Dreamer Easy

I have the rampaging thoughts tonight. Parking some of them here, just to get them out of my system.

1. Bullying is not a useful way of opposing racism, sexism, and other bigotry. In particular, social aggression between girls and women - malicious gossip, ridicule, exclusion - is profoundly anti-woman, a byproduct of patriarchy. It should not be confused with, nor is it justified by, honest anger, frustration, assertiveness, disagreement: things which girls and women are taught to suppress, but which are the real tools for dismantling oppression. Bullying will slow and confuse our efforts until online progressives reject it.

2. Why am I not an atheist? I'm a naturalist and a rationalist, so why am I up to my elbows in gods? Is this something to do with how the human brain makes sense of the world through narrative?

3. Dear Mr Dawkins et al, regardless of how much praying I and others may do during takeoff, the Bernoulli Effect is not magic. Please make a note of this.

4. The Ten Commandment Boogie helpfully reminds us that the Bible is "full of incredible tools". Surely you cannot be down-with-the-kids while simultaneously pastiching "Kokomo".

Why Clinic Violence is Obama's Problem

Op-ed calls for the federal US government to revive the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and revive the National Task Force on Violence against Health Care Providers.

"Even if no national anti-choice group directly ordered [Dr Tiller's murderer] to fire that gun, he is a product of a culture that thrives on systematically threatening reproductive health care providers and women who seek abortions."

ETA: Info on Anti‐Choice Violence and Intimidation in the US, including attacks with firearms, bombs, arson, and chemicals, as well as stalking and hundreds and hundreds of threats. It's clear it would be a huge mistake to regard Tiller's murder as an isolated incident.

Plus! Here's a handy refresher on relevant scripture.

I think I've mentioned before the enormous excitement generated when Mesopotamian and Egyptian writings began to be translated, and found to cover some of the same ground as the Hebrew Bible. It must have been staggering to find what appeared to be independent confirmation of at least some of the details of the OT stories. It threw up stumbling blocks as well, though. I've just been wrecking my eyes trying to read the Hebrew characters of Genesis 11:9:

"Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth." (ASV)

This is one of many passages that explains a place name: the city of Babel, as in the Tower of Babel, got its name from the Hebrew word balal, roughly meaning "mix". (If you stare long enough at the passage in Hebrew you'll pick out the city's name and the verb - the fourth and sixth words.) This is witty, and given that Babylon would've been full of people from different cultures speaking different languages (not to mention containing a whacking great ziggurat aimed straight at heaven) it rather suits the place. But finding the city's name in cuneiform would have presented a scholars with a problem: it was bab-ilu, Akkadian for "the gate of the god". (Later, it became bab-ilani, the gate of the gods plural, from whence the Greek Babylon.) So suddenly, after almost a couple of millennia, they would've been faced with a completely different etymology for the name.

But what I'm confused by is why the Septuagint version of the verse doesn't contain the word "Babel". ?!

ETA: With the aid of the Perseus Digital Library and Babelfish, I think the Greek text reads, "Therefore the name of that was called Confusion because the Lord confused their tongues". Don't put money on that, though. (Oh hey, this is where the phrase "the Lord thy God" comes from - kyrios o theos. Cool.)

To mark Pagan Pride Day, I thought I'd share with you the results of my research into sacred prostitution in the Ancient Near East.

There wasn't any.

No, seriously. In the past couple of decades, scholarship has eroded the long unquestioned belief that there were priestess-prostitutes in Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Greece, until there's pretty much nothing left. Herodotus started the whole thing by claiming that all Babylonian women had to shag a stranger as a fund-raiser for the love goddess. Looks like that was just one of a bunch of tales about those whacky non-Greek barbarians which Herodotus repeated. He also said the Babylonians had no doctors and sold brides at auction, which is rubbish. No evidence has turned up for any of it.

Nonetheless, for a long time scholars translated nearly every Mesopotamian term for a priestess as "harlot", etc, whatever the word actually meant. A good example is naditum, which literally means "woman who lies fallow" - a naditum was not allowed to bear children, and lived in a women-only sanctuary. Basically, she was a kind of nun, and yet for years the term was translated as "hierodule" or "sacred prostitute".

Something similar seems to have happened with the term for another kind of priestess, the Canaanite qedesha (male, qadesh), and Mesopotamian qadishtum (the word literally means "sacred" - same root as kaddish). qedeshot and qadeshim are associated with prostitutes in a few places in the Bible, most clearly in the story of Tamar, who disguises herself as a zonah (harlot); Judah buys her services, promising to send her a kid as additional payment. later, Judah's servant tries to find her and asks the locals if they've seen the qedesha... and that's about it for the evidence that a qedesha was a whore¹. In fact, earlier Bible translations didn't render qadesh and qedesha as "sodomite" and "harlot". But later editions translate the words as "whores", "male shrine prostitutes" etc.

Nothing in the cuneiform sources from Canaan or Mesopotamia supports the idea of sacred prostitution. In the Canaanite city of Ugarit, a qadesh was a type of high-ranking priest - there's no mention of his having anything do with sex. Similarly, there's no evidence that sex was part of the job of the Babylonian qadishtum. Moreover, there are mentions of dire results for men who boink a priestess - including losing his voice and having a "scaly penis"!

