrontational argument something that I meant as a friendly and helpful nudge towards digging deeper instead of making assumptions
You see, that's the issue; your nudge would only be helpful if I indeed did not dig appropriately deep yet already; which may or may not be, but instead of verifying it first, you told me things that I either knew already, or that did not address my point at all, which was irritating. I am all for infodumps, everytime, everywhere, love 'em. What I took issue with was that you seemed to assume a lack of knowledge, and decided to nudge, seemingly not considering the possibility that you might have completely missed my point.
Which is, succinctly stated: "Surely we should be able and are able to make educated assumptions about all aspects about anytime anywhere of human history; with the strong assumption that we do not have time machines and are therefore are limitited to guessing (or theorising, if one wants to use the fancy word), not measuring or anything or anything of that sort. It is perfectly understood that it's all guesswork, that might be mightly off regarding how it really was - and if we are lucky, the theory is not totally off".
You seemed to take this as a much stronger claim, as is evidenced by you bringing up exceptions to the "rule" more than once; that would only make sense if you literaly believe that statements such as "most of the books in the old testament were written for with an audience in mind that mostly viewed being the first born son a special, higher social condition" was meant in its absolutes (or with absolute certainty), which it was not. Anectodes, counterexamples and so on are meaningless when it comes to statements of bigger trends. They would only be relevant if they would turn out to be a common occurance, or when the source mentions the homosexuality of a monk in passing, without making a big fuzz about it for example - a possible indication that non-hidden homosexuality amongst monks might have been at least tolerated, and maybe even not-rare in first millenium france in at least that monstery. Or was not an issue to the person who reported that. Or it was a smear campain (not all sources are reliable). And so on and so on... (Note: I don't doubt that a homosexual monk named Flora existed back than, it might be well established that he did. I am just using that fact as an example)
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To wrap up: Infodumps/facts? Heck yeah! Exchange? Yes please. The two of us talking past each other? That's not an exchange, yes. Simply assuming I do not know something instead of verifying it? Heck no, I firmly reject that. If you would have shown me where I was wrong, a nudge would have been appreciated, but as I read it, even now, you simply misunderstood my claims - then, the nudge was missplaced, and came over as patronizing to me.
I think I understood now where it went wrong and what you tried to bring across. Appreciate the facts you droped; I am more the top-down than bottom-up type, but facts like those are interesting to me nonetheless.
I will also stop this thread; in case it helps resolving open ends: "most of the books in the old testament were written/edited/composed for with an audience in mind that mostly viewed being the first born son a special, higher social condition" was and is my intended claim; independent of who the individuals where that wrote these books, of periods where social hierarchies within the intended audiences at time of writting/editing/composition changed, and so on and so for. Yes, that audience encompasses a bit amount of time and space. Still, people who are paid to think and write about this seem to majorily agree with "most of the books in the old testament were written for with an audience in mind that mostly viewed being the first born son a special, higher social condition", if I did not wildly misread the current consensus of academic research. Again, this is a big picture claim; no singular counterexamples or short time periods can change the assumed validity of that statement, only once new sources or new interpretations of old sources indicate a different quantitative historic reality than previously assumed.
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All the best & happy nerding!
I think you were emphasizing something beside this, but if you want to know _why_ the five Books of Moses often jump suddenly into genealogy or minutiae of interest only to priests, you might be interested in the Documentary Hypothesis. Friedman's "Who Wrote the Bible?" is an approachable introduction to it.
Ancient history is much like astrophysics and cosmology. We know so very little and there are so many blanks.
It sometimes catches me off guard that people think our past is well known.
I recommend searching books and articles about 'canaanite religion' - the cult of El, Baal and Yaveh have a lot in common. You need to understand the context of Israelite religion to realize that modern monotheism wasn't created in a vacuum, it matured out of a deep tradition of local cults. I'd also recommend looking into Mesopotamian religions. Egyptian religion is not as fundamental but it provides a lot of perspective. Once you see the influence, it sheds light on a lot of things. The relationship between the cults of Set and the conflicting beliefs of followers of El and Baal is a fascinating rabbit hole.
