Tag Archives: torah

The Ascension of Moses

My translation from the Talmud, Tractate Shabbat, pages 88b-89a: And Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said, When Moses ascended on high, the serving angels said before the Holy One, Blessed Be He: “Master of the Universe, what does one born of woman have to do with us?” He said to them, “He comes to receive Torah.” [...]
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500 words on Michael Fishbane’s “Text and Texture”

Michael Fishbane’s Text and Texture is a little book: 150 pages. It asks about biblical texts: what they teach, how they interact with culture, how we may reconstruct their intentions, what avenues for thought they open up. He wisely avoids trying to give an overview of those question in a general Bible-wide way, as Fishbane’s [...]
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Confederacy Discussion (3): Seder, Slavery, and the Bible

It was John Hobbins’ posts that first made me aware of the idea of functional canonicity. That is, regardless of what a group says is their canon, more practically important is what they use as canonical. In this sense, we could say that the Apostles’ Creed is canonical for most Christians. We could say that [...]
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what’s the central verse of the torah?

The central verse of the Torah (I read this today in Emanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, p. 57, citing b. Qidd. 30a, which ascribes finding it out to the soferim) is this: Leviticus 13:33:  then he shall be shaved, but he shall not shave the scale; and the priest shall shut him [...]
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The canon

If we agree that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, and that the Bible is the Word of God, we then come to another question: what is the Bible? In the last post, I defined the Bible as the Old Testament (Tanakh) and the New Testament. If these books are to govern our lives, [...]
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