Television boggles me. I don’t understand why human beings subject themselves to the meaningless drivel that it serves up hour after hour. In fact, my only complaint about going to the local gym is that while running on the treadmill I am forced to face a row of television screens, each one of which is showing something more insulting than the last. I am not insulted by the stupidity of the people they find to perform in front of the camera, and I am not offended by the fact that the producers and the camera crew are evidently as retarded as these individuals that they film. I am, however, truly insulted by the suggestion, inherent in their production of this material, that the average Australian is as lamentably uneducated – as irredeemably stupid! – as they.

While running today, I was subjected to “Fox 8″. Wikipedia informs me that this is an Australian channel, owned by the FOX broadcasting corporation in the United States. North America, by virtue of its population, can be proud of the fact that their bottom 2% (which is the market to whom daytime television must be geared) contains some 4.3million more people than does our bottom 2%, and it would be reasonable to assume that it is correspondingly that much more banal. Instead of watching some poor fool, liberated of his brain and sense of self, being congratulated for the very activity that deprived him of these things (which, I am desperately hoping, is as low as Australian television sinks), Fox 8 went so far as to display actual footage of people who deserved nothing more than what was coming to them, actually having it come to them. Whether it was a man breaking car windows with his head, a boy having darts (darts!) thrown at his naked body, a fellow who free-climbed a large statue and had to be rushed to hospital after falling off it, or a young man who leapt down a long flight of stairs and broke his arm: every single one of these ridiculous idiots, whose exploits were considered by FOX to constitute harmless entertainment, met with the same tragic ending. They all survived. And one day, they’ll probably breed.

BETHLEHEM, ISRAEL, January 13, 2010 – Archaeologists have announced
the discovery of a text written by King David shortly following his
defeat of Goliath, authenticating the biblical story narrated in 1
Samuel 17. Excavation directors, Dr. Benny bar Throom and Dr. Eilat
Mezimah unveiled a tenth century ostracon uncovered only days ago, in
Bethlehem, David’s hometown.

“The Bethlehem Ostracon appears to be a short letter written by David
to his mother, shortly after killing Goliath,” explained Dr Mezimah.
“This remarkable and hitherto unparalleled letter not only proves the
historical existence of David, but also of the giant Goliath. It also
sets out David’s ambition to become king over the entire region from
Egypt to Babylon, thereby supporting the legitimate and God-given
right of the modern State of Israel to the entire region of the
Levant.”

The text is written in ink on a potsherd and is only six lines in
length. Dr Bar Throom dates it to “the time of David.” The first line
identifies “David son of Jesse” as the sender of the brief letter, and
it is addressed to “my mother.” Dr Mezimah remarked that the
tenderness of the address corresponds to what we know of the biblical
David, whose relationships with others were marked by great love and
affection.

The following lines of the Bethlehem Ostracon describe David’s victory
over the infamous Philistine terrorist, and appear to be written
shortly after the event. The main body of the Ostracon reads as
follows: “What a great day! I killed the giant, Goliath. And now I
will be king over all Israel, from the Wadi of Egypt to the River
Euphrates.”

“Writing a nice letter like this, to his Mom back at home, displays
just the sort of Torah-observant respect for parents that we would
expect from the young King David. And it is entirely consistent with
the biblical picture we have of him,” noted Dr Mezimah. “This high
level of morality is quite unlike anything we find amongst Israel’s
neighbours during this period.”

The Hebrew letter aleph is visible on the obverse of the ostracon,
together with parts of the letters beth, he, and tav. Although the
text is difficult to reconstruct, Dr Bar Throom believes that it is a
short sentence in the first person, “probably something along the
lines of, ‘I’ll be home for dinner soon, Mom!’”

“What a good and faithful boy David was,” added Dr Mezimah.

Reactions from Old Testament scholars in this country have been
universally positive. Professor James Digmore of Dallas Seminary
welcomed news of the Bethlehem Ostracon as “the archaeological find of
the century.” Commenting on highly skeptical scholars who “only want
to cause trouble” by denying biblical truths (the so-called
“minimalists”), Professor Digmore proclaimed, “It is not too much to
say that it sounds the death-knell of minimalism as we know it.”

“What this find shows us,” said Professor Digmore, “is that it is
entirely possible that the Bible’s account of David was written by
David’s own hand. We are dealing with eyewitness testimony. In any
case, it was certainly written centuries before the critics have
previously claimed. I guess they will have to change their tune, now.”