Greek mythology also acquires a whole new depth to it when you realize that Baal (a canaanite deity), El (an israelite deity that eventually merges with some others into the monotheistic god) and Zeus: all were storm gods. There's a lot more to it all I'm saying, again, look into that. Fascinating stuff.
There is an amazing channel on youtube I wholeheartedly recommend: Esoterica https://www.youtube.com/@TheEsotericaChannel
A couple of good books I still remember are Belief by Orsi and Ancient Israel by Lemche.
Some journals off the top of my head:
Religion Compass https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17498171/current
Journal of the American Society for Premodern Asia https://lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/jaos
I'd say go on Semantic Scholar, Academia.edu, or some other academic search tool and start digging! Bible authorship is a minor branch of a deep well of scholarship that is the study of ancient history and ancient religion.
It's my understanding that both Baal and El were Canaanite deities and that the Israelite cults brought their storm god Yahweh with them to Canaan and eventually he absorbed features of the Canaanite gods.
We don't really know much about these entities. There are fragments of inscriptions that could be read as 'lord of the city' for example just as easily as naming some deity.
Israel means roughly 'lords' struggle': Isra El.
Like I mentioned elsewhere, we know very little and what evidence we have is fragmentary. Thinking about possible interpretations of and links among what evidence we have is fascinating and every so often we might see a constellation of data points shedding light on events of 2500 years ago or so, but it's important to realize that the gaps in our knowledge of what happened in the iron age are much, much bigger than what we actually know.
KJV: For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.
NRSV: For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.
NIV: For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.
So KJV and NRSV agree.
This is all the same group. Bin the NIV.
It is not clear from the text that Samson is aware of the presence of Philistines the first three times. We are told they are lying in ambush in an inner chamber. We are not told that they make themselves known, attempt to subdue Samson, or interact with him in any way. Instead, we are told that Delilah announces their imminent presence, with no follow-through. (And why, after all, would they dare come in until Delilah has established that he is weak and harmless, given his reputation for strength and bloodthirst?)
I don't believe Samson understands Delilah is betraying him. Not until the end when he's told her the real secret. Until that point, he may only receive her behavior as, at worst, a taunt and, at best, an attempt to pursue a kind of relational intimacy in which he makes himself vulnerable to her. And indeed, that's exactly where the story goes. He eventually makes himself vulnerable to her, both emotionally and physically.
A shallow reading that concludes the characters must be dumb and naive to explain the ridiculousness of the plot is rarely the most appropriate reading. Frequently, the characters and nuances run much deeper, and a more careful and thoughtful reading is required. Ancient literature is stylistically terse compared to modern literature. Space on the manuscript is precious and not given over to things that the reader is meant to infer by reflection. And whenever a phrase or pattern is repeated, that means it is very, very significant. In this case, Samson's interaction with Delilah is not a one-off inexplicable behavior. It is one episode in a series of episodes, both preceding and following, where consistent patterns of behavior develop and escalate (e.g., his vengefulness, his vulnerability to women).
But I thought about it deeper and how some men can be blinded by sex. In my own life, I've seen men stay with the wrong woman, tolerating all kinds of toxicity from their partner, even with all their friends telling them it's the wrong woman for him.
Samson is blinded by sex. He's recorded multiple times going outside of his community, even to enemy territory, to seek out attractive women and prostitutes. Even though Delilah is seemingly open about her intentions to destroy him, he's blinded by sex.
In that light, Samson isn't so dumb; he's just human.
Which, as I understand, is pretty much the lesson that most of theologists derive form the story of Samson: don't let your lust blind you and make you stray from your duties to the God.
I think he's purposefully supposed to come off as a buffoon, but maybe a relatable one?
That's a neat summation of Biblical hermeneutics if I've ever seen one and more generally of religious hermeneutics.
What is being defended as a "close and thoughtful read" implicitly is from a more cynical view, a projection of nuance, complexity, and deep structure,
which is predicated and motivated by the axiom that the text must, definitionally, be subtle and its lessons profound. Because it is, you know, divine.
If you don't accept that axiom, the countervailing read is no, the characterizations are clumsy, the plots ridiculous, etc.; and it is precisely the gymnastic efforts one must go to, to find in them inspiration and divinity, that convince those who do of the ineffably mystery of the divine.
