Phyz.org reports that clothing still makes the man, but it may not be the most expensive of fashionable clothing that makes the best status statement. Harvard University researchers found that students attributed higher status to the more slovenly: “In one study, students were asked to rank the perceived professional status of a professor who was employed at either a local college or a top-tier university and who was either clean-shaven and in a business suit or who had a beard and... Read more
Sean McDonough’s YHWH at Patmos (1999) is a 250+ page book about a single verse, Revelation 1:4. Really, only one phrase of that verse: “He who is and who was and who is coming.” McDonough traces the pre-history of the phrase to the name Yahweh. More surprisingly, he finds precedent for the name in Greek literature, all the way back to Homer and Hesiod but most clearly in statements like this from Pausanias: “Zeus was, Zeus is, Zeus shall be (Zeus... Read more
Gary Shteyngart writes in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2007): “A knowledgeable Russian lazing around in the grass, sniffing clover and munching on boysenberries, expects that at any minute the forces of history will drop by and discretely kick him in the ass. “A knowledgeable Jew in a similar position expects history to spare any pretense and kick him directly in the face. “A Russian Jew (knowledgeable or not), however, expects both history and a Russian to kick him in the ass,... Read more
The Lego movie has a cutting-edge social message, writes Ben Walters in The Guardian: “The film’s exuberant, kid-friendly larks – Wild West! Robot pirates! Unicorn kittens! Batman! – are laced with satirical digs at surveillance culture, built-in obsolescence and police brutality, as well as inane positive thinking. Its opening sequences show a world in which a pliant, consumerist populace, mollified by overpriced coffee and dumb TV shows, is exploited by cynical leadership; political and corporate power are conflated in the villainous... Read more
Dennis Pardee’s Ritual and Cult at Ugarit collects texts that are relevant to Ugaritic cult, especially sacrificial cult. He ends the book with a helpful survey of the similarities and differences between Ugarit and the Bible. One of the differences has to do with the use of blood. “The blood and the fat of sacrificial victims, of great importance in the sacrificial system of the Hebrew texts, are entirely absent from the Ugaritic texts.” It’s impossible to know fully what this means, since... Read more
Durkheim said that “society” was the god to whom primitive peoples sacrificed, the totem standing in for the clan for which it served as totem. We might say, But of course. As FS Naiden (Smoke Signals for the Gods, 277) has recently pointed out, by the time of Durkheim and Robertson Smith, most sacrifices in European experience didn’t involve a god at all – the Mass being the main exception. They were precisely what Durkheim said they were, sacrificed to... Read more
David Biale (Blood and Belief) argues that menstrual blood is not defiling because it is associated with death (as Jacob Milgrom, among others, argues). After all, menstrual blood doesn’t mean a woman is dying but that she is fertile. On the other hand, the sorts of bleeding that lead to death do not defile (until the person has bled to death). As Biale puts it, “Since only genital discharges pollute, while all other types of blood, in and out of context, do... Read more
What hath Jerusalem to do with Athens? The worship of Greece with the worship of the temple? Quite a lot, in fact, argues David Biale in Blood and Belief (26): “Greek and Israelite sacrificial customs turn out to have been more similar to each other than the Israelite was to other ancient Near Eastern cults. And it was these similarities that might have drawn the attention of the priestly writers. The word for altar in Greek (bamos) is virtually identical to... Read more
Drawing on the work of Jonathan Klawans (Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism) and others, David Biale (Blood and Belief) points to the difficulty of reconciling the “Priestly” and “Holiness” sections of Leviticus. In the “Priestly” code, found in Leviticus 11-15 and Numbers 19,. impurity is contracted “as a result of contact with a variety of contagions related to sexual intercourse, menstruation, childbirth, pathological genital discharges, scale disease, the carcasses of certain impure animals, and human corpses. Such impurity—variously called by... Read more
David Biale observes in Blood and Belief that “the ancient Israelites were the only Near Easterners to make blood a central element in their religious rituals” (10). He fills out the picture: “There were, to be sure, magical and medical rituals mentioned in Akkadian, Sumerian, and Hittite texts that used blood to feed bloodthirsty demons, and one Hittite text mentions the use of blood as a ritual detergent (similar to its use in the Bible), but blood played no other significant... Read more
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