The Bible

There’s a great book by Jospeh Heller called “God Knows”, which re-tells the story of King David in novel form. It’s incredibly engaging, actually, but also faithful to the original story.

Also, did you know that God divinely inspired the translation of the KJV, and that he actually corrected mistakes for the Aramaic and Greek and whatnot? That’s right, some people believe that the KJV is more accurate than the texts it was translated from. The More You Know!

(Actually, if you’re just reading the bible for your own interest, I recommend the KJV. As a work of literature it’s kick-arse.)

Is it faithful to the Samuel/Kings version, or the Chronicles version?

As best I can remember, the basis is the Samuel/Kings version, but I expect Heller worked with Chronicles too. For someone who knows the Bible better than I do, the way he handles any contradictions may be more evident than it was to me.

Well, to make a long story short, the version in Chronicles kinda skips the controversy surrounding his ascension – it goes as far as to say that Israel immediately and unanimously unites behind him once he claims the throne. In Samuel/Kings, there’s a split kingdom for a few years until he finally unites the kingdom; it’s this split that later becomes permanent. I think it also skips the whole Bathsheba thing.

I gotta come clean here, guys — I’m in a position to tell you all that Mary was NOT a virgin. 'Nuff said!

Motherfucker.

Very cool, thanks Rimbo!

You’re welcome, Mike! Glad I could help.

Dumbledore dies about 3/4 of the way through.

Apart from Ecclesiastes, I don’t much care for the Bible as a literary work. And even with respect to Ecclesiastes, I think the Byrds song is better.

People cite the Song of Solomon sometimes but really, practically any one line of Sappho is better than the whole Song as far as classical porn goes:

Really? No, really, is that what they’re like? Roe deer? OK, well, that’s fine, I guess, if you don’t think about it, at least people generally like deer, even if there is really no sensory quality whatsoever in which breasts can be like deer. Unless they’re furry, I guess. Or maybe the author of the Song was a furry.

OK, now you’ve lost me completely. Killed the mood.

If I had a bunch of free time I’d totally write the Furry Bible. I bet a lot of the old testament wouldn’t even need much touching up. Though yiffing would need to be worked in somewhere. Maybe an extra commandment or beatitude is called for.

They meant cod roe, like in taramasalata. Those are some small, salty breasts right there.

Aramaic and Arabic don’t have a word for “cousin”, and culturally speaking the relationship is not one that is considered distinctive. People don’t consider “fist cousins” to be a relationship that requires a separate category. The relationship is considered ambiguous such that if you feel a special bond with a cousin then you refer to him as “brother” (or “sister” if the cousin is female). Conversely, a “cousin” can be as distant as anyone else in society such that marrying your “fist cousin” is accepted and quite common.

Jesus would have referred to his cousins as “brothers and sisters” in a direct translation from Aramaic to English. This in no way implies that Jesus had actual brothers and sisters.

I wish I had a link to this information, but it was told to me by my grandmother who was born and raised in Lebanon. She spoke Arabic, and she was from an area where a sprinkling of Aramaic was still present in their local dialect.

This may be true. But this…

People don’t consider “fist cousins” to be a relationship that requires a separate category. The relationship is considered ambiguous such that if you feel a special bond with a cousin then you refer to him as “brother” (or “sister” if the cousin is female). Conversely, a “cousin” can be as distant as anyone else in society such that marrying your “fist cousin” is accepted and quite common.

Is just weird. I’m very close to a first cousin, and she and I never called each other “bro” or “sis.” We call each other “cuz.” I’ve never known anyone to do such a thing.

I also don’t think marrying a “first cousin” is either accepted or common, except among people (such as royalty) for whom “keeping it in the family” is important.

In other languages, this distinction exists; e.g. Chinese, not only is there a word for cousin, but separate words for cousins on the maternal and paternal side and phrases for older and younger and male and female cousins.

Jesus would have referred to his cousins as “brothers and sisters” in a direct translation from Aramaic to English. This in no way implies that Jesus had actual brothers and sisters.

I wish I had a link to this information, but it was told to me by my grandmother who was born and raised in Lebanon. She spoke Arabic, and she was from an area where a sprinkling of Aramaic was still present in their local dialect.

I’ll grant you that this is possible. But it also doesn’t address what is more likely; that Mary was a complete virgin for her entire life, or that she had a normal married, monogamous relationship with Joseph. The thing that grabs my interest is the need from men for Mary to be a lifelong virgin. Men do seem to put women into one of two buckets: Whore, or Virgin-saint. They put girls who enjoy sex into the former; they want to entertain the illusion that their mothers, wives and daughters are in the latter bucket.

Also, I stumbled upon this article which points out that the passage in question was written in Greek; if they were meant to be cousins, it could have used the Greek word for that (noting that even OT passages that were written in Hebrew are careful to distinguish brothers from cousins, even though there was no specific Hebrew word for it). It addresses certain other arguments as well. (The fact that the writer is female is merely a coincidence, and not a tie-in to the prior paragraph.)

Edit: On further review, the above link author’s scholarship is of dubious quality.

What I related is fact not my opinion. My grandparents were immigrants from Lebanon. There was a large Lebanese community in this part of NC so I had the chance to learn a bit about Middle Eastern culture from first hand exposure.

When I say that Arabic culture doesn’t have a word for cousin because they don’t recognize the distinction, I’m not talking about word play. The entire concept of “cousin” does not exist in the culture. If there is any reason to make reference to a cousin in a way that indicates the extended family link then that person is referred to as a brother or sister. This gives rise to some cousins becoming one’s brother or sister, and that relationship is recognized by the community as a sibling relationship. The woman who was my great aunt, and who I thought was my grandmother’s biological sister was actually her cousin. I didn’t know this fact until many years after they’d both died. Within the community they were considered sisters.

Marrying first cousins is very, very common in Middle Eastern culture. You have to understand that culturally speaking there is no such relationship as “cousin”. Because the relationship bears no significance, there can be no taboo in marrying your “first cousin”. My grandmother was married twice in her life (her first husband died). Both of her husbands were also her “first cousins”. More than half of the people in her generation were married to “first cousins”. This is an effect of the tribal nature of Arabic communities. I should probably phrase that as “an effect of the nature of tribal communities”, since there are a vast number of cultures outside of Western Civ that still maintain tribal bonds.

That’s great but uh… Jesus wasn’t an Arab; he was Jewish.

Same thing.

Hahahahahahaha!

Huh, really? That spell isn’t in my D&D 4 handbook. He must be Epic level.

So it’s like reading Tolkien’s books… long, boring, someone smiting someone else, and the need to look at the reference notes to make any sense of it?