Capricious, that's what they were

In general, the ancient Near Easterners believed that deities withdrew because they were angry. The cause of this divine ire could be due to a wide variety of human offenses: sin, insult, error, crime, curse, and so on. Although intentionality is occasionally mentioned, it played a rather small role in the overall scheme of things because the divine response was always the same: anger followed by abandonment. So in the end, it really didn’t matter whether one intentionally or unintentionally exasperated the gods and goddesses.— Cursed Are You!, page 226

Missing the forest for the trees

Yet we would misread the nature of the Christian mission according to Acts were we to think only of the individual “heroes” of the story as the icons who best figure forth the missional identity of the church (e.g., Peter, Stephen, and Paul). Though Acts obviously focuses much attention on these characters, the modern individualism that has long ground the lenses of our interpretive perception can all too easily blind us to the fundamental importance of the communities and established networks that finally make sense of the main characters lives in the first place.—World Upside Down, page 252 n. 210

The cost of a secret

A secret in its simplest form is merely information. However, it is keeping this information hidden that gives control to the enemy. The enemy of our souls uses secrets to destroy us from the inside out. Secrets of any kind can lead to the physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences all too familiar in our society. Sins of commission or omission, family secrets, secret thoughts, and even feelings can quickly attach to shame, fear, lack of value, and a myriad of other barnacle-like emotions, slowing us down and causing loss.—What’s Your Secret? pages 24-25

<idle musing>
But it's really nothing. Just a little thing. Nobody needs to know about it. After all, everybody's doing it. It will just go away if I ignore it.

You've heard that before, haven't you? The problem is, they are all lies. If it's big enough to keep secret, it's big enough to bring out into the light for healing and cleansing...
</idle musing>

So what's changed?

Children in antiquity had little status and significance, especially outside the Jewish world. although Jews valued children as real human beings who should be cared for, in Greco-Roman culture and law children were not persons but possessions, without legal rights, and were often victims of abortion, infanticide, exposure, and other forms of mistreatment that Jews, and then Christians, condemned. Even Jews, however, did not equate children with adults but ascribed to them a subordinate status and significance. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean world children were most often seen as immature, intellectually weak, and of far less significance and status than adults.— The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant, page 107

<idle musing>
So what has changed in 2000 years? Not a whole lot, I would say...
</idle musing>

Thursday's thought

People are perfectly willing to go along with God as long as God will be good and conform to their pattern.—A.W. Tozer, Voice of a Prophet, page 144

Why use a participle?

In other words, the net result of choosing a participle over a finite verb is to have the main verbal action of the clause receive primary attention. Had two finite verbs been used, attention would have been equally split between the two. In this case, judgments about the importance of one action relative to the other would have been based on content and context.—Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament, page 248.

<idle musing>
In case you hadn't noticed, I reading Steve Runge's book again. I started rereading it a while back, but then got sidetracked on reading a whole bushel of linguistics books. I'm still reading some—right now Analyzing Grammar, but decided to return to Steve's book again. Good stuff. Highly recommended. Food for thought on every page.
</idle musing>

Quick, get a guardian angel!

When the deities depart, bad things happen. Every ancient Near Easterner knew this regardless of the time period or culture. An Old Assyrian Lamaštu text from Kaneš (ca. 1920–1840) describes why the demoness is able to target someone: 18a-na be-el la2 i-li-im 19i-ša-ru-um 20ate2-še2-er ‘She heads directly toward the person without a deity’ A Sumerian inim inim ma dingir udug-ḫul-kam ‘incantation against an evil demon’ states that the demon šul dingir nu-tuku gaba rig8-ga ‘confronts the youth who has not acquired a deity’. Without the protection of the divine realm, all sorts of hostile beings could attack an unsuspecting individual.— Cursed Are You!, page 225

<idle musing>
Yep. And we still think that, why else would be be so huge on guardian angels and "spirit guides" (or whatever you want to call them)?

The first step in a curse was to either get the person's personal deity (^dLamma) to abandon them or to get a more powerful deity to endorse your curse. Once the person's personal deity was neutralized, you could do whatever you wanted to them; they were helpless.

