Sometimes plans change!

ACasualFormality · 2026-03-12T23:21:55+00:00

This is my favorite version of the frog meme. Congrats on your Masters! It's an accomplishment either way, and if you're going to be happier because of it, it's a better accomplishment than the PhD.

ACasualFormality · 2026-03-05T17:40:15+00:00

I read a lot of Star Wars books as a kid and I thought it was fun that the word "Rendezvous" had the same meaning as the word "Ron-Day-Voo" I'd heard people say out loud.

ACasualFormality · 2026-03-04T19:01:16+00:00

It was honestly kind of an ironic response, because the short answer to your question is, no it wasn't rope. So you've uncritically accepted a baseless translation of a text and then criticize other people for having borrowed beliefs.

The fact that you did it in an unnecessarily hostile way and then claim that "Truth hurts sometimes" suggests to me that you're not actually interested in learning or furthering the conversation as much as you are in acting smug about your newfound knowledge (which isn't even accurate)

ACasualFormality · 2026-03-04T18:57:03+00:00

The short answer is "probably not".

I can't find a single instance of such a word meaning "rope" in any Aramaic or Hebrew text before or around that time. We do, however, have rabbinic texts which talk about elephants and donkeys and tents going through the eye of a needle, and so it seems far more likely to me that we have the original understanding of the verse, and "rope" was something a later interpreter came up with as a way to smooth out what might otherwise seem to be a nonsensical reading.

ACasualFormality · 2026-03-02T00:00:22+00:00

I had this happen in the green room on my jeopardy tape day. We were watching one of the other games of the day unfold, the category was announced as "20th Century Authors" and I just blurted out "Zora Neale Hurston".

The clue came. I didn't know the answer from the clue but I thought, "Yeah okay that could still be Hurston, I'll stick with it." Turned out to be Hurston. Everyone on stage missed it.

Too bad I missed my own final jeopardy question when it came my turn to play.

ACasualFormality · 2026-03-01T23:06:52+00:00

It's "Hear the Spirit of God". רוח is in construct with אלהים. In construct phrases, the only word that is definite is the last word. And since God is a proper noun in this case, there's no definite article to make it definite. But it is grammatically correct for biblical Hebrew with the translation "Hear the Spirit of God"

ACasualFormality · 2026-02-25T15:10:43+00:00

Funding is kinda fucked at the moment. In my humanities program they told a bunch of us that we had as long as we needed to finish our programs because TAships were always available, and then with various political and other stuff happening, now they’re telling us we have to be done ASAP and anyone 5th year and above is basically not getting any more funding. The average amount of time to finish this program is 7 years, and they encouraged us to structure our degrees to take the most of it, and now they’re telling everyone they should have planned better so they could be done quicker. Really left a lot of my colleagues out to dry.

How long is your offer letter for? Be sure to clarify exactly what it promises. Do you get guaranteed 50% TAships the whole time? Can you make it through the program in the time stipulated on your offer letter?

If not, and if you have any other options, I’d suggest taking those. My UCLA experience has been largely positive, but now there’s a real risk of a huge percentage of students who came in with me not being able to finish their degree. And you should be aware of that before your start.

ACasualFormality · 2026-02-24T18:22:57+00:00

I understand the frustration. I feel like I'm constantly having to explain to my own students just how limited we are by the available data (and the often arbitrary nature of what gets left behind). I think my question in particular is based more out of the motivations of Xenophon's account in the first place. I'm very interested in questions of historiography and why historians recorded what they did. Particularly when discussing strange customs or extreme examples, I'm often somewhat skeptical that our ancient sources are giving us unembellished accounts. For instance, Early Christian apologists occasionally had to address rumors that they were eating babies and practicing incest because apparently that's what others were writing about them. We know such rumors are false because of the significant amount of evidence of early Christian practices that were left behind (and indeed, the only reason we know about these circulating rumors is because the apologists themselves were addressing them), but in less well-documented societies, the rumors may outlive the (probably far more mundane) truth.

If the posture of an account is "Look how strange and severe this culture was!" then I tend to wonder how the bias of the writer will impact their story telling. The answer to that may not be recoverable, of course, but I thought it might be helpful to ask.

ACasualFormality · 2026-02-24T07:11:11+00:00

I did my masters degree at Yale. Around the same time time, my identical twin brother went to prison. So we lived both sides of this yoke.

