Philip Davies on Jewish knowledge of the Bible

From an essay by Philip Davies:

. . . A recent National Biblical Literacy Survey in the UK carried out by the Centre for Biblical Literacy Communication at St John’s College, Durham (http://www.dur.ac.uk/codec/about/cblc/) found that as few as 10 per cent of people understood the main characters in the Bible and their relevance. Figures such as Abraham and Joseph were unknown: hardly anyone could name even a few of the Ten Commandments. . . .

I know a lot of secular Jews . . . . Very few of them can demonstrate the degree of ignorance of the Bible that Christians do. For them, being Jewish means knowing the Bible, even if not accepting its religious authority. Secular Jews are nearly all proud to be Jewish and know that their Jewish identity is defined by the Bible. There is no equivalent commitment among Christians because they share no ethnic identity. . . .

(HT:  James Davila)

FTC to enforce disclosure in blogging

Practical ethics requires that a blogger disclose when he has received a gift or compensation from a firm that he subsequently blogs about.

For example, consider the case of a blogger recommending a book that he received as a gift from a publisher or an author; or a blogger selling a book and receives a kickback from an online bookseller; or a blogger promoting Bible software in exchange for a chance to receive a luxury leather Bible.  Such bloggers are ethically required to disclose the gift, kickback, or lottery chance.  To do otherwise would be to deceive the blogger’s readership, who otherwise would expect a disinterested opinion.

These ethical guidelines will soon be legally enforced in the US by the Federal Trade Commission.  The FTC’s guidelines are available here and it is expected to become final this summer.

Deborah Yao of the AP writes:  “It would be the first time the FTC tries to patrol systematically what bloggers say and do online. The common practice of posting a graphical ad or a link to an online retailer — and getting commissions for any sales from it — would be enough to trigger oversight.”

(By the way, this blog does not receive compensation or commissions from any posts that it makes.  This blog does not receive free books or other gifts that it subsequently blogs about.)

Codex Sinaiticus

From Arts Beat  (quick summary – much of the Codex Sinaiticus published at codexsinaiticus.org):

The pages of a Bible more than 1,600 years old have been published on the Internet, The Associated Press reported. Nearly 800 pages from the Codex Sinaiticus, a Christian Bible dating to the 4th century, written in Greek and containing the oldest complete copy of the New Testament, were posted Monday at the Web site codexsinaiticus.org, coinciding with a conference on the book at the British Library in London. The original manuscript, containing about 1,460 pages written on prepared animal skin, was discovered in 1844 at the Monastery of St. Catherine, a Greek Orthodox shrine in the Sinai Peninsula, by the German Bible scholar Constantine Tischendorf. Its pages were split among Britain, Egypt, Russia and Germany. Scholars from the four nations worked on the restoration of the Bible, which also includes substantial portions of the Old Testament and Apocrypha. Forty-three pages of the manuscript are at the University Library in Leipzig, Germany, and six fragments are at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg.

The economic meltdown – should you be concerned?

By the brilliant Jorge Chan:

Leo Strauss notes online

From Hanoch Was Not:

The University of Chicago is publishing all of Leo Strauss’ surviving lecture notes online at the Leo Strauss Center. A bonus is that they will be including any surviving audio of his talks that they can dig up. You can sample one of his classes on Plato's Meno here. . . .

As Hanoch Was Not notes, the project is just beginning.

It’s Time to Learn from Frogs

From Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column:

Some of the first eerie signs of a potential health catastrophe came as bizarre deformities in water animals, often in their sexual organs.

Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians began to sprout extra legs. In heavily polluted Lake Apopka, one of the largest lakes in Florida, male alligators developed stunted genitals.

In the Potomac watershed near Washington, male smallmouth bass have rapidly transformed into “intersex fish” that display female characteristics. This was discovered only in 2003, but the latest survey found that more than 80 percent of the male smallmouth bass in the Potomac are producing eggs.

Now scientists are connecting the dots with evidence of increasing abnormalities among humans, particularly large increases in numbers of genital deformities among newborn boys. For example, up to 7 percent of boys are now born with undescended testicles, although this often self-corrects over time. And up to 1 percent of boys in the United States are now born with hypospadias, in which the urethra exits the penis improperly, such as at the base rather than the tip.

Apprehension is growing among many scientists that the cause of all this may be a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors. They are very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products. Some also enter the water supply when estrogens in human urine — compounded when a woman is on the pill — pass through sewage systems and then through water treatment plants.

These endocrine disruptors have complex effects on the human body, particularly during fetal development of males.

“A lot of these compounds act as weak estrogen, so that’s why developing males — whether smallmouth bass or humans — tend to be more sensitive,” said Robert Lawrence, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s scary, very scary.”

The scientific case is still far from proven, as chemical companies emphasize, and the uncertainties for humans are vast. But there is accumulating evidence that male sperm count is dropping and that genital abnormalities in newborn boys are increasing. Some studies show correlations between these abnormalities and mothers who have greater exposure to these chemicals during pregnancy, through everything from hair spray to the water they drink.