But you don't see that stuff in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, do you? What happened? Why not? Think about it and take a shot at it in the comments.
</idle musing>

Roman government

The system of control employed by the imperial government was in its general lines the same as that invented by the republic—to maintain the ascendency of the wealthier classes. As before, the constitutions of the cities were so arranged as to give the control to the rich, and any attempts to upset this arrangement were severely checked. Left-wing politicians found themselves relegated to the islands. If the assembly proved too active its meetings were suspended. Above all the formation of clubs which might organize the voting power of the lower orders was strictly supervised and often prohibited.—Jones, The Greek City, 134 as quoted in World Upside Down, pages 248-249 n. 180

<idle musing>
The more things change...you know the rest. Reminds me of The Who's "Won't be Fooled Again." Except we are. Always.
</idle musing>

New book

We're starting to excerpt from a "new" book today—What’s Your Secret? I hope your enjoy it.

We may think that we are keeping a secret, but the truth is that the secret is actually keeping us. What we thought we controlled, slowly and subtly grows.—What’s Your Secret? page 21

<idle musing>
Yep. It will eat away at us until it consumes us...and those around us, too. And that's the saddest part; we don't just destroy ourselves, but we destroy those around us as well. We need to bring things into the light—as much as we are scared to death to do it, it is the only way to freedom. Let's see how the book handles this in the coming days.
</idle musing>

A different measure

The task of a witness is to speak courageously in word and deed, testifying to the truth of God and prophesying against all falsehood that distorts and parodies divine truth. Witnesses offer testimony to the vision of God given them in the hope that others will repent from error and turn to the truth, but their success is measured, not by the quantity of their converts, but by the steadfastness of their testimony.— The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant, page 104

The burning bush

The bush was just a scrub thorn bush, and I imagine there were millions of them there. Maybe there were hundreds of thousands of them scattered over the broad face of the wilderness, and they did not amount to anything. The flame, however, transfigured this particular bush until it became the most famous bush in all of history. However, its glory was not on its own but was derived from the indwelling fire. It took on a glow, a glory, and it has held that glory all down these years.

Men talk about the burning bush; artists paint the burning bush; we preach about he burning bush. Why? Because it was a great bush? No, because it was a great fire in the bush.—A.W. Tozer, Voice of a Prophet, page 128

Love that participle

The participle is used much more widely and diversely in Greek than in English. It is the workhorse of the Greek verbal system, with participles being used for more actions than would be acceptable in English. This mismatch in usage has significantly impacted the participle’s grammatical description. Remember, our goal is to understand the Greek usage first, and only then should we worry about translation. The participle is one of those areas where it is imperative to think about Greek as Greek.—Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament, page 243 (emphasis original)

Say what?

Mytho-poetics is what those who think they can think, think those whom they think cannot think, do in place of thought.—JoAnn Scurlock in Creation and Chaos, page 265, n 50

It's all interrelated

[Here is] a helpful analogy between linguists and medical doctors. The human body is a very complex system. Each part can affect the others in various ways, and a single symptom (e.g. a fever) can have several different underlying causes. Similarly, the grammar of a language is a very complex system. Just as the doctor looks for the diagnosis which will best account for the various symptoms, so the linguist tries to find the best “diagnosis” of the data, i.e. the hypothesis about the underlying patterns of the grammar that best accounts for the observable facts.—Analyzing Grammar, page 60

<idle musing>
And you can easily misdiagnose in both cases! So take heart, language students! At least in the case of grammar, you usually don't kill someone if you misdiagnose—although I once had a person try to conjugate a Latin noun and I almost died : )
</idle musing>

Is it ever complicated...

Curses cause disease. An Akkadian incantation against sorcery makes the following observation: u2-ša-aṣ-bit-an-ni GIG-su lim-nu ša2 ṣi-bit ma-mit ‘She (the kaššaptu) has imposed on me her evil disease caused by the attack of a curse’. Other texts also show that diseases caused by supernatural agents, which strictly speaking cannot be killed, are readily managed with maledictions. The idea here is to separate and then dismiss both the disease and the supernatural agents to the correct place and make sure that they stay there.... The use of a peg (Sum., gag, line 197) is instructive. According to lines 207/208, this is the vector that will carry the disease into the earth. One suspects that in order to achieve this outcome the peg was nailed into the ground at the conclusion of the ritual.