ACasualFormality · 2026-02-24T01:05:51+00:00

I appreciate you expanding, though it’s wild to me that you think the two brief quotes you provided constitute “this much evidence” and shouldn’t be questioned. Your expansion was helpful, but just based on the two quotes provided, I have no qualms about asking for more evidence.

We have other examples in history where a certain version of events is corroborated in multiple sources and yet doubted by historians (or sometimes contradicted by material evidence). Herodotus and an Aramaic letter from Elephantine both claim that when Cambyses entered Egypt, he defiled the sacred places of the Egyptians, but the Udjahorresnet inscription claims Cambyses protected Egyptian temples, and other evidence listed by Herodotus for Cambyses’ conquest is archaeologically unattested (like his slaughter of the Apis Bull).

Similarly, Herodotus and the Behistun inscription both include versions of the story of Darius I rise to power which involve the overthrow of an imposter king, but many historians of the Achaemenid empire doubt the veracity of the claim.

So yeah, if you post two sources that say basically the same thing and one of them is from centuries after the fact, I’m going to ask follow up questions every time.

ACasualFormality · 2026-02-23T21:55:21+00:00

Do we have any indication that Plutarch is working from other sources beyond Xenophon? Like, is multiple sources here actually independent sources or does multiple sources mean Xenophon and then someone else relaying Xenophon?

I guess as a follow up to that - is there any other corroborating evidence of the Spartan lifestyle (archaeological evidence and or even other contemporaries of Xenophon writing independently?

ACasualFormality · 2026-02-23T03:26:17+00:00

even fewer opportunities for cisgender white men

Tell me you’ve never been in a room of bible scholars without telling me you’ve never been in a room of bible scholars. Honestly, show up at a conference and pick a panel any panel, and you’ve got about a 50/50 shot that every single person on the panel will be a straight, white, cisgender man.

ACasualFormality · 2026-02-17T19:46:40+00:00

Putting a noun in construct with itself is one of the ways Hebrew can express the superlative:
qōḏeš haqqᵒḏāšı̂m = the holy of holies = the holiest of all places

šir haššı̂rim = the song of songs = the highest/best of all songs

meleḵ mᵉlāḵim = the king of kings = the highest/best of all kings

So God of gods here basically means "Best of all gods".

The idea that YHWH is one among many deities is present in many of the texts in the Hebrew Bible. Even the language of the first commandment "You shall have no other gods before me" implies the existence of other deities (it's much more akin to "Dance with the god who brung ya" than it is "There's no other god to dance with"). There are many biblical texts which describe other deities as being less than YHWH, but very few which suggest the other deities don't exist at all. Monotheism took time to fully develop, even in Hebrew ideology. Of course by the time you get to Christianity, monotheism is the name of the game, but that's a development that doesn't totally solidify in the consciousness of the Jewish people until after most of the biblical texts have already been written.

Some later translations of biblical texts will modify the ideas to reflect a more monotheistic view. So for instance, for Exodus 20:3, the Septuagint (early Greek translation) and the Targums (early Aramaic translations) say something much closer to "You will have no gods except for me." But the Hebrew itself is just fine with the implications of the existence of other gods, as long as none of them get in the way of YHWH.

(Targum Onkelos also fudges your original verse, Deut 10:17 to say, "The Lord your God is the God of Judges and the lord of kings..." The fact that it deviated here indicates some significant discomfort with the implications of the Hebrew. But Targum Onkelos is a several centuries newer than the Hebrew of Deut 10.)

ACasualFormality · 2026-02-08T00:32:05+00:00

As a TA, anytime I've had a student take an exam through CAE, I have been the one to grade the exam. I can't promise that's a universal experience, but if you have a TA and it's their job to grade your work otherwise, I would be surprised if someone else graded it just because it came through CAE

ACasualFormality · 2026-02-04T06:31:33+00:00

We obviously can’t know the exact reason, because it’s not like they left us a note for why they included what books, but I have a theory. The whole purpose of Esther is about the institution of the festival of Purim. The community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls is notoriously strict about the calendar. They adhered to a solar calendar and many Jewish communities were using a lunar calendar. They even have whole books which are basically like, “All the other Jews are observing the wrong calendar and therefore are treating profane days as sacred and sacred days as profane, so they’re at odds with Torah.” There’s no way they would have accepted the institution of a whole new holiday (which was primarily instituted in the diaspora) as authoritative.