The one exception is the "sacred marriage", a ritual from one period in Sumerian history in which the king and a priestess, representing the goddess Inanna, had sex. It isn't as exciting as it might sound. It took place just once a year, and since the queen could be a priestess, it didn't even have to be extramarital. Later, the whole thing was replaced by simply putting the statues of god and goddess into a garden together overnight.

The idea of "sacred prostitution" was a lascivious fantasy about sexy foreigners which became received wisdom, in turn giving modern writers licence to indulge in their own fantasies. (There's a corker in Nancy Qualls-Corbett's The sacred prostitute: eternal aspect of the feminine in which a "world-weary" man is quite mercilessly pampered.) IMHO, modern writers looking for a sex-positive setting might do better to look at the real, historical Mesopotamia. It wasn't a free-for-all orgy, nor a feminist utopia - but prostitutes were neither criminals nor sinners. What could contrast more with our own culture's attitudes to women and sex?

(I'll post a more detailed version of this over at ikhet_sekhmet when I get the chance, including all my sources - the two most important are Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World, edited by Daraone and McClure, and In the Wake of the Goddesses by Frymer-Kensky.)

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¹ My favourite explanation is that the servant is embarrassed and pretends he's offering the kid to a priestess for sacrifice. :) That's not just fancy - there's a mention of "sacrificing with qadeshot" in Hosea 4:14.

5 Superpowers From the Bible That Put Marvel and DC to Shame. "Jesus told them they were faithless wusses and the disciples shut up. If that wasn't cool enough, he chewed out the storm, and it shut up, too. That has to be our favorite part, how he's just annoyed by the whole thing, as if being bothered to stop an entire weather systems was equivalent to getting woken up by your girlfriend to go kill a spider in the bathroom."

Nudibranch checking the time

rainbowjehan pwns (so no change there, then).

Review of Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea.

Handy! NSW Food Authority Register of penalty notices.

XKCD on, of all things, fanbullying. Kewl.

ryuuri_chan demonstrates how she draws chibis!

illudiumphosdex demonstrates the mighty phonofiddle!

Dark Phoenix cosplay, Blimey!

Elsie's stunning poem 64 Birds.

In further Bible study news, I've only just clocked that in God's beautiful speech admonishing Job, He has both male and female characteristics:

Does the rain have a father?
Who fathers the drops of dew?
From whose womb comes the ice?
Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
when the waters become hard as stone,
when the surface of the deep is frozen?

(That's the NIV rendering of Job 38:28-30.)

(Those are amongst several images of God as creator and organiser of the cosmos - besides these biological ones, there are references to building, cutting irrigation channels, giving orders, looking after animals, pottery, textiles, and metalwork.)

OK, lemme see. Under "Word of God" in the Anchor Bible Dictionary we get several pages on the Hebrew dabar, "the word of God", meaning: communications from God via speech but also through dreams, visions, and other routes; the creative power of God's words; and the expression of God's will. (I think the latter two are something like the Greek concept of the logos, though it's not mentioned.)

Bit more in a, erm, in a bit.

I've just been listening to a terrific podcast about The Gospel of Mark while doing the washing up. Among many interesting things (the always-entertaining disciples bring the stupid and spend a lot of time panicking), there are references to the Greek word pneuma, "breath", usually translated as "Holy Spirit". For example:

"... right from the beginning in Mark, pneuma, or what's usually translated as Holy Spirit, sacred pneuma, the charged breath, the wind, the sacred essence, is what breathes through this story."

(It's God's breath which brings Adam to life, of course, and synaesthete7 has mentioned the idea of the Bible as theopneustos, God-breathed.)

Long-time readers of this LJ will not be surprised that I thought of a Mesopotamian parallel: the word for the spirits that cause illness is similar to the word for "wind", and those spirits get in through apertures in the house, like a wind coming in. (I read about this quite recently, but do you think I can find the reference? I cannot.) I'm not sure, though, that there are Mesopotamian parallels with the idea of breathing life into someone or something.

Is the idea of God's breath as His agent similar to the idea of God's Word (or indeed, Marduk's word, which can create and destroy)? And are these in turn parallel to the Egyptian idea of hike, roughly "magic", the divine power used by the gods?

I was looking up Martha in the Bible and found Luke 10:38-42. As a spiritual person, I totally get this. (There's a similar Buddhist story, about the herder who's in a panic over his lost sheep - the Buddha quips to his disciples, "Aren't you lucky you don't have any sheep?). As a feminist I'm like WAAGH! If Martha also sits at Jesus' feet, who's going to make his dinner?

ETA: Aha! I can post to LJ if I keep it short!

ETA: Have a look at this very readable essay on Interpretations of Luke 10:38-42.

I've written a brief jekhet_sekhmet entry inspired by a journal article on "Biblical abominations and Sumerian taboos". As always, with anything Biblical, I may have run right off the rails. All comments welcome.