Robert Alter on Psalm 11:7

  

The upright behold His face. With the wicked disposed of in the previous verse, the psalm ends on this positive note of the upright beholding God— even as God from the heavens beholds all humankind. In the Hebrew, the noun is singular and the verb is plural; presumably one of the two (probably the verb) should be adjusted. The Masoretic Text reads “their face,” with no obvious antecedent for the plural, but variant Hebrew versions have “His face.” (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:46)

 

Discussion with a Disingenuous Baptist (Adam)

Update: Adam keeps trying to get the video taken down. So here are the Zoom details so you can download it:

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/7nHap6qpk3cP_TzDGl0t2Yri8PT4TBVfHl4QaVak9bMElayg7fGfK2hUfN0qLHXX.T680M5GqWnNx1naG 

Passcode: 4r@?FP!+

Please download and upload onto your own youtube and other channels. You have my express permission to do such.

Alberto Rus Lhuillier on Medicine among the Maya

  

Medicine

 

The Maya in common with other Mesoamerican groups believed that illnesses could have both natural and supernatural causes. To treat illnesses due to natural causes the healers first determined the symptoms and then made use of the vast supply of natural cures available (animal, mineral and plant), prescribed in a variety of different forms. Amongst these were infusions, poultices and ointments. Hundreds of recipes used to cure many aches and pains have been collected from colonial documents, and a great number of these prehispanic remedies were still used today and their effectiveness is well proven.

 

Illnesses caused the “bad winds” or by enemies, those provoked by failure to fulfill religious obligations or for any other unknown reasons were considered to have magic or supernatural origins. It was also necessary to cure them by these means. The Ritual of the Bacabs, a manuscript written in Maya and translated into English, records many spells as well as medical prescriptions. Cure by faith healers (brujos) is still a common practice today for sicknesses of supernatural origin. (Alberto Rus Lhuillier, The Ancient Maya [trans. Margaret Shrimpton; Mérida, Mexico: Dante, 1992], 53-54)

 

Joseph A. Fitzmyer on Luke 2:48

  

have been terribly worried and have been searching for you. Lit. “suffering pain, we are searching for you.” The ms. D and some ancient versions (OL, Curetonian OS) add another ptc., “and grieving.” Still other mss. (C, D, Θ, the Koine text-tradition) read the impf. ezētoumen, “we were searching,” instead of the preferred reading, the pres. indic. (translated here as a pf.). The verb odynasthai is used exclusively by Luke in the NT (see 16:24, 25; Acts 20:38); it expresses mental torment or anguish. Mary’s reproach implies that an obedient or responsible son would have acted otherwise. (Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel according to Luke I–IX: Introduction, Translation, and Notes [AYB 28; New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008], 443, emphasis in bold added)

 

Notes on Job 42:13 and the MT vs. Targum on the Number of Job’s Daughters

  

13. The form of the numeral (šiḇʿānāh) is peculiar. Targ. construed it as a dual, thus doubling the number of sons without increasing the daughters. A surplus of girls ordinarily would be regarded as a calamity; cf. Ecclesiasticus 26:10–12, 42:9–11. The pagan Arabs used to bury unwanted daughters at birth (cf. Sale, The Koran, pp. 199, 438). Job’s daughters, well endowed with beauty and wealth, figure more prominently than the sons who are not even mentioned by name. Sarna (JBL 76 [1957], 18) suggests that the numeral šiḇʿānāh may be a genuine archaism related to the Ugaritic form šbʿny. (Marvin H. Pope, Job: Introduction, Translation, and Notes [AYB 15; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008], 352)

 

 

The Targum of Job reads:

 

והוו ליה ארבסר בנין ותלת בנן

 

 

13. And he had fourteen sons, and three daughters. (The Targum of Job and The Targum of Proverbs and The Targum of Qohelet [trans. Céline Mangan, John F. Healey, and Peter S. Knobel; The Aramaic Bible 15; Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1991], Logos Bible Software edition)

  

Taking šib‘ābāh as dual, corresponding to the doubling of all Job’s possessions in v. 12: see 1:3. (Ibid., n 9)

 

Robert Alter on Psalm 9 (LXX: Psalms 9-10)

 

 