[As read on NT Wrong]

The first thing that I noticed about this is that it doesn’t make any sense. The second thing that I noticed about this is that it’s backwards. Because I am loth to assume that this is the fault of some schmuck who forgot to reverse the image before putting it on a thousand websites, I’m going to tentatively suggest that the text was written from right to left, but with the letters going down the tablet, rather than across it. I tried to have a bash at transliterating it into square script, but got no further than the first two lines:

אל תעש ועבד א
שפט עבד ואלמנ [ו]שפט ית

That’s okay because these first two lines contain the three verbs and two nouns that commentators have used to suggest that the language was Hebrew. There’s the verb עבד (“worship”), which is an imperative, the adverbial phrase אל תעש (“do not do”), which is a prohibitive, and the verb שפט (“judge”), which appears twice and is an imperative. These verbs are all masculine singular, although we might suppose a final vowel that was not represented graphemically. As for the two nouns, there is עבד (“slave”) and אלמנ (“widow”), the latter of which also lacks graphemic representation of the final vowel. There is a lacuna that follows this word, although it was most likely filled with a conjunctive waw, given the absence of a final heh on the other instance of אלמנ (line 4).

The lacuna that ends the first line is more mysterious, and we might suppose that it was filled with the direct object: “worship [the Lord]“, perhaps. The lacuna that ends the second line is less mysterious, and was most probably [ית[מ ("orphan"). The absence of definite articles is interesting (although perhaps not surprising), and the absence of the direct object marker is not surprising at all. I would translate these two lines as:

"... do not do, but worship... Judge the slave and the widow, [and] judge the orp[han]“

After that, I’m sorry to say, I got a bit stuck. I can see how line 3 might begin with ו]גר], but I’m not seeing anything after that that makes sense to me. Furthermore, while line 4 commences with אלמנ and ends with מלכ, the intervening letters are (to my eyes) indecipherable. The second letter on the final line appears to be two letters, rather than a ק (as I had originally supposed) but I’m only seeing patterns because I’m trying to fit it together with the official translation:

1′ you shall not do [it], but worship the [Lord].
2′ Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an]
3′ [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and]
4′ the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king.
5′ Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger.

If anybody can do a better job of reading this, I’m all ears.

[Thanks to: Ferrell Jenkins]

§

Is this the world of which our prophets spoke?
They can still be seen, their dull descendants
Standing on corners, wild-eyed and anxious
Holding up traffic with their bearded revelations
Still stopping passersby, doomsday and justice
Still criticising the world that rejects them
But they no longer preach with the authority of wisdom
Kings no longer listen to them
Armies no more go to war for them
No longer do the sages pass the time of day with them
Thank God, I say.
Our prophets now, with their moth-eaten raincoats
Are most holey. They no longer speak
In hendecasyllables,
No longer compose verse nor orate with passion
They only speak of their own sad failure
And, instead of delivering truth to power,
They accept small change and anti-psychotics.

Could this truly be the world that our sages promised?
The world for which they laid down their lives?
A world of bureaucrats and politicians,
In which the diplomat trumps the king?
Our temples now are marketplace museums:
Places to go to escape from the office
Or places where the past is put on display
Where the old books are worshipped, with letters reprinted
But messages, misread, decaying with age.
There is a part of me that thinks that things were different
It was not always the same sad Now
Was there ever a time when we stood united?
Tradition says so, but I have my doubts.
A time when we marched like a thunderous storm
And brought the earth under our dominion?
Our kingdom was an everlasting kingdom
But the north seceded and the south burnt down.

§

It’s a fool, said Qohelet, who worships the past
But it was easy to say that: things were better then.
Now, familiarity makes dull the knife of reason
Makes mantras of epiphanies
And slays the proverb with repetition.
I hold this Bible in my tired hands:
How I wish that I could read you
Again, for the first time.

I had an interesting experience at one of the workshops. Billed as a “Kirtan” call-and-response exercise, I expected a form of communal mantric meditation. I enjoy meditating and I tend to favour the mantric variety over the alternatives that I have experienced. I was mistaken, however, but remained in the circle for long enough that my departure should not seem rude. Lacking phone reception, I had been unable to Google “Kirtan” but, had I done so, I would have discovered that it is a devotional tradition: a form of prayer. The following are the lyrics to one of the chants, invented by a participant:

Hanuman, O Hanuma-an, Hari Hari Hari Hanuman
Hanuman, O Hanuma-an, Hari Hari Hari Hanuman
Hari Rama
Hari Rama
Hari Sit-ta
Hari Sit-ta
Hari Rama
Hari Rama
Hari Sit-ta
Hari Sit-ta
Hari Rama
Hari Rama
Hari Sit-ta
Hari Sit-ta
Hari Rama
Hari Rama
Hari Sit-ta
Hari Sit-ta
[repeat]

Rama is a Hindu deity, Sita is Rama’s wife, and his attendant Hanuman is the eleventh incarnation of Lord Shiva: another Hindu god. This makes the chant-leader’s assurance at the beginning especially odd. “Don’t worry,” she told us. “This isn’t religious.” Isn’t religious?? What on earth is it, if not religious? And then it hit me. What she had meant to say, was “Don’t worry: this isn’t Judaism, Christianity or Islam.”