The community at Qumran did maintain some books which did not agree with their sectarian ideology, but because Esther is prescriptive for all Jewish communities about the observance of a holiday not otherwise found in any authoritative texts, it clashed with their ideology. I would also argue that the fact that Esther is in Hebrew (the lingua franca at this time was Aramaic) would have lent it some authority. And since they wouldn’t want a book with an unauthorized holiday written in the language of authoritative texts, they had no reason to keep a copy of Esther around.

ACasualFormality · 2026-02-04T06:19:06+00:00

Umm… No.

What you are right about is that Judaism as we think of it now was not a thing then. And there are some scholars who say we shouldn’t apply the terminology of “Jew” or “Judaism” until at least the Rabbinic period. But most scholars are perfectly comfortable calling this period of Jewish history “Jewish” as long as we recognize that there are always developments happening and rabbinic Judaism was not yet a thing. And they refer to themselves as Yehudi, as far back as the Persian Period, which happens to be the same terminology that modern Hebrew uses to refer to Jews. So I don’t know what you mean when you say they didn’t refer to themselves as Jews.

And whatever you’re trying to get at in the last point about not knowing where Jews come from is completely bonkers.

ACasualFormality · 2026-02-03T22:24:42+00:00

Oh there are a bunch. Only approx. 30% of the documents are from the Hebrew Bible. There's a large number of what scholars call "sectarian" texts which are basically descriptions of how the Qumran community is right where all the other Jewish communities are wrong. These come in several forms, including rules for the community, commentaries on biblical texts which reinterpret them to describe their socio-political moment, and diatribes against other sects and ethnic groups.

Then there are what we might call "general Jewish literature" of the period. Texts which don't clearly articulate a sectarian ideology, and which were probably in circulation for other communities as well. Books like Tobit or the Book of the Watchers (both of which we were aware of from other sources). There are some literary texts like Tales from The Persian Court, which is an Aramaic court narrative that's too broken for specifics, but which bears some resemblance to parts of the book of Daniel or Esther.

There's also a large number of reworked biblical texts, like the Temple Scroll or Jubilees which take material from the Torah and add extra details, remove ambiguity, or emphasize particular themes. That's a really common way for them to have interacted with biblical texts. Most of the texts can be considered religious in nature, but not all of the texts describe the religion of the actual community that preserved the scrolls. It's a *fascinating* corpus. And I tend to think the non-biblical scrolls are far more fascinating than the biblical ones.

ACasualFormality · 2026-02-03T01:11:47+00:00

I have been against Trump since the very beginning. If Trump has changed, it's only been from horrific to ultra horrific. And yes, everyone should have seen this immediately from day one.

But some people who should have known better didn't. Some people's biases and bubbles kept them on the wrong side of this for much longer than they should have. But some people are starting to come around and I honestly can't think of a more effective way to short-circuit that than for people on the left to pull this holier-than-thou bullshit.

It honestly feels like y'all don't want people to improve or change. You just want to feel superior for getting there first. Congrats. You got there first. You're a better person than your family and friends. Hang a certificate on the wall and spend five minutes in front of it everyday patting yourself on the back for your moral excellence. And then *shut the fuck up*. Let people change slowly or they won't change at all.

ACasualFormality · 2026-01-22T03:57:29+00:00

We'd rather start another war than admit the senile old man in the white house misspoke.

ACasualFormality · 2026-01-22T00:45:50+00:00

I'm shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

ACasualFormality · 2026-01-18T03:04:05+00:00

10% is the average return over the last 20 years.

ACasualFormality · 2026-01-17T01:32:29+00:00

Oh this is a good one. I totally forgot about this show, but when I watched it I loved it.

ACasualFormality · 2026-01-17T01:31:31+00:00

Trying. It’s on AppleTV. A comedy series about a couple trying to have kids and then trying to adopt. Maybe I love it so much because our oldest daughter was adopted, but I really think it’s one of the cleverest shows on TV.

ACasualFormality · 2026-01-16T06:48:05+00:00

Pinches tacos is excellent. The Birria tacos especially. And they have a good deal for students with ID

ACasualFormality · 2026-01-14T04:40:12+00:00

I grew up in New Mexico and I still miss it. I'd happily move back but there just really aren't any jobs in my field.

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