Sometimes a crude story succeeds on some merits and fails on others; when it is enshrined and glorified it creates a frankly dangerous social pressure to praise the emperor's clothes.
The same issue seems to occur with "deep" thinkers in other areas (e.g. trying to understand French intellectuals).
The trouble is that it can be worthwhile thinking about something without depth, or paying attention to a smart persons' thoughts on something shallow. And a priori we can't always know what is worthwhile.
E.g. I liked the blog, because here's a smart guy who has explained a little of what he gets out of a few divergent works.
To an atheist, it seems very obvious that there is a intellectual whirlpool and cognitive error meta-pattern at work, which crudely summarized would be, "close attention to any subject and its context provides a fractal landscape within which infinite complexity and subtle relationships may be discerned" (the universe is reflected in a grain of sand; or, if you practice breath meditation, in the focus of breathing): this is interpreted as the signature of the divine. Because nothing we can produce with our human agency has such complexity. We are simple, serial, things; the world is parallel and multidimensional at every scale.
The world IMO is worthy of wondrous regard. But it's not because of design, not in any sense usually meant, bar those that Wolfram is pointing at with his "Rudliad" and the anthropic principle.
A deist is liable to say, ah ha, well, that is where the divine shows itself. But this is IMO the last of the gaps into which it might flee. Or, more charitably and ecumenically, one might say, this is where definitions of the divine converge for the atheist and the deist; what we mean when each say "the divine" is this, that the universe is wondrous and has deep orders and it betrays fractal similarity and order; and what a thing it is to be not just alive within it but aware of being so!
That is a cause for humility reflection and gratitude, for sure.
I am playing devils advocate here: Even if it were not divine because atheists happen to be right on that one... even then, the authors and the intended audience of the bible considered it divine - with pretty much the same outcomes when it comes to hermeneutics. That is why I think that both 1) atheists rejecting to do (at least temporary) suspension of disbelief even for the sake of understanding the protagonists, or the authors, or the intension of the text, and 2) christians who just pick whatever forcibly-robbed-of-its-context oneliner fits their particular point view miss out.
Divine or not, this is a work that was composed a long time ago, edited, translated and interpreted by a diverse range of people spanning more than two millenia. Putting in less effort than one would into any other written source only guarantees one thing, the absense of surprises and learnings - if that is the goal, then reading two-three pages and discarding it because its plot seems worse than a C-move is surely the way to success.
Are passages about killing infidels and the other xenophobic garbage is a historical metaphorical and nuanced stuff which must be interpreted very different nowadays? Fine. But then all the other things should be also interpreted heavily - like there is no need to saran-wrap women because "the intention" or "the author's meaning" was about simply protecting them from the desert sand a-la medieval hiking handbook. There is no need to avoid specific animal meat in the age of refrigerators. And so on it goes.
Or we need to literally believe in the resurrection/heaven/souls/miracles and literally follow some extremely outdated and thus absurd instructions to the letter? Well, then murder, sadism and xenophobia then should be taken literally too.
Agree: Intellectual dishonesty just sucks, period. In any area I think, but the more emotional a topic, the harder so. Changing the axioms of how one views the world when it fits ones point is often either decieving, or the person is not aware of doing it, both options are suboptimal.
Here is the "But" or maybe better, the "but also": What I often observe where atheist + theist conversations go wrong is that the atheist has a preconcived notion of how certain beliefs have a causal relationship with other beliefs, which might not be necessarily true, and the intellectually honest would be to confirm that mental model first before jumping to conclusions. Let me make a, depending on the person, controversial example:
Imagine atheist A and theist T being in an ongoing dialoge, 10m, 15m in, and the topic comes to how Ts faith affect their marriage, what role is does play. T makes the statement that "... and one other thing is that I really like we are both partipating in this beatiful symbol of womand and man being created seperately and for each other ..." - now, what I often observed in real life and online:
A might infer that
- T things that women that are single are less worth or doing it wrong
- T thinks that homosexual couples are less worth or doing it wrong
- Underlying assumption: T thinks less of people that don't try to practise the christian faith
All of that might or might not be true, but by getting angry about their own interpretation of reality rather than asking about it first, the conversation is unlikely to become productive.
