Bart Ehrman on Colbert
It has been a busy few days, but I couldn’t resit posting this clip of Stephen Colbert interviewing Bart Ehrman.
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Chag kasher ve’same’ach
חג כשר וסמח Happy Passover! For your holiday viewing pleasure: a rabbi, a robot and a rapper recite the plagues.
(For lyrics go here.)
Peter Enns speaking at Eastern University
For those in the Philadelphia area (i.e. God’s own country), Peter Enns of Inspriation and Incarnation fame will be speaking at Eastern University on Tuesday night, 7PM.
(HT: wezlo)
A Tale of Two Reviews
For an interesting experiment in dueling reviews, check out the two reviews of Stephanie Lynn Budin’s The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity over at Review of Biblical Literature. Mayer Gruber and Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer review the book with quite differing conclusions. Read more…
Women Nazirites?
The other week Erik posted a comment on rabbinic perspectives of the Nazirite. This line of research led to some interesting observations which turned out to be far afield from the original discussion of permanent vs. temporary Nazirites, focusing rather on male vs. female Nazirites instead. Read more…
Enkidu Wine?
Apparently there is a Sonoma Winery named Enkidu Wine. This is of course confusing, since Enkidu is humanized not through wine but through beer (and sex, of course). The winery’s rational for not being a micro-brewery is unfortunately skewed.
Enkidu was told by the sacred slave: “Eat bread, oh, Enkidu! It is the fountain of life; drink the wine, it is the custom of the land.” Then Enkidu ate the bread till he was full, drank the wine, seven goblets…” http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab2.htm.
The translation “wine” is incorrect here; the lines (OB Pen II [CBS7771] col iii 96-101) read as follows:
a-ku-ul ak-lam den-ki-du10 sí-ma-at ba-la-ṭim
KAŠ (šikaram) ši-ti ši-im-ti ma-ti
i-ku-ul ak-lam den-ki-du10 a-di ši-bé-e-šu
KAŠ (šikaram) iš-ti-a-am 7 as-sà-am-mi-im
“Eat the bread, Enkidu, the thing proper to life;
Drink the beer, the custom of the land.”
Enkidu ate the bread until he was full;
He drank the beer, seven jugs!
I haven’t tried the Enkidu Wine yet. I would be more partial to the Shamhat than the Humbaba. Let’s hope that bad translation makes good wine!
Biblical Studies Carnival XL is up and aptly named
James Gregory over at James Gregory’s Blog has posted Biblical Studies Carnival XL. And while one might be tempted to see this purely as coincidence, James’ offering is indeed extra-large.
Be sure to check out his yeoman’s effort to summarize apparently everything that happened in biblioblogs last month!
As an added bonus, I’d also like to mention that AWOL (Ancient World OnLine) also has a phenominal post on SOAS’s online research.
Eisenbrauns’ Apirl Fools Sale
Eisenbrauns Aisanbrauns has their April Fools sale up. This year they’ve got an entire alternate page set up complete with an actual poster for purchase.
Among the many humorous amenities that this year’s offering provides is the latest news from MLA concerning the little known letter shortage raging in the publishing industry:
MLA Announces Severe Letter Shortage
The MLA today announced that the ongoing shortage of the letters E and L has begun affecting the publishing industry. “The reading public has always assumed that letters are infinitely available, but that simply isn’t true,” the MLA spokesperson told us. “There has always been an overabundance of the letters A and Q, while the letters E and L have been historically harder to obtain.” The current economic crisis didn’t help, but what really created the current shortage was the new German policy of spelling out all umlauted words. “Consumers have no idea how many letters this new policy is diverting,” the MLA told us.
Check out all the frivolity here.
Arguments from silence
One problem with writing a research-driven work in the humanities is silence. When you run across an idea, a concept or a line of interpretation that no one has commented on, what does it mean? Read more…
Strange Ironies
I haven’t posted all week due to teaching responsibilities and the MAR SBL Regional. While I hope to post some thoughts on the conference later, there were two ironic occurrences in my absence that I’d like to note.
- I’ve been almost religiously following Eisenbrauns’ Deal of the Day sales, hoping to pick up some much loved volumes that I can’t pony up the normal cash to enjoy. While I was at the conference on Thursday, Textes Culinaires Mesopotamiens Jean Bottéro came and went at some 80% of the retail price. I’ve been looking for an excuse to pick this volume up, but the sale passed by while I was schmoozing with colleagues.
- RBL posted a review of the English translation of Jean Louis Ska’s Introduzione alla lettura del Pentateuco entitled Introduction to Reading the Pentateuch (translated by Pascale Dominique). The review (available here) is by Reinhard Achenbach. The irony? the review of the English translation of Ska’s originally Italian work is itself written in German.
Ketuvim: the Writings of James R. Getz Jr. 