I am sure that back in the 1960s, when hippies first began rejecting the major faiths of their upbringing and embracing Eastern alternatives, the choice was a vibrant and an exciting one. I am truly surprised that so many people are still within such a mindset. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I cannot help but feel that if somebody at ConFest had offered to run a workshop in which participants were encouraged to praise the Lord, the peaceful and tolerant veneer would have cracked for more than one attendant. ConFest is, after all, not a “religious” festival. It is not supposed to promote “religious” values. You want to wave a Bible around or get people singing about Jesus, you might have come to the wrong place. But Eastern religion? Nobody’s scared of that, right? It’s so fresh, and so clean. So all-embracing.

Bollocks.

I say, people should do as they please. I say, if somebody wants to run a religious workshop, they should run a religious workshop. I say that the whole point of festivals like ConFest is that members are empowered to do their own thing, absolutely irrespective of what that is. Furthermore, they should have the decency to admit it to their audiences, rather than weakly pretending that they’re offering an alternative. There’s a lesson in that, perhaps, for all of us.

I’d like to wish all of my readers a happy and a healthy 2010: a year in which you have the audacity to be yourselves, along with the integrity to admit it.

Can this please settle it? The overwhelming majority of sites favour graphemic representation of the final heh, and eschew (for the most part) representation of the initial het with “Ch”. I wonder if this is in order to better distinguish the word from “Christmas”, but I shall leave investigation of that question to one more bored than I.

I purchased a book at the SBL conference in New Orleans yesterday: David A. Bernat, Sign of the Covenant: Circumcision in the Priestly Tradition (SBL: Atlanta, 2009). He cites a scholar named Geller in his introduction: “Geller observes that the biblical authors, unlike their Greek contemporaries, did not articulate doctrine through systematic, philosophical discourse. Rather, they gave voice to ideology and theology through narrative, law, and other modes of literary expression. Consequently, the extraction of meaning from the Hebrew Scriptures is an exegetical enterprise requiring close reading that is sensitive to the lineaments of the text, and proceeds step by step within it” (4). That last part, in italics, is his quote from Geller’s Sacred Enigmas: Literary Religion in the Hebrew Bible.

That passage sums up beautifully exactly why I love the Tanakh. It is quite unlike other corpora of literature in the nature of the analysis that it requires. Given how heavily meaning is dependent upon cotext, and given how reliant that cotext is upon broader historical and literary context (not to mention the elusive and subjective nature of any attempt to establish the “meaning” of such contexts!), the pursuit of biblical information is fraught with all of the difficulties of other fields, yet compounded by the fact that it is an ideologically determined corpus in every respect.

Those of us who wish to promote an interest in the biblical literature must reckon with two phenomena. The first is the growing resentment of theology, which perceives in the Bible an intellectual enemy to be rejected. The second is theology itself, which perceives in the Bible the words of a creator. These two perspectives are not so dissimilar, for they both commence with presuppositions as regards the origin of the universe and they both ascribe meaning to the biblical literature beyond what the corpus deserves.

As I once described elsewhere, in a post that was intended to be frivolous, there are two different ways of construing non-belief in divinity. The first concerns the existence of God. That is to say, it suggests that the main protagonist of the Hebrew Bible does not, nor did not, exist. His actions belong in the realm of fiction, and his expressed opinions are the opinions of those who composed the text. The second, however, concerns the existence of god(s). That is, the existence or non-existence of a prime mover that initiated the process of creation, itself culminating in the establishment of the universe. While the first question is theological, the second question is entirely scientific. What is more, while I heartily add my own small voice to the list of those who disbelieve in God, I shrug my shoulders as regards belief in the latter. Did the universe have a creator? Not only do I not know, but I quite sincerely could not care less. Abstract speculation on that score, while it might prove entertaining as a diversion, is a waste of brain power – as can generally be evidenced by those who occupy themselves with the question.