Some notes:
- The opposite if of course possible as well, i.e. a T assuming that an A has no morals because they don't believe in God or stuff like that
- In case one wonders how T can be able to believe that the proper thing in Gods eyes is to do X, yet they are at peace with people doing Y, does this not cause cognitive dissonance? Yes, but only under additional assumptions that T might not have all - for example: Society should be structured based on christian values. People should be evaluated on their deeds whether they actually want to work towards God rather than against him. And so on...
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Some might raise the point that it is rare that T voices a strong belief in X, but is compatible with a diverse, inclusive society. To this I counter: I don't care and neither should you! When it comes to me, I will get annoyed fast because I am fine with someone being interested in an exchange between two individuals, but when I am viewed as a representative of some group, then put on your sociology hat and do a survey, I guess. When it comes to you (as in: anyone else): This mindset cements notions that you have about a group - if you do not talk to Ts at all, or be open to their existence, how would you ever be able to correct the (possibly wrong, possibly right) notion that strong conviction and compality with a diverse society is possible?
I always find this mindset peculiarly baffling. From a secular perspective, we've understood since at least the 1800s that "morality" is simply the pro-social instincts that we've developed as a social species of apes, and that they are historically contingent on a million different factors for any particular group of humans, such that the exact manifestation of "morality" differs widely from culture to culture and over time. Yet comments like this invariably accept Christian moral realism as a given (and granted, it's obviously a large genealogical contributor to Western social norms today) but then sever its grounding from God and place it in...their personal feelings about right and wrong. So God using the Israelites/Babylonians/Romans/etc as his instrument of divine justice is evil "xenophobic garbage"...because divine justice is real (xenophobia is objectively evil) but the God described in religious texts actually has nothing to do with it, and actually its wrong because....uh...we say so and we're the final and ultimate arbiters of right and wrong I guess? Us, specifically, that is.
It really seems like this is the genealogical origin of the idea of "progress" you see throughout these comments as well - people are "better" now, because you can clearly see over time a large subset of people developing social norms closer and closer to our own! And unlike theirs, ours are objectively right and true, or at least closer to it. This is certainly a historically unusual view, which may have typically been rather provincial and close-minded, but which certainly did general not have this universalist, and dare I say, colonialist bent, that all must agree.
A very off-tangent note, but I recently learned that Samson's last words, "ἀποθανέτω ἡ ψυχή μου μετὰ τῶν ἀλλοφύλων"/"moriatur anima mea cum Philisthiim", pretty much have never been translated into English literally; it's always "Let me die with the Philistines" for some reason.
It's also worth noting that some books of the Hebrew Bible are poetry (Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Song of Songs), which doesn't show at all after translation. Hebrew poetry is unique!
As they say, reading the Bible in translation is like "kissing your spouse through a veil".
In my experience there's a lot of support for reincarnation in judeo-christian scripture, when you read it open to that interpretation.
Why do you assume a entire team of biblical scholars, working for years to translate the Old Testement for the NIV didn't know what they were doing?
But you do?
That assumption does not appear anywhere in their comment.
Your rude strawman question only makes sense if assuming that ivrit-tirvi is not a fluent speaker of Hebrew and is somehow translating the Hebrew into something else that they understand ... which is quite unlikely, since ivrit (עִבְרִית) is the Hebrew word for the English word "Hebrew".
And the NIV translation into English reflects ideological interpretation that one can avoid by reading the original Hebrew if one understands it.
A very loose translation could be how the "same program", as defined in its lambda calculus form, or as assembly code, is equivalent to dozens of programming languages, all with different goals and ways to reach their goal (declarative vs. imperative, functional vs. OOP, readable for beginners like Python versus APL, ...)
Hebrew is all about INTUITION (knowledge that rises spontaneously from YOUR OWN heart).
The more you are SPIRITUALLY ALIVE, the more you will get out of every Hebrew sentence. It's a work-in-progress that lasts all of your lifetime.
And it's PERSONAL: every time you read (or re-read) a passage, it adds understanding to the level/dimension that you are currently capable of...
(You see, it's a never ending process: and that's exactly why I LOVE Hebrew and the Bible so much!!)
