Sunday Sermonette: New wine into old bottles
For some reason, the wine industry adopted Jeroboam and Rehoboam as the names for large-size bottles. You can look it up. Anyway, while the division of the Israelites (defined presumably by the Hebrew language) into two kingdoms is probably historically real, the similarity of the names points to the likely fictitious nature of this story about how it happened. We learned in the previous chapter that Yahweh wanted it to happen because Solomon ' s wives seduced him into promoting the worship of other Gods. Yahweh somehow induces Rehoboam to say exactly what will cause the people to rebel against him, although exa...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 24, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Losing the plot
In Chapter 11 Solomon, supposedly the wisest man who ever lived, is seduced by some of his 700 wives into worshiping Gods other than Yahweh. God doesn ' t like this, obviously, but instead of the usual military defeats and plague and famine and all that, we just get the kingdom divided after Solomon dies peacefully of old age. By the way, Solomon ' s 700 wives and 300 concubines produced only three children: his son Rehoboam and daughters Taphaph and Basmaph. There are hints that he faces rebellions of some kind but we learn nothing about them. First there is the story of Haddad, who was purportedly the sole escapee f...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 20, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: International Trade
The visit of the Queen of Sheba is well known and no doubt features in the Bible stories for children genre. However, the legends that have grown up around her in the Jewish, Christian and Moslem traditions are all built from very sparse material. In this telling, we never learn her name, where the heck Sheba is, or what any of the profound wisdom was with which Solomon dazzled her. Not that it particularly matters, but scholars believe that Sheba may be based on Saba, a people of the southern Arabian peninsula. It is interesting that Solomon, along with the narrator, take the idea of a polity ruled by a woman completely i...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 17, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Fantasyland
Chapter 9 starts with yet another repetition of the motif that has appeared maybe a hundred times since Exodus: God tells Solomon that if the people stay faithful to him, he ' ll reward them with great power and riches, but if they stray, he ' ll destroy them. Yeah, we got that.Then we get more absurd claims about Solomon ' s wealth and power. Hiram had given Solmon 120 talents of gold, which would be four metric tons. Sure. (That happens to be what the Queen of Sheba will give him in the next chapter.) This is despite Hiram, for some reason, not liking the cities Solomon had given him. Solomon then enslaves the Amor...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 13, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
God moves in
Chapter 8 is very long, possibly the longest chapter so far though I haven ' t been keeping track of that. The writers obviously see these events as extremely important, and indeed, this symbolism as resonated through history to the present day. The narrative strongly ties the Israelite religion to a place, a specific spot on earth. In the story from the beginning, they were first a decentralized tribal people without a clearly defined territory, then they were exiled and enslaved, then they were wanderers who carried the main symbol of their religious devotion with them, then they were conquerors but only gradually develo...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 10, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
TWiV 886: COVID-19 clinical update #109 with Dr. Daniel Griffin
In COVID-19 clinical update #109, Daniel Griffin discusses cardiac complications after infection or vaccination, long COVID in children, fourth vaccine dose in Israel, no need for fourth vaccine dose in EU, dexamethasone dosing, immunomodulation therapy, MIS outcomes in children, US long COVID effort launched, and herd immunity. (Source: virology blog)
Source: virology blog - April 9, 2022 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: This Week in Virology antiviral coronavirus COVID-19 delta inflammation Long Covid monoclonal antibody Omicron pandemic SARS-CoV-2 vaccine vaccine booster variant of concern viruses Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Design specifications
Chapter 6 is just a detailed description of the temple. I don ' t know why we ' re supposed to care about all these architectural and decorative details, and I don ' t really have anything to say about it. Two points, however. In the following chapters Solomon builds his own palace, and it ' s more than 4 times as big (5,000 square cubits vs. 1,200 square cubits, i.e. 1,040 square meters vs. 250 square meters). Also, the calculation of the years since the exodus is wrong. I ' ll just quote SAB:After the Israelites left Egypt, they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. When they arrived in Israel, they were ruled b...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 3, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve Was Never Used Strategically
