#biblefreak posting

[hypokeimena]

memes i hate passionately

my brother in christ (I Am Not)

none of those words are in the bible (if you're a fuckin coward)

[hypokeimena]

everything you're saying is more or less correct but disregards the entire thing my thesis is based on (LXX, places where qumran aligns more closely with that than with MT) - so on the whole i'm with you with friedman's version of the documentary hypothesis, but we do know that by the 2nd/3rd c bce we *didnt* have one unified textual tradition identical to the MT so much as multiple extremely similar but non-identical parallel hebrew traditions, one of which seems to have developed into the MT - and at least one of which is preserved in fragmentary form at some parts of qumran and more holistically in translation in the LXX. the difference in age and redactional completeness of these various versions i just think is pushed significantly later than qumran since we have differences preserved past that date.

like qumran is actually famously FAMOUSLY useful specifically bc it demonstrates that a lot of the differences b/w LXX and MT are not changes in the lxx translation or style they are preserving a different hebrew tradition. that makes a lot of jewish / MT focused scholars real uncomfortable (i don't really get why) but i think friedman's work is disregarding a lot of this mess in part to make stronger claims about the redactional dates of the MT than i think he really could / should have, even in 1987.

Book Review 17/36

Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliott Friedman

Or: Books which are gonna make me really irritating in Torah study for a bit.

I read substantial portions of this out loud to my wife on a drive, which is how you know it's either very good or very bad. In this case very good.

I have some quibbles with what he chose to cite, it felt very much like xkcd's quartz where he cited things that he felt weren't common knowledge but, of course, his idea of common knowledge is leagues away from what it actually is.

It's also a book with An Argument It's Making, which is fine and he makes that super clear, but I'm not well read enough to know what the opposition is--if there is one, I read the '97 edition and that may be academic consensus by now.

5/5

[hypokeimena]

every time i post about the bible i feel like i need to throw my hands out spongebob meme style like IM NOT RELIGIOUS which isn't even true. but i am not religious about the bible (<- also not exactly true). i guess my point is that i don't think the bible is real.

[hypokeimena]

the book of jonah includes god, unprompted, being like "i would NOT love you if you were a worm, AND you're basically a worm to me already" which is some pretty good stuff i think

[hypokeimena]

we as transgender family abolitionists truly do love to discuss how the Structure (tm) of the family is the thing which replicates harm and similar but also like all language will be coopted into the realm of the structural. anyway going insane currently about this

[hypokeimena]

The version of the Hebrew Bible/'OT' common to early christians and used by NT composers was absolutely in Greek! If you're interested in reading the Septuagint in Greek, I recommend starting by reading NETS in English to get a sense of its similarities and differences from the 'traditional' 'old testament'.

it's harder to find a decent version of the LXX (<- septuagint) than the greek new testament unless you have academic access, though, many of the online resources are dubiously reliable.

I came from a classics/attic background as well and so already had greek when i started studying the lxx, but koine is much easier to read than standard attic. I also cannot speak to the efficacy of koine-learning materials as i have never used them; if you will ever read anything other than the bible in greek, i do recommend starting with attic, but it is definitely harder than koine greek overall and this can be very frustrating.

I learned attic out of hansen and quinn originally (and went in with strong latin, which does help), but I use athenaze for grammar review and find it pretty effective and probably best for anyone who doesn't already have a strong grounding in ancient languages.

If one wanted to translate the Old Testament from the Ancient Greek do u have any recommendations for where to start

Hi! I think you mean the New Testament, since the Old Testament (i.e. the Tanakh) is in Hebrew with a few passages in Aramaic.

As a disclaimer: I am by no means an expert in Biblical Greek, I'm trained as a classicist whose introduction to Greek was through Attic Greek (ca. 5th-4th century BCE), which is usually the introductory dialect for anyone who wants to learn Ancient Greek. The New Testament is in Koine Greek which is quite readable with a background in Attic, but I know there are also resources more targeted toward Koine (and probably for an audience specifically interested in Biblical Greek rather than Ancient Greek more broadly). A quick Google search suggests that there's some online tools for learning Koine as well; I can't speak to the quality of any of them.

Because of my background, all the resources I have personal experience with and would know to recommend are really resources for learning Attic - I started with Cynthia Shelmerdine's Introduction to Greek, which is fairly solid and generally my preferred Greek textbook but might be easier going if you've had some Latin. A lot of people swear by Hansen and Quinn's Greek: An Intensive Course which is also what my department uses for teaching, but I personally find it a more difficult textbook in that it introduces some of the most difficult grammatical concepts in the language very early. There's several other Greek textbooks out there (Athenaze is one I've heard relatively good things about) but I don't have personal experience with them and can't offer a recommendation one way or the other. Depending on your commitment level, several universities also offer online summer Greek intensive courses which are typically open even to non-enrolled students of that university; here's a decent list including both online and in-person intensives that looks to be fairly current.

Sorry I can't be of more help!

[hypokeimena]

texts to send your dad that make you feel like the most insane bible freak in the world. i would make this a general call to action but the reason i like jonah is basically the reason it reads as an incomprehensible dumbass ideology theology story without context. so don't read jonah but it IS good.

[hypokeimena]

deciding if i want to read modern classics by googling is there incest in absalom absalom!

[hypokeimena]

gotta say i do enjoy the bibleposting. probably because youre normal (not ChristianTM) about it. love and well wishes,

there were, in fact, papers about wells as the setting for romantic drama in the bible but i can't find my phone that will let me two-factor authenticate my way into jstor so i can't read them

[hypokeimena]

like first of all i'm not your brother or sister or sibling, nevermind in christ; i am jewish and it is actively rude to say that shit to strangers. i don't know you like that.

second of all, saying "those words aren't in the bible" demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what "the bible" is. not everyone has to be a religious scholar but it seems to me (xkcd expert voice) that most people are probably aware there are different versions of "the bible" which differ between religions (jewish vs. christian vs. samaritan, etc), between christian religious denominations (catholic vs. protestant), and between translations in the same tradition (KJV vs. douay-rheims, etc).

the king james bible (trans. early 1600s) is not going to contain the word "homosexuality" because that word (origins late 1800s) didn't exist at the time; english-language bibles that DO explicitly contain the word "homosexuality" were translated more recently with a specific, anti-gay agenda, because there was no word or concept for "homosexuality" when the ancient hebrew israelites were composing it or when the LXX translators were rewriting the bible into greek or when jerome was translating into latin or when etc etc etc. if that word ended up in the bible, it is modern commentary and you should have a sense for why modern concepts end up translated into ancient texts.

like why should that word be or not be in the bible. if the ancient israelites had the word "slay-serve-cunty" should they have used it? would they have used it? why or why not? why, or for what ideological purposes, would that word or concept end up in a translated bible, even if it didn't exist at time of composition? why do you need to see a word in the bible to know it's okay to use? why is this the way you choose to criticize other people? i'll kill you

AND before anyone says this: i know it's a joke. my point is that if that's the joke you're making you're not very funny.

memes i hate passionately

my brother in christ (I Am Not)

none of those words are in the bible (if you're a fuckin coward)