Both of those forms are third-person and say "may my soul" ( ψυχή/anima) "die with the Philistines". (Definite article in Greek but not in Latin because Latin doesn't have them.)
The original Hebrew has
תָּמוֹת נַפְשִׁי עִם-פְּלִשְׁתִּים
which is also third person "may my soul" (נַפְשִׁי) "die with (the) Philistines".
"Let me die with the foreigners"
I usually see "foreigners" replaced with "Philistines" (as noted above). It's Samson's line just before he braces against the pillars and brings the building down on himself and the thousands of Philistines inside, so I understand why it is usually translated that way.
Also, ψυχή here renders Hebrew nephesh, which is closer to "life" or "self", but when I think about the attributed statement it just reads better with the personal attachment (vs. "Let my self|life|soul die with..."). Which is the fun of translation, as each translator seeks to reveal a meaningful rendition which will resonate with their audience.
P.S. My only reaction to the response is "whoosh!".
The Greek quoted above is from the Septuagint, and those translators rendered that word as ἀλλόφυλοι, roughly "those of another tribe." So "foreigners" is the closest I have in English to the Greek word, and "Philistines" is who it refers to.
I'm no scholar here, just a dabbler, so I'm happy the discussion is happening at all.
The other line sounds like a plea to others.
I can't help but wonder about LLM translations... will they do it better or worse or just different? I can wonder if it might be with less bias, or with a better body to pull from, but I can see it can be slop too.
Well, yes, precisely. Just two verses earlier Samson prayed to God, asking to grant him a last bout of strength to take revenge at the Philistines for blinding him: "And Samson called unto the Lord, and said, O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%9E%D7%AA#Conjugation
תָּמוּת is either second person masculine future, or third person feminine future. But according to
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A0%D7%A4%D7%A9
נֶפֶשׁ is feminine. So it seems that only the third person form could agree with the subject noun, right?
But those are the older translations — those quotes are from Luther Bible (1534) and Gdansk Bible (1632); you can find newer translations that use the wording of "let me perish with the Philistines" variety as well.
If you want the latest edition of the "real" Roget's, it's the one published by Longman.
Note that this version of Thesaurus-1911 has been supplemented with over
1,000 words not present in the original 1911 edition, but many modern words
are still missing. About 1500 verbs (out of 6500) which can be found in an
80,000-word spell-checker are absent from this work. The deficiency of nouns
is probably much worse, especially on technical topics. Of 40,000 unique
words contained in the original text, 12,000 are not recognized by a
spell-checker. Most of these are foreign words (primarily Latin), and many
are obsolete.As I understand it, particularly for the bizarre natural sciences stuff, a lot of this is actually _Aristotle's_ fault, not Christianity's.
Adding the Pseudodoxia Epidemica to my list of things to read if I ever have infinite time.
Plus it's a fun book.
(Note this isn’t a knock on the author for staying within western tradition, which is both deep and interesting and also diverse in a way which provides a wide breadth of ways of thinking about the world; rather, getting outside the tradition entirely would provide yet another perspective on that tradition, eg its bounds and the lines it doesn’t realize its prescribing itself within even as it changes dramatically over different eras.)
(Genuinely, I'm not pushing this as a critique or thinking ill of you, your descriptions of those books get into some deep parts of the evolution of western thinking that most people don't approach or don't appreciate. I'm pushing the outsider angle because I think you see and appreciate the intellectual history there well enough that I'd be interested in what speaks to you from outside that tradition, or what you hear from works that are outside the tradition.)
Of those, only the Thousand and One Nights and the Book of the Dead are anything like canonical. But of the seven I talked about in the article, only the Bible and the Decameron are canonical. I wouldn't have mentioned the dictionaries, except that one of the books in the original article was a thesaurus.
But most of the books I keep in the office are technical (lots of mathematics) or are more or less contemporary Western fiction.
I think some people might see my reading habits as those of a dilettante with a lack of serious focus, and I don't think I would care to dispute that. As I said, my brain is full of stuff, and and what's in it doesn't always make sense or go together with the other stuff.
You've got me thinking that it might be nice to get a translation of _Līlāvatī_ by Bhaskara II to put there. Thanks!
