1. In Louis Feldman’s Josephus’s Interpretation of the Bible, something on page 143 stood out to me. Josephus discusses the corrupt sons of Samuel, a good man. Josephus says that the lesson is that good men can spring from bad men, and vice versa. According to Feldman, “One wonders whether Josephus may not here obliquely be suggesting that Domitian, the emperor at the time when he completed the Antiquities…turned out to be much inferior in character to his father, Vespasian.”
Josephus is dropping a hint to the man whom many scholars deem to be the Beast of Revelation!
2. On page 29 of A Law Book of the Diaspora, Van Seters states, “It is contradictory to maintain that the Covenant Code is prior to Deuteronomy and revised by it and at the same time claim that the Covenant Code was composed by the final Dtr author, who also shaped Deuteronomy in its final form.”
Man. Some scholars think that the Covenant Code had a pretty complex history!
3. On page 179 of A History of Education in Antiquity, H.I. Marrou says that (unlike the Indians) the Greeks didn’t like writing down numbers higher than 100,ooo, for they were terrified of infinity.
Why? Was it because they felt they couldn’t wrap their minds around it? Tell me about it! In high school, when I did Algebra 2 graphs on my calculator and mapped out infinity, a line would keep approaching the x-axis but would never touch it. That made no sense to me. I mean, the line has to touch the x-axis eventually, if it’s approaching it, right?
Math.
4. On page 54 of Song of Songs, Marvin Pope says that the Song’s praise of feminine beauty is not widely paralleled in Hebrew literature. Proverbs 31 values women according to their home-ec abilities, not their appearance. Proverbs 11:22 says a fair woman devoid of sense is like a gold ring in a snout’s mouth. In Susanna and Judith, the evil characters are those who are swayed by feminine beauty.
I was thinking about this as I watched Rocky II last week. There Adrian was, standing around all those glamorous models. Yet, I’d take Adrian over those models any day of the week!
5. Corey Haim passed away. I remember him as the guy who played Lucas. Lucas was a nerdy kid who studied insects. He was bullied a lot. He had a drunk for a father and lived in a trailer park. But he was in love with an older girl and told her that he lived in a fancy mansion. But the girl he liked was in love with a football player, played by Charlie Sheen. But Lucas should have counted his blessings, for he was liked by a character played by Winona Ryder (who grew up to be hot), even though she knew he was from the wrong side of the tracks. At the end of the movie, Lucas plays on the football team and gets pulverized, but his teammates (even the ones who bullied him) get him a jersey and applaud him.
I saw Lucas in the fourth grade, and my family told me I look like him. The only difference is that Corey Haim grew up to be a sex symbol, while I grew up to be…well, me! 