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I went to the library today to read some articles. The first one I read was by Geza Vermes, and it appeared in volume 1 of the Cambridge History of the Bible.
This was such a great article, but I’m too tired to go into detail about everything that I read in it. It talked about different Jewish views concerning divorce in the pre-70 period. Josephus advocated a position similar to that of Hillel and Akiva: that a man could divorce his wife if she displeased him. Philo, however, was more restrictive, like Jesus and Shammai.
I encountered the Qumran view that the Torah prohibits a man to have multiple wives. It says that God overlooked David’s polygamy because he didn’t have access to the law, which was in the ark of the covenant after the death of Joshua and Eliezer.
Then there were Jewish attempts to argue that Sarah was not Abraham’s half-sister, notwithstanding Genesis 20:12′s claim that she was. The problem was that such a union would violate Leviticus 18. And so Josephus, targumim, and rabbis said she was his niece, interpreting “sister” rather broadly. But Qumran had a problem even with that, for the Torah banned sex between an aunt and her nephew in Leviticus 18, and so the Qumranites concluded that an uncle/niece marriage was out-of-the-question as well. Consequently, Qumran may have held a position similar to what we find in a targum: that Sarah was Abraham’s cousin.
Again, this was a good article, with many decent topics for a blog. I recommend it!
I’ll tie together two of my other readings. I began G.A. Kennedy’s A New History of Classical Rhetoric, which I will read whenever I make it to the downtown public library. He referred to the Sophists, who tried to use logic to defy common sense—for example, to prove that injustice is better than justice. They were just playing games! But that reminds me of an article I read today in Study of Ancient Judaism 1, which quoted Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 17a’s statement that a good judge should be able to prove that a reptile is clean, even though the Torah says the opposite. A good Jewish judge sounds like he’d be a Sophist! Then there’s another statement in that article: according to Neusner, the Tannaitic rabbinic document Sifra tries to show the limits of logic, by demonstrating that the Torah doesn’t necessarily agree with what we would consider the logical conclusion. That sounds Sophistic, too, but it’s not playing games: it’s elevating revelation over reason.
I finished Writings and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy last night. I suppose that I have to find something to write about it, so I’ll open the book and pick a random passage. Okay, page 267 says that oracles and an inscription were made to justify the Assyrian king Esarhaddon’s rise to power. Yeah, many things come down to power, don’t they?
Speaking of which, there are elections tonight. In South Carolina, Nikki Haley may win the Republican nomination for South Carolina governor. She’s a Tea-Party favorite, and she has an interesting background. She is an Indian by race, and her parents were Sikhs. While she is a born-again Christian, she practices some Sikh rituals to honor her parents’ memory. And some in South Carolina have launched racist attacked against her. Remember: this was the state where John McCain lost in the 2000 G.O.P. primary for President due to rumors that he had an illegitimate African baby.
It would be great if Nikki Haley won in this state, for the same reason that it was awesome that Indian Republican Bobby Jindal became Governor of Louisiana, a state that nominated David Duke as the Republican gubernatorial candidate about a decade before. People get to progress, and be conservative.
But I hope that Nikki Haley didn’t have those affairs.