Here's a brief comparison (Titus 1)
LSB: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Titus%201&versi...
NLT: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=titus%201&versi...
Flipping pages in a book still has not been matched by computer text.
Are people better? And if they are what made them better?
For example:
- "Prevent" in 1611 meant "go before, precede". Now it means "stop from happening". - "Suffer" in 1611 meant "allow to happen". Now it means "experience pain". - "Quick" in 1611 could mean "alive" (hence "the quick and the dead"). Now it exclusively means "fast".
And there are words that are completely archaic now - "anon", "bissam", etc. Or words that are just very rare - e.g., peradventure.
It's a wonderful read in many places if you want to revel in language, but modern translations are often better for understanding meaning. Not because they're "dumbed down" (as some claim) but rather because they reflect modern meanings and usage.
I once tried to stick to Green’s Literal Translation but it got dry fast. I actually enjoyed reading the preface and made me appreciate the work Jay Green Sr put in.
I enjoyed it, and I absolutely loved Tanya Reynolds, who is hilarious. But Bocaccio's Decameron it is not.
Actually, Redwall and other slightly-mature anthropomorphic stories are also surprisingly good for that.
But if I had to pick a time of year, then I'd say winter, under the blankets or by a fire.
Brian Jacques' other series Castaways of the Flying Dutchman is also very good.
> This of course is the cornerstone of Western culture and no well-educated person can be without a knowledge of what is in it.
This is just dogma and factually wrong.
The cornerstone of Western Culture is Greek Philosophies/Texts added-to/modified-with Indian/Chinese/Islamic/etc. philosophies/texts.
You might not like it, but you can't deny it's influence.
I merely echoed the phrase used by the OP article (should have used quotes to make it clearer).
When you have had great Greek (Classical and Hellenistic) schools of philosophy and later practiced/extended by the Romans which could justifiably be called "cornerstone of Western culture", to point to a single book like The Bible and attempt to place it on the same pedestal is silly. In fact the opposite may be true viz. when western civilization broke away from the shackles of biblical thinking is when the "Scientific Revolution" happened leading to the science/technology driven world that we live in today.
Of course the bible had a lot of influence on western culture but one could argue whether it was not more detrimental than beneficial.
There is more to be learnt from Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) than from The Bible.
Completely misses the point of mediaeval philosophy.
As an avowed atheist, I find the works of the Blessed Duns Scotus and St Thomas Aquinas intellectually fascinating.
I keep a computer graphics book that I'm reading over and over again, just one chapter that is concerned with physically-based rendering. By now the theory is getting so ingrained I could write a path tracer in my sleep! But then again, I don't want to.
It's about how war is perpetrated by the old against the young. I've carried it next to my heart since I was fourteen.
Also, it's quite short and will definitely fit in the space.
A bit more about it: https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/116411220100252049
_Castle_ and _Umderground_, though I love.
What I most appreciated in The Way Things Work is that he gives a complete working description of the boolean half-adder built out of logic gates, and I think how to connect them to make larger adders. Remember, in our very recent past, it was actually hard for little kids to find explanations of how to do arithmetic with logic circuits? Macaulay did his bit (so to speak) to fix that amidst tons of weird mammoth jokes.
By the way, I've been to one of Comenius's old schools (Herborn, Germany) and grave (Naarden, Netherlands).
I'm sorry, what? Why is Moses depicted with glowing horns?
But apparently it is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horns_of_Moses
> The Horns of Moses are an iconographic convention common in Latin Christianity whereby Moses was presented as having two horns on his head, later replaced by rays of light.[1] The idea comes from a translation, or mistranslation, of a Hebrew term in Jerome's Latin Vulgate Bible, and many later vernacular translations dependent on that. Moses is said to be "horned", or radiant, or glorified, after he sees God who presents him with the tablets of the law in the Book of Exodus.
If you asked random strangers in the street what Moses is most well known for, I'd wager bringing the stone tablets down would be #1.
> I would like to understand the world I live in, and there is no way to understand 21st-century America without understanding the Bible.
