Posts
I’ll be doing this post fast, since the Sabbath is nigh!
1. Louis Feldman’s Josephus’s Interpretation of the Bible: In Numbers 22, God allows Balaam to go with the envoys to the Moabite King Balak, who wants to hire Balaam to curse Israel. Yet, God gets mad at Balaam when he does go. What’s up with that? Josephus’ solution is that God was being sarcastic when he told Balaam to go (Antiquities 4:107).
2. John Van Seters’ A Law Book for the Diaspora (page 51): Is Exodus 20:22 dependent on Deuteronomy 4:36, or vice versa? Exodus 20:22 says that God talked with Israel from heaven. Deuteronomy 4:36 says God spoke from heaven, and then states that God spoke from a great fire.
A scholar named Phillips says that Deuteronomy 4:36 is trying to reconcile two views of the theophany in Exodus 19-20, one that says God spoke from heaven, and the other that says God spoke from a fire on the mountain.
Van Seters disagrees with this, and I’m not entirely clear why. He says that Deuteronomy is moving in the direction of making God transcendent. I don’t understand why that means Deuteronomy 4:36 wasn’t trying to reconcile things within Exodus 19-20. Van Seters also says that the command against images in Exodus 20:22-23 presupposes Deuteronomy 4:9-12 and 15-19, which connect the prohibition of images with the fact that Israel saw no likeness of God in the fire of Horeb, but simply heard a voice. Exodus 20 doesn’t make that connection, so Van Seters says that it’s presupposing Deuteronomy 4:9-12, 15-19. My understanding of Van Seters’ overall argument is that Deuteronomy came before other biblical writings in the Pentateuch, so this argument is probably part of that.
Source criticism can strain my brain, if I’m not too careful!
3. H.I. Marrou’s A History of Education in Antiquity (page 206): the Ancients were very fond of the story about young Polemon, who burst into the lecture-hall after an orgy while he was still drunk and had a crown on his head. The philosopher Xenocrates was discussing temperance, and he went on speaking so persuasively and so affectingly that Polemon renounced his life of debauchery, fell in love with philosophy and later succeeded his master as director of the Academy.
4. Marvin Pope’s Song of Songs ( page 77): The wasf devoted to the Mesopotamian infernal prince is, mutandis mutandis, similar to the descriptions of the supernal Ancient of Days of Dan. 7:9 and the “one like the son of man,” i.e., anthropoid, in Enoch 106 and Rev 1:13-16.
I don’t entirely see the resemblance. Sure, lightning’s involved in both, and humans fall down before them in fear in response to their brilliance. That’s part of being divine, I guess! But I don’t see anything in the Mesopotamian description about a white garment and wooly hair, as I see in Daniel 7:9.