Against the theologians, who profess a(n, admittedly qualified) belief in the biblical literature and in the existence of its chief character, I have nothing to say. It is their prerogative to think whatever they please about the books that they read and, while I may find some of their scholarship dubious, I am happily able to disregard those texts that do not appeal to me. This is the democracy of academia, in which no opinion should be overtly privileged over another, and within which all perspectives possess the right to be aired. My concern is not with convincing theologians of my perspective, for it is their right to think and to publish as they see fit. My concern, however, is with the ranks of unaffiliated individuals, whose antipathy towards the biblical literature is fuelled by misconceptions.

There are a large number of reasons as to why people may not enjoy the Bible, and a number of reasons as to why they might find it threatening. I would like to focus on one issue in particular, as I feel that it constitutes a major obstacle to the enjoyment of the biblical literature. Those who have been raised on reading texts in translation don’t appreciate the allure of Hebrew and Aramaic. Those who choose to embrace the Bible in English must reckon with its banality, and it is no surprise that many forms of religiosity are found, by those who were not raised on them, to be so very insipid. I’ve read the Bible in English, and considered it frustrating to the extreme. People who treat it as a source of intellectual enlightenment need to go back to school, and those who profess it to be great literature have evidently never encountered Milton, Shakespeare or Keats. The antiquated thinking of its authors shows through on almost every page and it is difficult to account for the book’s tremendous popularity. In short, I am not in the least surprised that atheism is such a global phenomenon.

What these people fail to realise is that much of what fails to work in English is oftentimes splendid in Hebrew. The economy of expression makes succinct the circumlocutory and the semantic indeterminacy opens avenues of investigation which, when coupled with considerations that concern the setting of composition, turns banalities into triumphant yearnings of the human spirit. What is more, those who read a text in their native tongue will never appreciate the subjectivity of their own reading, nor the full weight of all the intellectual baggage that they carry to the task. Those who must labour with a foreign grammar, and the parsing of words in a tongue long dead, will reckon with such crucial phenomena every day.

This is why I don’t subscribe to atheism. As a movement, atheism professes the non-existence of a divine being who interacts with creation. As stressed above, the existence of such a divine being is either a scientific question, the contours of which do not interest me in the slightest, or a question regarding the literalness of the biblical literature. This is a moot point, for any appropriately engaging analysis of the Hebrew Bible will reveal the fact that reception of the text is not commensurate with a belief in its literal truth. Furthermore, I can speak for Judaism when I say that religious affiliation can be broad enough to subsume those who do not subscribe to the tenets of that religion. While I cannot in faith speak for Christianity or Islam, or any other religion on the planet, it would be a sorry situation indeed if they were so rigidly defined as to exclude members who do not profess their creed.

Dawkins, the contemporary champion of disbelief, has never read the Bible in Hebrew. Indeed, it is doubtful whether or not he has even read it in English. As a result, his attempts at demonstrating the banality of the biblical literature are, in turn, banal. This is my message to “atheists”: your beliefs concerning what you call “God” do not concern me in the slightest, but your opinions concerning the Bible are lamentably misinformed. There is absolutely nothing wrong with not caring about the biblical literature, but if you aspire to the singular honour of hating it, I suggest that you learn how to read it first.

The Torah commences with the clause, בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ (bereishit bara’ ‘elohim ‘et hasshamayim w’et ha’arets). The classical translation of this clause is, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”. This has achieved a little notoriety of late, with Ellen van Wolde’s recent suggestion that ברא (bara’) exclusively denotes separation, that creation was therefore not ex nihilo, and that Intelligent Design theorists can go suck an egg. This isn’t something I wish to discuss.

Instead, I would like to discuss an issue that has come up innumerable times and that has posed a problem from the earliest commentaries until today: what does the first word mean?

To (briefly) summarise the problem:
בראשית (bereishit) features the root-word ראש, meaning “head” or “beginning”. It has the inseparable particle, ב, which in this case means “in”, but the word is vocalised as indefinite.

That is to say, the word is spelt (or spelled, if you’re an American) “In a beginning”, which doesn’t make an awful lot of sense. The solution? It’s in the construct state! “In the beginning of“. Well, in the beginning of what?, asks Rashi (amongst very many other scholars). Rashi’s ’solution’, which is not entirely satisfactory, is that this is simply a Biblical collocation, featured also in the second verse of Hosea. The only reason that this is unsatisfactory is that it compounds the problem by adding to it another verse, rather than simplifying the problem by actually explaining it.

An explanation that might have been satisfactory would have been calling for the revocalisation of the second word as an infinitive absolute. That would have yielded the clause, “In the beginning of God’s creating the sky and the earth, …” and therefore seguéd nicely into the second verse, which describes the state of the sky and the earth at that earliest time.

