Wednesday, August 31, 2016

The role of a prophet

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Evidence includes Gen 20:7, in which Abraham is called a prophet just prior to being asked to intercede and Jer 27:18, in which Jeremiah spe...
Tuesday, August 30, 2016

It sure is different!

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For the most part the speeches take the form of prose prayer, even in the exceptional case linked to ritual—the story of David and the censu...
Friday, August 26, 2016

But it doesn't always work

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Muršili’s plague prayers attest to Hittite beliefs that the gods need not respond positively to every ritual. These prayers recount the king...
Thursday, August 25, 2016

Close enough for horseshoes...and rituals

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Many persuasive analogies are intended to transfer an attribute from one entity to another using the supernatural means of similarity. Here,...
Wednesday, August 24, 2016

It's where it came from that counts

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The supernatural rites rather than a special supernatural quality of the human agents (ritual practitioners) give the namburbis’ causative s...
Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Speaking of ANE backgrounds...

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The previous post spoke of the ancient Near Eastern backgrounds to the prosperity gospel—tongue firmly in cheek, of course. But, there is a...

Name it and claim it, Akkadian style

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This process did not depend on the āšipu ’s possessing a pre-existing or essential connection to the divine realm, but rather the āšipu ’s...
Monday, August 22, 2016

Flattery will get you...

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Not only the fact of praise, but the content of the praise is significant. Any selection of specific attributes over others uses the techniq...
Friday, August 19, 2016

It's real

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[Stefan] Maul ( Zukunftsbewãltigung : Eine Untersuchung altorientalischen Denkens anhand der babylonisch-assyrischen Lõserituale [Namrubi...
Tuesday, August 16, 2016

So what's a guy supposed to do?

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One particular Akkadian term for intercession, abbūti ṣabātu (“to act in a fatherly way”), illustrates the Mesopotamian view that a prim...
Saturday, August 13, 2016

Give me more!

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While we seek to master the plethora of manuscripts, we also savor their very unmanageability. The textual critic’s heart yearns for even mo...
Thursday, August 11, 2016

A subtle difference

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The Mesopotamian and Anatolian texts show the intercessors’ use of ritual and sometimes magic with the gods’ explicit aid to protect individ...
Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Get the wording right

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When action-based agency is rooted in speech, words operate more or less as things rather than (or in addition to) being carriers of meaning...

It ain't inerrant!

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A perfect text-critical procedure is not at hand. Like all historical inquiry, we see the past indirectly through our (always fallible) eval...
Monday, August 08, 2016

Blended spaces

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Sørensen argues that in magical rituals, participants (including ritual performers) view themselves as interacting with elements and rules o...
Thursday, August 04, 2016

But how does it work?

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We're starting a new book today: Forestalling Doom "Apotropaic Intercession" in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East ...
Wednesday, August 03, 2016

Will I live longer if I only smoke 3 packs a day?

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The HMOs talked about so-called preventive medicine, but is such a superficial way that the message had virtually no impact. Their dietary r...
Tuesday, August 02, 2016

Help a brother out!

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OK, this one has been sitting in my inbox for almost 2 months now! I need to let people know about a chance to help out a fellow blogger. Ri...

ad fontes!

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We talk endlessly about shifting payment responsibilities among different groups—private sectore or public sector, employer or employee—as i...
Monday, August 01, 2016

Follow the money...

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Can you imagine the health gains in the U.S. population if the half-trillion dollars in annal Big Pharma revenue were allocated to educating...