Alan ReynoldsPresident Biden plans to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) for a million barrels a day for six months, describing this as “awartime bridge to increase oil supply until production ramps up later this year. ”This is only the second time that the SPR has been used for the purpose Congress intended in 1975 – to counteract temporary spikes in the global price of oil due to cartel extortion or foreign wars. The first time was during the Gulf War, on January 16, 1991, when President George H.W. Bush announced the SPR would immediately begin selling up to 2.5 million barrels a day. On the following d...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 1, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Construction Contract
The next couple of chapters describe the construction of the first temple. Most scholars think it probably existed, one reason being that it ' s destruction, which is described later, happened within perhaps a generation of whoever wrote this. However, as I have noted earlier, archaeological excavation on the Temple Mount is not possible, so it can ' t be confirmed by physical evidence. (Archaeological finds which some have claimed to be evidence for the temple have either turned out to be fakes, or are of dubious meaning.) In any case, it was highly unlikely to have been as grand as is described here, and we don ' t ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 30, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The magnificence of Dear Leader
The first part of chapter four is basically an administrative directory -- the names of Solomon ' s cabinet officers and provincial governors. Since these events purportedly happened centuries before this was written, I have no idea why anybody is supposed to care about this list of names. The second part is like North Korean propaganda. Kim Jong Un bowled 300 five times in a row, wrote a symphony when he was five years old, that sort of thing. Just a reminder, which shoudn ' t be necessary by now, but according to the archaeological and historical evidence, Israel at this time was at most a collection of small ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 27, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: What are you, a wise guy?
Ch. 3 ends with a famous little story, but if you bother to think about it for a second it ' s completely ridiculous. The first thing that happens is that Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, gives his daughter to Solomon Riiiiiigggght. I happened to read an article in the new Scientific American about archaeology in Jerusalem. It ' s a problem because originally, actually until fairly recently, diggers set out to prove the foregone conclusion that the Bible stories are true. Another problem is that it ' s hard to dig anywhere without offending somebody. Anyway, the current scholarly consensus is that at the time t...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 23, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Last last words
You may recall that 2 Samuel 23 presented what purported to be David ' s last words, but he has had many more words to say since then and now we get what really are his last words since he in fact dies immediately after saying them. They consist of a hit list, including Shimei who David had previously promised not to kill. Well, he kept his word I guess, David had Solomon do the murder. (Shimei had called David names and thrown rocks at him in 2 Samuel 16.) BTW that David ruled for 40 years shouldn ' t surprise us since everything in the Bible seems to last 40 years. The Israelites wandered in the desert eating manna ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 20, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: King Me!
The Book of Kings (which is one book in the Tanakh but has been divided in two in the protestant Bible) is the last book of the Deuteronomic History. Remember that Deuteronomy, although it is considered the last book of the Torah, was actually produced separately from the first four books and is thought to have the same authorship as these subsequent ones. The overall purpose of the Deuteronomic History appears to be to reestablish orthodoxy and the exclusive worship of Yahweh at the beginning of the Second Temple period. The Book of Kings to some extent reverts to the Groundhog Day pattern of Judges, with the k...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 16, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: You didn't really expect it to make any sense, did you?
With Chapter 24 we come to the end of the Book of Samuel. The division seems arbitrary -- David is still around for the first couple of chapters of Kings. I suspect it has to do with the conventional length of a scroll rather than any literary consideration. In any event, this chapter is completely incoherent.God is angry at Israel for no apparent reason, so he orders David to take a census, which is somehow supposed to be a punishment? Note that Moses took several censuses, in fact that is the reason for the title of the Book of Numbers, in which there are three. Saul also took a census. This was never any problem. Anyway...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 13, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Urgency and Legitimacy: 2021 Volume of Yale's Global Constitutionalism Seminar, a Part of the Gruber Program for Global Justice and Women's Rights
Judith Resnik (Yale University), Daphne Barak-Erez (Israeli Supreme Court), Marta Cartabia (Bocconi University), Linda Greenhouse (Yale University), Ivana Jelic (European Court of Human Rights), Rosalie Abella (Supreme Court of Canada), Muneer I. Ahmad (Yale University), Susanne Baer (Humboldt University of... (Source: HealthLawProf Blog)
Source: HealthLawProf Blog - March 13, 2022 Category: Medical Law Authors: Katharine Van Tassel Source Type: blogs
