Author: From Adapa to Enoch, Invention of Hebrew. Guggenheim fellow; I study how people say what God says. he/him, Ε‘u/Ε‘a/Ε‘i if you're archaic.
Apr 13, 2023 β’ 14 tweets β’ 3 min read
Why are 'foreign films' supposed to be boring and confusing, what about 'foreign' religions? I'm lucky to be teaching a class on religious ritual and myth in the ancient Mediterranean right now, and it's all 'foreign' ritual and music so this Scorsese letter hit home for me....
First we watched some of the Hatian Vodou ceremonies from the late 1940s that Maya Deren recorded in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, still miraculously communicative and easy to "read." We'll do a little music theory to see why the singing there sounds so different...
Aug 26, 2022 β’ 21 tweets β’ 4 min read
Big question in the history of ancient Israel: almost none of it comes from Israel but from Judah--everything about Israel in the Bible was produced by its southern rival/successor who considered itself to be "Israel." Surprises from rereading Fleming's book on this: 1)
He suggests a sort of political source criticism to identify Israelite material in the Judahite text of the Bible. Based on the literary representation of Israelite v Judahite politics, 1. In Judah, political center=religious center=Jerusalem, while Israel decentralized: 2/10
Jan 1, 2022 β’ 11 tweets β’ 2 min read
The philological orthodoxy of a century ago was that all manuscripts are more or less reliable witnesses to an original. Today it is orthodox to preach that every manuscript is its own original, demanding equal consideration. A move from one unachievable fantasy to another. 1
As a 21st century scholar the contemporary fantasy is easier to understand: the manuscripts accessible to us (that accessibility often determined by patterns of plunder and theft) are real to us in ways the ones our founders didnβt get a chance to discover or steal arenβt. 2/