Endocrine disruptors also affect females. It is now well established that DES, a synthetic estrogen given to many pregnant women from the 1930s to the 1970s to prevent miscarriages, caused abnormalities in the children. They seemed fine at birth, but girls born to those women have been more likely to develop misshaped sexual organs and cancer.

There is also some evidence from both humans and monkeys that endometriosis, a gynecological disorder, is linked to exposure to endocrine disruptors. Researchers also suspect that the disruptors can cause early puberty in girls.

A rush of new research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans. For example, mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults.

Among some scientists, there is real apprehension at the new findings — nothing is more terrifying than reading The Journal of Pediatric Urology — but there hasn’t been much public notice or government action.

This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.

“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is moving toward screening endocrine disrupting chemicals, but at a glacial pace. For now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed.

“We should be concerned,” said Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network. “This can influence brain development, sperm counts or susceptibility to cancer, even where the animal at birth seems perfectly normal.”

The most notorious example of water pollution occurred in 1969, when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire and helped shock America into adopting the Clean Water Act. Since then, complacency has taken hold.

Those deformed frogs and intersex fish — not to mention the growing number of deformities in newborn boys — should jolt us once again.

Museum exhibits as a commercial endeavor

I think that this criticism is well-posed (I saw this show in Los Angeles, and found it to be pure hucksterism):

Among people with a professional interest in the arts, Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, which opens today at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, will merely deepen the tarnish on the reputation of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Although FAMSF curator Renee Dreyfus has swapped out four objects presented at other venues for four of her own choosing, the show in bulk comes here prepackaged by National Geographic and Arts and Exhibitions International, a subsidiary of corporate impresario AEG Worldwide, which also owns the San Francisco Examiner.

Critics have hammered every art museum that has hosted Tutankhamun. (A parallel exhibition, Tutankhamun, the Golden King and the Great Pharaohs - same size, same sources, same organizers - opens today at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis.) But here, as elsewhere - except Dallas, where attendance fell about 40 percent short of projections - a vast audience probably will eat it up, even at $27.50 a head for general admission … the enveloping stagecraft will encourage no one to reflect on the reasons why these things fascinate.

A large dedicated shop connected with the show incites visitors to spend as little time as possible outside the fog of consumer desire. The commercial spirit of the affair shows even in the presence of large-type labels at the top of each case, to inform viewers of what they can only glimpse through a crowd….

Unfortunately, hard times have lent traction to the bottom-line thinking behind Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs. With museums across the world - even the Met - trimming staff and programs, and sometimes taking artworks to the auction block to raise cash, the sate-the-gate approach of the Fine Arts Museums' John Buchanan … looks almost prudent….

But what will we not be seeing that we might have in the de Young's special exhibitions galleries during the nine-month span of Tutankhamun? What projects did FAMSF curators have to postpone or scrap altogether for the sake of the costly Tut gamble?…

Note that in New York, a new space has opened in Times Square that is purely commercial for the purpose of putting on these “blockbuster shows” – including Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs:

… Two years after The [New York] Times left its longtime headquarters on West 43rd Street in Manhattan, the basement of that building is being converted into a 60,000-square-foot space for large-scale exhibitions of art and historical artifacts. Called Discovery Times Square Exposition, it will open June 24 with two shows, Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition and Lucy’s Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia, featuring the 3.2-million-year-old fossil remains of the female hominid known as Lucy. Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, an expanded version of the show that has been touring North America since 2005, is to open next spring….

The enterprise is a partnership between Running Subway — a New York production company whose projects have included the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC — and the Discovery Channel…. Running Subway has taken out a 20-year lease and spent “tens of millions of dollars” on construction since spring 2008, Mr. Sanna said…. Shows will be installed in two basement rooms, each with 30-foot ceilings, and a cafe and gift shop will also be underground.

Shows like Titanic and Tutankhamun, which have been blockbuster hits, are often organized by for-profit companies instead of museums, and in some cases they have bypassed New York because no appropriate spot could be found, organizers say.

“We’ve always wanted to bring Titanic to New York, but there wasn’t really a suitable venue until this time,” said Chris Davino, chief executive of Premier Exhibitions, whose other shows include Bodies: The Exhibition. Presented in museums, science centers and casinos elsewhere around the world, in New York Bodies has been mounted in converted retail space at South Street Seaport.

The new Times Square space will also allow exhibitors to avoid the restrictions of museums. The King Tut exhibition was turned down by many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, because its organizers wanted to charge additional admission fees. Each show at the Discovery Times Square Exposition will cost $19.50 for adults and $17.50 for children….

This brings to mind a snarky quote I read long ago from Gore Vidal to the effect that, in America, education was now a branch of the entertainment industry.

Why I don’t like most study Bibles

I became interested in contemporary study Bibles because of my interest in pedagogy.  I wondered if a study Bible could be used as a self-study tool or as a resource used by a teacher.