This psalm and the next one are a striking testimony to the scrambling in textual transmission that, unfortunately, a good many of the psalms have suffered. The Septuagint presents Psalms 9 and 10 as a single psalm, and there is formal evidence for the fact that it was originally one poem. Psalm 9 in the Hebrew begins as an alphabetic acrostic: verses 2 and 3, aleph (four times); verse 4, bet; verse 6, gimmel (dalet, the next letter, is missing); verse 7, heh; verses 8–11, waw; verse 12, zayin; verse 14, ḥet; verse 16, tet; verse 18, yod; verse 19, kaf. It is notable that some lines of poetry have been interspersed between the acrostic lines, unlike other acrostic psalms in which the sequential letters of the alphabet occur in consecutive lines. Then Psalm 10 begins with the next letter of the alphabet, lamed, after which the acrostic disappears, to surface near the end of the psalm with the last six letters of the alphabet—verse 7, peh; verse 8, ayin; verse 12, qof; verse 14, resh; verse 15, shin; and verse 17, taw. Now, what accompanies this confusion is a whole series of points, especially in the second half of the psalm, at which the text is not intelligible and is in all likelihood defective. Something along the following lines seems to have happened to our psalm: at some early moment in the long history of its transmission, a single authoritative copy was damaged (by decay, moisture, fire, or whatever). Lines of verse may have been patched into the text from other sources in an attempt to fill in lacunae. Quite a few phrases or lines were simply transcribed in their mangled form or perhaps poorly reconstructed. When the chapter divisions of the Bible were introduced in the late Middle Ages, the editors, struggling with this imperfect text, no longer realized that it was an acrostic and broke it into two separate psalms. The result of this whole process, alas, is that we are left with a rather imperfect notion of what some of the text means. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:40)

 

Alberto Rus Lhuillier on Astronomy among the Maya

  

Astronomy

 

In comparison to the ancient peoples of the Old World (Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, Greek), the methods used by the Maya for astronomy were rudimentary. The Maya used a pole set upright on the ground to mark the moment when the sun passed by the zenith of a particular spot and rods with intercrossed threads to trace the sight lines to significant astronomical points. We know some buildings were constructed for astronomical purposes, amongst these, the so called Caracol or Observatory at Chichén Itzá and Mayapán, the tower of the Palace at Palenque and the F. Group Complex at Uaxactun. In these structures sight lines leaving from a point on the staircase of the pyramid and directed towards three temples aligned on a platform opposite, determine the points on the horizon from where the sun rises at the equinoxes and solstices.

 

Despite the lack of accurate instruments the Maya determined precisely the cycles of the moon, the sun and of Venus, as well as some of the constellations. For the Moon they observed a cycle of approximately 29 and a half days. According to the Dresden Codex their exact calculation was for 29.53086 days and today modern scientists calculate the figure as 29.53059 days.

 

According to modern observations the actual tropical year (the solar cycle) has a duration of 365.2422 days. With the addition of the leap year every four years in the Gregorian calendar, the cycle is estimated at 365.2425 days, which is more accurate than the Gregorian calendar by one day in every 10 thousand years. The correction to the accumulated error was made with the civil calendar of 365 days.

 

For the cycle of Venus they established a pattern of 584 days divided into different phases. The morning star phrase was 236 days, for 90 days the planet disappeared, returned for 250 days in the evening star phase and then finally another disappearance, this time for 8 days. In modern astronomy, the Venus cycle has the following phases, respectively: 240, 90, 240, 14 with a total duration oscillating between 580 and 587 days, averaging 583.92 days.

 

Although it is unproven, the Maay ought to have known the cycles of the other planets whose hieroglyphs appear on their inscriptions. Great importance was given to stars and constellations. Some of the most important ones were the Pole Star Xaman Ek, or the big star, that guided merchants and travelers, the Pleiades or Tzab, “the rattles” and Geminin or Ac, “the turtle”. The representation of animals hanging from the celestial belt in the Paris Codes has led to the suggestion that a zodiac was used for some prophesying.

 

In the Dresden Codex, a table or register predicting eclipses has been identified that is valid for 33 consecutive years, and repeated to infinity. Modern calculations show that the table is in general accurate. Differences are small, not exceeding one day. (Alberto Rus Lhuillier, The Ancient Maya [trans. Margaret Shrimpton; Mérida, Mexico: Dante, 1992], 37, 39)