Israel gets its first taste of war after the exodus when the Amalekites attack the women, children, and stragglers (Exodus 17; Deuteronomy 25:17-19). Yahweh vows to make war against those who make war on the weak, until He blots out “the memory of Amalek from under heaven” (Deuteronomy 25:19). He spends the rest of the Old Testament making good on this threat. He sends Saul against the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15), but Saul doesn’t complete the job. David fights Amalekites... Read more
Barbara Kowalzig (Singing for the Gods, 5) observes that “Choral song was everywhere in the Greek world, and even if we attempt to avoid the risk of viewing the entirety of Greek civilization through the choral lens, it is nevertheless clear that dancing in the Greek khoros was a ubiquitous, and culturally highly prolific, social practice.” She suggests that the chorus was ubiquitous because of its intimate relation with membership in the polis: “One reason for this ubiquity lies no doubt... Read more
A tidbit from E.P. Evans’s Criminal Prosecution and the Capital Punishment of Animals(18-19). “It is said that Bartholomew Chassenee, a distinguished French jurist of the sixteenth century . . . made his reputation at the bar as counsel for some rats, which had been put on trial before the ecclesiastical court of Autun on the charge of having feloniously eaten up and wantonly destroyed the barley-crop of the province.” The case called up all Chassenee’s legal skill: “He urged . .... Read more
People who work in the tech industry pride themselves on their long hours and work ethics. It may backfire, warns Michael Thomsen. He cites studies that link sleep deprivation with declines in “divergent” thought, “weakened long-term memory, impaired decision-making abilities and lessened visuomotor performance.” “How,” Thomsen asks, “can any work ethic connected to such dimming of cognitive function produce anything worth having? Any culture that celebrates the loss of sleep as a virtue must inevitably become a backwater of degraded thoughts and... Read more
Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice, edited by Christopher Faraone and F.S. Naiden, is divided into four sections: modern treatments of sacrifice, Greek and Roman sacrificial practice, representations in visual arts, and sacrifice in Greek comedy and tragedy. Bruce Lincoln opens with an informative survey of modern theories of sacrifice from Hubert and Muass through Robertson Smith and the ecstasies of Bataille to the work of Karl Meuli, a major influence on Walter Burkert’s influential Homo Necans. Fritz Graf brings things up... Read more
1 Samuel 14 records the second of Saul’s three falls: He sins when he sacrifices impetuously without waiting for Samuel (ch. 13), when he attacks Jonathan for eating during a battle (ch. 14), when he refuses to carry out the ban against the Amalekites (ch. 15). Chapter 14 is also about Jonathan’s heroism. Alone with his armor bearer, he attacks the Philistine camp, sparks a panic, and enables Israel to win the battle. Saul’s response to this heroism is to... Read more
J.N. Adams takes up a classic question about the history of Latin in his Social Variation and the Latin Language: How did the Romance languages emerge from Latin? It’s been thought that the Romance languages came from changes in Latin pronunciation and grammar at the lower levels of Roman society. Adams examines this thesis in detail, and concludes that it is basically right, though he adds nuance. As Roy Gibson says in his TLS review, “A good number of features of Romance... Read more
I review Leigh Trevaskis’s Holiness, Ethics, and Ritual in Leviticusat the Trinity House site. Click here. Read more
Bad question, says Justin Barrett (Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology, 26): “No aspect of our biological development, let along our cognitive development occurs without important contributions from both our biological endowment and our environment. Cells don’t divide and multiply without a steady stream of chemical nourishment from their environment, prenatal development is dependent upon hormones and nutrients from the mother, and babies simply cannot survive, let alone develop properly, without massive environmental inputs. When it comes to human thought and... Read more
Van Ruler is an advocate of “theocracy,” but he at the same time insists that toleration is “an absolute necessity in the state” (Calvinist Trinitarianism and Theocentric Politics, 186). It is necessary because every people is religiously mixed, because intolerance invariably leads to coercion, because of the reach of the state’s power, because there are areas of social life that it should stay out of (186-8). At the same time, van Ruler thinks it impossible for a state to be... Read more
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