A new voice with an interesting idea

Seth Sanders, who's new blog Serving the Word looks promising, is working on what looks to be a fascinating book. I can't wait to see how it comes out. Welcome to the Blogosphere, Seth.
(Hat tip to Dr. Cathey.)

Some paper blogging, when I should be paper writing...

I despise text criticism. Not specifically text criticism of Jewish texts, and not for religious reason, which one might expect of a {more or less) orthodox Jew, but all text criticism. I hate it because it is so stultifyingly boring, but simultaneously necessary to any kind of text study. It is impossible to study any text properly without getting a picture of what the original text looked like. The problem exists for Shakespeare as well as the Bible. A short anecdote, to demonstrate my hatred. I've been working on a paper about Exodus 21:37 for the past little while. Yesterday, while looking in a book by Jacob Neusner, I saw a translation of the verse which excluded the following verse 22:1 and picked up at 22:2. I freaked out, afraid that there was a variant Bible text somewhere that I wasn't aware of. There was a copy of The New American Bible Translation nearby, I forget why. I picked it up to check to see what it said. The same as the Neusner book. Now I was really freaking out. Was I going to have to spend a million years trying to reconstruct the original reading, which I had no interest in doing? I ran and checked the Septuagint. It was the same as the Masoritic text. I double checked the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Same as the Masoritic text as well. Now I'm scared. I have no idea where this variant is coming from, but I've seen it two places. However, it doesn't exist in any of the oldest bible versions we have. I spent the next three hours or so going over books trying to figure out what the hell happened. In the end, it turned out to be a false alarm. Both Neusner and the New American Translation had used internal literary evidence to reconstruct what they thought was the original text, but none of that is within the scope of my paper. So I spent three hours freaking out over nothing. Moral of the story, text criticism is the Devil. Along with Ikea, Purolator and Kenyon Martin.


UPDATE: Rebecca pointed out the obvious fact that I can't spell, so I fixed it.

Into the breach...

Well, I'm heading into the academic trenches for the next little bit. If I survive, I'll be back in about a week and a half. Wish me luck.

Goldberg on religion

Jonah Goldber has a column up over at Nationalreview.com about religion and the role organized religion plays in society. I don't agree with everything he says, and I don't agree with his conclusions. However, he does make a few interesting points. The two I want to single out are:

I also detest the tendency of Americans, Westerners, or "Moderns" to boast of how they've customized their religious views to fit their lifestyles. "I don’t believe in organized religion, but I’m a very spiritual person." Yuck. It simply strikes me as intellectually offensive to pretend that the engineer of it all goes out of his way to let individual people order off-menu their religious preferences in just such a way so as pretty much everything they do is exactly how God wants it. And, even if that were the case, even if God customizes the heavens, space, and time so as to make every personal indulgence divinely inspired, the trend of people being their own priests is not one I celebrate.

This is a sentiment I endorse heartily. Even hypocritically paying lipservice to an organized religion is better than making up your own, in my opinion. His other interesting point is one about Jews: "I sometimes wonder if it's a Jewish thing because I have run into far more observant Jews who balk at the idea of discussing the existence of God." That's just something to think about.