1. Actor Robert Culp has passed away. I mentioned him last month in a post on Roots: The Next Generation, for he appeared in an episode of that miniseries (see Roots TNG 4-5, Reward and Punishment in Wisdom Literature?, YHWH Alone, We’re Rodents!, Pythagoreans on the Cosmos’ Origin). I read today that both he and his co-star on I-Spy, Bill Cosby, were active in the Civil Rights Movement. I remember Robert Culp on an episode of the Cosby Show, in which he played a person with heart problems whose wife wanted him to improve his diet. And, as viewers of the Cosby Show realize, that was also a struggle for Dr. Cliff Huxtable! But the two of them were in the kitchen, going wild over pizza and potato chips, until their wives walked in!
Robert Culp usually played a no-nonsense type of character. It’s too bad that he died in his 70’s.
2. On the Eagle Forum’s blog, Phyllis Schlafly has a post, More Youth Are Depressed Now. Mrs. Schlafly states:
Other mental health professionals have chronicled the mistakes of so-called “helicopter” parents, who hover over their children to protect them from every perceived slight and failure. Such children don’t develop the real-life coping skills needed to stick to a budget or accept criticism from a boss.
That sounds a lot like Betty Friedan in the Feminine Mystique! See Feminine Mystique 10, under number 1. I wrote that on Mrs. Schlafly’s Facebook page, and a lady wrote underneath my comment that she’s glad that she grew up in the 1950’s. Her implication was that the 1950’s didn’t have the problem of a high number of depressed youth. But that’s a decade in which, according to Betty Friedan, the Feminine Mystique (the view that women are only fulfilled as wives and mothers) was in full swing. So there’s a difference of opinion about whether or not the Feminine Mystique produced children who can’t cope with life. As always, reality is complex, so maybe both views are correct, in some way, shape, or form.
3. In A Law Book for the Diaspora, John Van Seters states on page 154: It is quite possible that the special food laws of Deuteronomy originally applied to priests as holy persons and that Deuteronomy has extended this principle to all Israelites.
Van Seters is talking specifically about not eating an animal that has died of itself or been torn by another animal. In Leviticus 22:8, that law applies to priests. Elsewhere in the Torah (Leviticus 17:15; 22:8; Deuteronomy 14:21), it applies to all Israelites. Could we assume that the law applied to everyone simultaneously—both priests and lay Israelites? Perhaps, but it’s also possible that a priestly law was applied to all of Israel, as there emerged a belief that Israel was to be a kingdom of priests to God. I wonder how other ancient Near Eastern countries were on this. Did they apply priestly laws to the populace, or not?
4. Speaking of Van Seters, Mordechai Cogan says the following on page 91 of his Anchor Bible commentary on I Kings: Thus, the somewhat whimsical picture drawn by Van Seters…of the author of Kings traveling around the country reading and copying cuneiform (!) inscriptions so as to tell the story of the Assyrian conquest of Samaria and their battles in Judah can be set aside. We are thus having spared having to credit him with a knowledge of hieroglyphs and/or demotic…
Cogan believes the the author of Kings (or one of them, anyway) had Israelite source material (“records of wars, tribute payments,” etc.).
I wonder why Van Seters thinks that the author of Kings copied cuneiform inscriptions. That reminded me of a minimalist I read, who stated that biblical writings only look historical because their authors copied stuff from other histories. But it’s been years since I read that, so I may be fuzzy on the details.
5. I finished H.I. Marrou’s A History of Education in Antiquity. My quote for today is from page 446:
There is a charming passage in one of St. Basil’s writings describing the joy of the children in Caesaria in 368 on being allowed to forget school and writing tablets for a day so that they could take part in the prayers ordered by the bishop on the occasion of a famine caused by a drought, thus in their innocence turning a time of general sorrow into a holiday (Hom. VIII, 72, PG, 31, 309); this suggests an atmosphere of confidence and co-operation between parents and teachers and the church.
I like Marrou’s use of the term “charming,” for it shows that he can be emotionally affected by the things that he studies. Many scholars write in a manner that so sterile that I wonder if they even do care about their subject!
6. I also finished Manlio Simonetti’s Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church. On page 95, Simonetti refers to the African Donatist Tyconius, who lived in the fourth century C.E. Tyconius believed the following about Daniel 2:
The stone cut from the mountain which annihilates the kingdoms of the world (Dan. 2:34) is a figure of Christ, but when it becomes a mountain, which fills the whole earth, it specifically prefigures the church.
I can somewhat understand Tyconius’ perspective here. In Matthew 21:42-44, Jesus calls himself the cornerstone that the builders rejected, saying that, on whomever the stone will fall, it will grind him to powder (KJV); that echoes Daniel 2, in which a stone from heaven falls on the image representing the Gentile powers. Also, if the feet of clay in the image of Daniel 2 was Rome, which was the belief of Jews and Christians in those days (at least from the first century C.E. onward), then wouldn’t the Messiah come during the time of the Roman empire? Wouldn’t his kingdom spread at his coming? Christ hasn’t returned for 2,000 years, but his church spread over the earth. When I was researching for my power-point presentation on Byzantine Jerusalem, I learned of a Christian belief that the reign of Constantine was actually the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies about the coming paradise.
Personally, I have a hard time considering the church the fulfillment of Daniel 2, since it’s had a lot of sin and oppression in its ranks (and it extended that oppression outside of its ranks as well). But it’s interesting to find a belief that says Daniel 2 was fulfilled near the time of the Roman empire.