The problem with this, however, is that there seems to be a contradiction between the vocalisation and the accentuation (although we can refer to the latter here as punctuation). While the word is vocalised as “In the beginning of“, the Masoretes added a disjunctive accent and thus denied the possibility of it being in construct with another word. So much for revocalising the verb, then, as an infinitive absolute!

The array of interpretations is therefore as follows:

BR’ShYT (consonantal): “In the beginning”, “In a beginning”, “In the beginning of”;
bereishit (vocalised): “In a beginning”, “In the beginning of”;
bereishit, (vocalised and punctuated): “In a beginning”.

It is fun to suggest that the last letter of the first word should be moved forwards a space, to yield “In my head, you create gods”, but this is a little too modernist for my liking. Which is to say, it is entirely to my liking, but it is utterly untrue.

Rabbi Yeshayahu Leibowitz said that the only information one can derive from this clause is the fact that there is such a thing as “God”, that God is not the world itself, nor is God in the world, but that God was somehow involved in its construction. Exactly what “God” means, what the nature of this construction is supposed to denote, and even the temporal relationship of these events to the narrator was all a bit too much for Rabbi Leibowitz and is certainly too much for me.

Update: It has come out, in the last few comments, that I have been using the word “eisegesis” incorrectly. I was mistakenly under the impression that the word denoted the leading into a text, which is done by somebody who imports ideas derived elsewhere. It would seem, however, that the word has a narrower definition than that, that it specifically denotes importing ideas of one’s own construction, and that it has a mildly pejorative nuance.

If anybody is familiar with this word having been reappropriated in recent years with a more relativistic nuance (ie: that ideas might have been read into texts, but that they were derived from older oral traditions and were therefore equally valid), please do speak up – either here or on Galus Australis. It is entirely possible that I have been using the word incorrectly for years (I’ve done that often enough with others), but it would be lamentable if the only word I know to describe rabbinic hermeneutics was disparaging.

While each of the above points has a basis in reality, those who criticise the medium in such terms take little notice of the fact that cinema might be described in the same way. Indeed, there was no shortage of people who eschewed films in their early days for precisely the same reason, and we might therefore hope for a corresponding increase in the number of those who are prepared to broaden their definition of literature today. In this regard, I think it worthwhile to draw a clear distinction. “Comic books”: a phrase that is generally intended with a mildly pejorative nuance, is a term best suited to describe panelled gags. “Graphic novels”, on the other hand, should be reserved for those texts that focus on the development of a broad plot, the psychological intricacies of its various characters and the visual effectiveness of its presentation. Unlike a series of panels that intends to establish a punchline, graphic novels present material that differs only from a novel in its presentation.

A quick glance at Wikipedia’s discussion of the term is enough to indicate that the issue is not without controversy. Without intending to sound pompous, it is obvious that there is a stark qualitative difference between early issues of Batman and the material now published by Vertigo: an imprint of DC Comics that targets older audiences. Indeed, even some of the later Batman issues (particularly those that focus on the rogues gallery, like Arkham Asylum, The Killing Joke and Brian Azzarello’s incredible Joker) are so different to their earlier manifestations that comparison can only be made on the most superficial grounds.

My comics shelf is slowly growing. It features a few editions from my childhood (notably Raymond Briggs’ Fungus the Bogeyman and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics), as well as a growing collection of graphic novels – mostly published by Vertigo. My first comic experience, as an adult, was with Alan Moore’s Watchmen. I appreciated the film for what it was, but knew that I was missing something, and bought the book. Watchmen is almost perversely aware of being a comic book. It features a superhero theme that it subverts by focusing on the psychological peculiarities of its heroes. What sort of individual dresses in tights, wears a gimpish mask, and runs out to fight bad guys? Sexual perverts, mainly, and fascists. This is the premise of Alan Moore’s creation, and a glimpse at other Moore creations (V For Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen above all) show that he is particularly concerned with alternate dystopian realities that provide him with an opportunity to critique present-day society.

Would I have expected such social commentary from the early issues of Superman or The Green Lantern? I do not think so, and it would seem as though the medium itself has come of age around (approximately) the same time that I did. Perhaps it was necessary for it to be ridiculed by others in order that it might ridicule itself, and then move from there to subvert itself and, ultimately, upset all expectations of what it was supposed to be. If the last twenty years of graphic novels have taught us anything it’s that “comics” is a medium and not a genre.

*

On a more personal note, I have recently started a crime-noir series (Brian Azzarello, 100 Bullets), a cyber-punk series (Warrin Ellis, Transmetropolitan) and a fantasy series (Neil Gaiman, The Sandman). I am also presently reading the first edition of Bill Willingham’s Fables and am looking forward to getting my hands on Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.

Yes yes, and I’m also working on my thesis. Get off my back.