Hard disagree! Yes, many of the more odious directions society has taken have been backed by Christianity (Christian Zionism anyone?) but we're already over-exposed to this stuff as is. I'm an atheist and I hate that I've been subjected to Christian propaganda my whole life as someone born and raised in the US. It's been a constant parade of ignorance.
Want to really understand the true nature of the US in the 21st century? Drop the bible and read Settlers instead: https://readsettlers.org/
Have you ever been to the US? I’ve been to many countries and Christian culture is one of my least favorites.
What makes you think I’m not indigenous? I never said that.
Just because some immigrants abandon their homes to come be part of the problem, it doesn't actually make the US a good place to live. I think movies and TV really did a number on a lot of people giving them a misguided view of what it's like to live here.
> If you live in the US, you most likely have it far better than most everyone else on earth
Ask most everyone else on earth how much they pay per month for health insurance. Most can't even fathom how we live like we do once they start learning the details. It's horrible.
There are certainly wealthy countries other than the US, but most people don’t live in those countries.
I mean, I'm sure there are many different senses in which I'm not the target audience for this work, but it immediately feels like it's actively leaning into "this book isn't for you" or "this book is meant to upset you".
On the other hand, I just realized that this is probably exactly what reading Richard Stallman feels like if you don't already agree with him. Like "I'm going to use lots of neologisms that I don't even explain, because I want to remind you of all my attitudes toward everything from the very first moment that you encounter my ideas."
Afrika is actually the correct spelling: https://soh.omeka.chass.ncsu.edu/items/show/692
The key takeaways from the book are that the white underclasses were the foot soldiers in the genocide of indigenous people and while they had hard, labor filled lives, they were still the driving force behind manifest destiny.
A couple of areas it shed light for me that I didn't know much about:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_genocide
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Chinese_massacre_o...
I would argue that the cheap real estate that existed in the US up until the early 2000s was the tail end of the land theft and manifest destiny. The increased prices we're seeing may actually be closer to the true value of the land that was artificially depressed by being handed out for free to white settlers. The boomers were basically the last generation of settlers to enjoy this.
FWIW I mostly agree with Stallman and definitely agree with Sakai (the author of Settlers). The bible however, I find to be triggering in the way you describe.
Knowing what's in the Bible isn't sufficient. You need to understand the full genealogy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
You need to understand Canaanite cults, the broad influence of both Zoroastrianism (via the Achaemenid Empire) and Hellenism, and how these cultures converged to form proto-Judaistic clerical class (or at least something like it), which eventually crystallized into the synagogue tradition and "modern" Jewish practice during the Hasmonean Dynasty.
Since you seem to hold a strong conviction, could you please make more explicit what concretely one would not know / missinterprete regarding the Western culture, not knowing anything about those concepts you listed, but knowing the bible itself back and forth? And to what excent one would need to dive deep into those concepts?
Or in other words: What fundamental concepts in Western culture will we understand if we take you on your word and spend time into understanding those concepts?
Bullet points / pointers would be enough already!
Hmm, while I agree that this particular book selection could come of as rather heady, and the author is obviously not doing an exercise in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_English either - but just gauging from the post itself, I find it plausible enough that the auther indeed just loves those books. My red flags: Putting others or other works down, pretending everyone is on the same level of knowledge ("everybody would agree that...", "It's pretty easy to see that...") and in putting the focus onto ones own (percieved or real) abilities. I see nothing wrong in engaging in complex, deep works, but I think some sense of humility should be at least subtly present; If that is not the case over and over again, I either assume that at least some form of signaling is going on, or that the author is genuinely that much out of my leage enough to make it hard for me to connect (I meet people like this in real life, they were often also nice people too, but I could simply not keep up - which is fine, not every crowd is for me and I am not for every crowd...)
On the bible itself: if we are strictly talking about the culture of the western world, I do not think it is controversial claim the bible has been and still is a fundamental element, for better or worse, and often also due to critics and their thoughts. Trying to make sense of the western culture without the bible could be compared to trying to make sense of chinese culture without the writings of Confucius - or a maritine biologist trying to explain the oceanic ecosystem, while working on the hypothesis that geothermic energy cannot interact with oceanic life at all. There will simply be wide, gaping spots in knowledge, and plenty of hacks needed to fix them somewhat.