Due to the verbal shift from the second person (207/208) to the first person (209–10), we may additionally speculate that the closing curse was uttered as the incantation specialist pounded the peg into the earth. Such an act as this would constitute the formal transferral of the disease demon into the ground but not necessarily its departure from the created world. The malediction “May you leave!” still depends on the cooperation of the “great gods” to coerce the diʾiu disease to depart. The reference to KI as the underworld would make an infinite amount of sense because disease demons cannot die. Even so, they can be expelled to the Netherworld, which is of course equivalent to “death” for these supernatural beings. It still remains that, in order for these hostile forces to get there, they must be disengaged from the victim, attached to a vector, and finally dispatched to a place where they will be restricted so that they can no longer do harm. Separation is consequently a necessary intermediate state that must be fully achieved before the harmful powers can even be sent to the underworld.— Cursed Are You!, pages 216-17

<idle musing>
Wow. Talk about complicated. No wonder Jesus said that the truth would set you free! He takes care of all that because he is Lord of all (to borrow from the other book I'm excerpting from, World Upside Down).
</idle musing>

Define sin

If the concept of “sin” means an awareness that there are dire problems in the world that need addressing, or that human beings are complex entities with competing and frequently injurious desires, then—other than a few naves—it would probably be hard to find people who were not aware of sin.—World Upside Down, page 247 n. 165

Participation in Christ

At the same time, it is imperative that we be clear that participation in Christ (or in his death) is not a vague, purely “spiritual” term. New covenantal, participatory love for God and neighbor manifests itself in concrete practices, some of which we have already considered in general terms. It is also worth remembering at this point the poignant words of Augustine: “Anyone who thinks they have understood the divine scriptures, or any part of them [such as texts about atonement], but cannot with this understanding increase in the twofold love of God and neighbor has not yet understood them.”— The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant, page 76

It's the life we live

To respond to the Sermon is not to respond to an ethical vision. To respond is to respond to Jesus. The proper response is to declare who he is by the way we live.— Sermon on the Mount, page 277

<idle musing>
That's the final excerpt from the book. I hope you enjoyed it—maybe even enough to read the whole thing : )
</idle musing>

Keep the bugs out!

Some people think holiness is something you get and that you take out with you and carefully guard it lest you lose it. Holiness is nothing else than the holy God dwelling in a human being’s heart. The heart will be holy because God is there, and God is holy. The bush had no purity of its own; and if the fire went out of the bush, as it probably did after God had given His demonstration to Moses, the bugs soon came back.—A.W. Tozer, Voice of a Prophet, page 127

<idle musing>
I love that description. We are holy because of Christ in us. To the degree that Christ is allowed to shine through us, the bugs have to flee. But as soon as we think the holiness is our own, the bugs start to devour us. What a great picture that is—especially to a gardener like myself.
</idle musing>

Not a lot there

The curses that we have in Hebrew from ancient Palestine do not attest to the complex genre of curses that we find in many civilizations. There is no practice such as the Greek and Roman defixio or binding curse, with its attendant manipulation of material or dolls (also attested in Assyrian and Egyptian sources), or the long and complex curses found in Greek magical papyri, or Christian Coptic texts. But words denoting ‘blessing’ and ‘curse’ in Hebrew are a recurring feature, and even though the curse did not develop for many centuries into a sophisticated system (and even then perhaps under cross-cultural influence), that does not mean that it or blessing did not have great force and significance for the people of the time. Indeed, the long exposition of blessing and curses in some texts (e.g., Dt 27–28 and 5Q14) is indicative of the importance placed upon them.— The Semantics of Blessing and Cursing in Ancient Hebrew pages 4–5

<idle musing>
I just finished reading the entire book. It was a very interesting read. I'll be posting more on it soon (I hope). He dealt with the whole issue of words having innate power—he even went into the history of where the idea came from. Good stuff. I've got another article coming via ILL that he referenced; once it arrives, I'll post from it. All very enlightening...
</idle musing>