Here, I make a distinction between a merely annotated Bible (e.g, the celebrated [RSV] New Oxford Annotated Bible – which explains difficult passages and includes summary of the pericopes, but makes for a reading text – not a teaching or study text) and a true “study Bible” intended to serve as a full teaching presentation of the Bible with commentary as well as annotations.

My conclusion is that all contemporary study Bibles I have seen are poor for teaching without substantial – often very substantial – additional materials.  They may or may not be useful as reference works, but by and large they are poor for pedagogy.

Most contemporary study Bibles suffer from the following pedagogic problems: 

(a) They attempt diversity in their selection of annotators and essayists, but if the Bible is read chapter-by-chapter, the reader has no chance to directly compare views on a single book (or even a single topic).  In this way, they are far weaker than a typical Norton Critical Edition volume which will typically include an anthology of essays which directly debate each other, providing a plurality of views that enriches the student.   In contrast, contemporary study Bibles are both wildly uneven (because of the different commentators) and also present opinions, often contentious opinions, as fact.

(b)  The physical dimensions of a study Bible necessarily limit the depth of commentary.  This is not necessarily a disadvantage for a lightly annotated Bible, but it makes for a reading text – not a teaching or study text.  (To be fair, the classic editions of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, as the title clearly indicates, claimed to be “annotated” and not “study” texts.)  In this way, I regard the Oxford Jewish Study Bible as slightly stronger than its Oxford cousins The Catholic Study Bible (2nd ed.) or the contemporary (ecumenical) New Oxford Annotated Bible (3rd Augmented ed.) – since it the JSB covers only the Hebrew Bible, it covers about 3/5ths of the material in roughly the same total dimensions (and, most promisingly, has room for much more essay material). But the JSB still suffers from the many of shortfalls of its cousins.

(c)  Evangelical study Bibles, in particular, are largely produced by a single company, the Livingstone Corporation, which has most recent apologetic study Bibles (including almost all of the recent study Bibles published by Zondervan, Tyndale, Broadman and Holman, and Thomas Nelson).  This has imposed a level of uniform mediocrity of these volumes (although they are often magnificent specimens of modern computer typesetting).

(d)  With a few significant exceptions (scholarly commentaries, most Orthodox Jewish study volumes, and the NET New Testament diglot), most study volumes include no or only superficial engagement with original language materials. 

(e)  Similarly, with a few significant exceptions, most text critical issues are avoided.  In this way, most study Bibles are significantly inferior to a typical single-volume annotated teaching text for Shakespeare.

(f)  Even “academic” study Bibles often include substantial apologetic material.  The New Interpreter’s Study Bible is, perhaps, among major “academic” study Bibles the worst offender, but it creeps into all of them.  While this is is not necessarily a bad thing, it should be noted and the student should be given a perspective of different views.

What I wish is that we could see a study Bible – in multiple volumes if necessary – where different commentators could directly engage with and debate each other, in the fashion of the Rabbinic Bible.  Such works are common in English literature (e.g., the Cambridge Companions, the Norton Critical Editions, Bloom’s Modern [or Classic] Critical Views, among many, many others).  Some of these are only mediocre, but the best of these are outstanding.

Moreover, anthologies of different opinions they can easily be found for classic interpretation of Scripture (e.g., the Rabbinic Bible, the Catena Aurea).  I fail to see why it is so difficult to produce a study Bible with contemporary opinion focused on pedagogical principles.

I have seen a (mostly successful) attempt to do this with a study edition of the Jewish prayer book; where ten different commentaries (from a full spectrum of opinions) are included with full engagement of the Hebrew.  A completely different style which also succeeds is the Norton Critical Edition Writings of Saint Paul (first edition, second edition) which includes a wide array of extra-Pauline materials as well as ancient, 19th century, and modern criticism.

For the time being, I am unable to recommend a self-study volume for serious engagement with the Bible.  This strikes me as odd given that many excellent examples exist for secular literature.

Japanese Gregorian Chant

Psalm 141 in Japanese chanted in Gregorian style, by the monks of Trinity Benedictine Monastery, Fujimi.

Thursday’s tragic death of a great musician

On Thursday, one of the great musicians of our time died.  No, I am not thinking of Michael Jackson. 

I am thinking of the amazing Ali Akbar Khan, who I was fortunate enough to see many, many times, who was named as a “national treasure” by the Indian government.  He was a great classical North Indian composer and performer.  He was the leading virtuoso of the lutelike sarod, and he often performed together with his brother Ravi Shankar.

Here is a brief obituary.

Here are links to some albums: 

Pre-Dawn to Sunrise Ragas (1967)

Morning and Evening Ragas (1955)

The Emperor of Sarod, vol 1 (1970)

This is a man who touched my soul and intellect through his music.  I am sorry he is gone, but happy that we have such a rich legacy of memories and recordings.

Correction:  Khan died Thursday – last week (June 18)