Posts
1. Zosia Zaks, Life and Love: Positive Strategies for Autistic Adults, page 247:
Our trusting nature and our autistic way of thinking are some of the reasons why we are at greater risk [of danger]. We don’t see hidden intentions. We are likely to miss any forewarning of danger expressed nonverbally or via body language. Clues from tone of voice or posture are likely to go unnoticed. Generalizing is another problem. We may understand a large, broad rule such as, “Don’t go home with a stranger,” but may not be able to apply this to a slightly different situation such as going home with someone you just met. If you’ve met, then the other person is not a stranger, literally speaking.
Today, I watched Stephen King’s It for the umpteenth time. Near the beginning of the movie, little Georgie Denbrough encounters Pennywise the homicidal dancing clown, who lives in the sewer. Pennywise invites Georgie into the sewer, and Georgie replies, “My dad told me not to talk to strangers.” “Very wise of your dad, Georgie, very wise indeed,” Pennywise says. “I am Pennywise the dancing clown, and you’re Georgie. So now we know each other! We’re not strangers anymore! Kerrect?” “I guess so,” Georgie says, laughing. Soon thereafter, Pennywise rips off Georgie’s arm and kills him.
Zosia’s comments on “Don’t go home with a stranger” reminded me of that scene. Georgie, like some with Asperger’s, took that instruction a little too literally. He should have defined “stranger” as someone you don’t know overly well, not as someone you’ve never met.
2. Sara Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought, page 399:
In I Chronicles 29:23, Solomon is said to sit on the throne of the LORD. For Japhet, that means that he’s God’s representative on earth. The rabbis had some creative interpretations of this verse, however. For example:
“…just as God rules from one end of the world to the other and also has dominion over all kings…so did Solomon reign over the whole earth, as it says: ‘And all the kings of the earth sought the presence of Solomon’” (Exodus Rabbah 15:26…)
They really struggled with the notion that a man could sit on the throne of the LORD. I should note, though, that I-II Chronicles is like I-II Kings in its acknowledgment that there are kings over God’s people who do evil in the eyes of the LORD, so sitting on the throne of the LORD doesn’t make them infallible. But they still have the authority to function as God’s representatives, which means executing justice and defending the poor from oppression.
3. D.A. Russell, Criticism in Antiquity, page 202:
Quintilian lived in the first century C.E. He writes: Why is it that persons who grieve for a recent sorrow often appear to utter words of the highest eloquence, while anger sometimes makes even the untaught into orators? It is because of the psychological force and feeling in them.
I’m not sure how true that is in real life, but I can testify by experience that the right amount of anger eliminates my fear and makes me more prone to talk, and to talk well. If there’s too much anger, however, that’s not as much the case. But the right amount of anger does this.
4. R.P.C. Hanson, Allegory and Event, pages 163-164:
Origen creates a Hexapla that set different versions of the Hebrew Bible side by side: the Septuagint, the Hebrew Masoretic Text, Aquila’s literal translation, and others. Did Origen believe that all of these texts were inspired? Did he make a theological point that flowed from the existence of different texts? Here’s a case that’s interesting:
[Origen] acknowledges that the LXX is inspired, inasmuch that he often regards its divergence from the Hebrew text as divinely prompted. Commenting on the verse ‘A virgin of his own people shall he take to wife’ (Lev. 21.14), Origen remarks that the Jews say that their texts do not have the phrase ‘of his own people’ though it appears in the LXX. He claims that it is by divine providence that their copies omit this phrase, because they are by their own disobedience no longer the people of Christ.
So, for Origen, the Hebrew text and the Septuagint both have what they have for a reason—in this case, to promote supersessionism (the notion that the church has replaced Israel as God’s people).
5. N.F. Marcos, The Septuagint in Context, pages 192-193:
In the synagogue the scroll continued to be used…The Church, instead, opted for the codex in the 2nd century…
So that’s when Christians started using the codex.
