Religiously Confusing
Religion can be a confusing thing. When we talk about religion do we necessarily imply belief in supernatural beings? What qualifies as a supernatural being? How about aliens, vampires or the great pumpkin? How is a philosophy different than a religion? Are humans, as a species, inherently religious? The questions go on and on.
In some Christian circles, Christianity doesn’t count as a religion. Witness this shirt available at Christian Book Distributors:
Front Design: CHRISTIANITY is not a religion with black paint spots in the background.
Back Design: RELIGION IS HUMANS trying to work their way to God. CHRISTIANITY IS GOD coming to men and women through a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Nothing like all caps to make your point. I’m guessing that Hammurapi thought he had a relationship with the gods through Shamash, but you see there point.
Yet, yesterday Pat Robertson stated that Islam is not a religion:
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Christianity isn’t a religion, and Islam isn’t a religion? What exactly would be a religion? How about vampires and zombies?
Truly, this is religiously confusing.
Ugaritic Abounds!
Wonderful posts on Ugaritic abound.
Karyn Traphagen at Boulders 2 Bits has a nifty Ugaritic Transliteration Bookmark. She recommends keeping it handy when using the Inscriptifact database. I concure and suggest also using it with Pardee and Bordreuil’s A Manuel of Ugaritic.
Hardy at Daily Hebrew has put forth a yeoman’s effort and posted a massive Ugaritic-Hebrew Bibliography. This is a wonderful resource and I highly recommend it.
Bibliographical Bonus: Along the lines of the last resource, here is a link to Chiara Peri’s bibliography for Poemi Ugaritici Della Regalità: I Poemi Di Keret E Di Aqhat.
Enjoy
Cloudy Dissertation
Resistance to Dialog?
My students have a paper due Saturday before midnight. The assignment is simple: write a dialog between two of the main characters/thinkers we’ve read so far this semester.This paper is causing anxiety in them and headaches for me.
There are a few more specifics to the assignment, but basically the paper prompt gives a lot of room for students to play with the texts, the ideas in the texts and the characters who inhabit those texts. I’ve given similar assignments before; but for some reason, students are really having a hard time this semester. Seemingly, they would much rather write on a theme in Gilgamesh than a dialog between him and Socrates.
I’m not sure what this means. There could be an inherent resistance to discourse longer than 140 characters. Or, a desire to keep ideas compartmentalized by historical context and never let them interact. Or again, it could simply be that I’m finding more anxiety because I’m teaching more classes.
Regardless, I’m very confused by this resistance to dialog.
A Wall of Books
Jim Watts at Iconic Books has a post on Dutch artist Sanja Medic’s book-inspired building façade. Very nice. Check it out, and follow the link.
Halloween, Christmas and Ritual
Don’t you hate it when a good story passes you by? This happened to me the other day when Kimberly Daniels wrote an article on The Danger of Celebrating Halloween. Unfortunately, the article can only be found in a Google cache at this point, after having generated over a thousand comments of scorn on such sites as the Huffington Post.
While I could let the (un)dead bury the dead, I really feel that this article should be addressed. However, it’s not the highly tendentious particulars of Daniels’ argument that deserves attention as much as her general thrust.
For example, she states:
Decorating buildings with Halloween scenes, dressing up for parties, going door-to-door for candy, standing around bonfires and highlighting pumpkin patches are all acts rooted in entertaining familiar spirits.
While one could argue the validity of these claims, the bigger issue is that the supposed etymologies of these activities are given pride of place over how they are actually used in the holiday. What matters is not what people intend by their observance as much as the historical roots of their activity.
However, if we turn this around, wouldn’t the same hold for that most cherished of Christian holidays, Christmas and Easter? If someone is celebrating these holidays, won’t their inherent crypto-Christian behavior rub off on the participants the same way that Daniels holds for Halloween?
Obviously, some folks will hold that this augment fails because Easter might be related to a poorly attested pagan spring festival and Christmas is mistakenly aligned to Saturnalia. The links for both of these are quite tenuous. The former is attested only in Bede’s discussion of Ēostur-monath in De Temporum Ratione. The latter runs into numerous problems when one actually compares the 3-5 day festival (from Dec 17-23) with Christmas. In short, the argument is mostly bogus.
Likewise, Daniels’ contention that the origins of a rite dictate is also bogus. An ardent Christian celebrating Halloween is in no more danger of crypto-Paganism than a secular atheist celebrating Christmas is of crypto-Christianity.
BSC XLVII and the Top 50
It’s that time again. Kevin Scull has the Biblical Studies Carnival XLVII at his blog, Paul of Tarsus. Likewise, the Biblioblog Top 50 list is up for October. Finally, last month I neglected to mention Daniel and Tonya’s Biblical Studies Carnival XLVI at their blog, Hebrew and Greek Reader. (Sorry about that).
Brad Lidge and the Last Crusade
Philly.com has an article on the Phillies’ closer Brad Lidge. In addition to helping the Phillies in their quest for back-to-back World Series championships, Lidge is also taking classes in religion.
Lidge expects to finish his undergraduate degree within a few years. He plans to pursue a master’s, and hopefully a career excavating religious artifacts in Europe, after retiring from baseball.
Perhaps he will help save the Holy Grail from the Nazis after having helped the Phillies win another series of games.
All Translation is Supple
Bill Mounce has an interesting post on conflicting translational practices in the ESV’s rendering of Rom 2:27, 29. The same word (γραμματος) is translated differently (“written code” and “letter”) in the two verses. Folks wonder why this is so, and Mounce give a rundown on the thought processes behind a biblical translator. What this ends up showing is just how squishy supple Bible translations really are. He ends his post with a warning against armchair quarterbacking:
When someone says that a translation is “wrong” and that the translators “should” have done it another way, in most cases (in my experience) this comes out of a lack of respect to the complexities of translation and a lack of knowledge of all the procedures being followed by a translation committee.
An interesting post, even if it is about the Jesus festschrift.
Ishtar and Inanna and Zombies
My exploration of the relationship between Ishtar and Zombies in the Gilgamesh Epic has taken another turn. I recently acquired a copy of Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer’s Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth
Ketuvim: the Writings of James R. Getz Jr. 