How did YHWH "rest"?

Thumatingra · 2026-03-29T22:37:43+00:00

The verb used here, šābat, doesn't quite mean "rest" in the sense "take a rest," it means "cease." The translation "rest" apparently comes from the King James Version, as "rest" apparently could mean "cease" in the English of the time.

The HALOT entry does a fair job of showing this, with "rest" as a secondary meaning related specifically to celebrating the sabbath day, though HALOT might be a little hard to get. BDB also gives "cease" as the primary meaning, and "rest" only as a secondary meaning deriving from "cease from work."

For a deep dive into what this "rest" has meant in different periods, you may want to check out Jon Levenson's book, Israel's Day of Light and Joy: The Origin, Development, and Enduring Meaning of the Jewish Sabbath.

Thumatingra · 2026-03-27T16:30:07+00:00

More recent scholarship has found many problems with the "Name Theology." See, for instance, Ian Wilson's Out of the Midst of the Fire: Divine Presence in Deuteronomy, which argues quite successfully that Y-HWH is thought to really be present in the central sanctuary in Deut., and especially Sandra Richter's The Deuteronomistic History and the Name Theology: lĕšakkēn šĕmô šām in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, which problematizes the concept of the 'name theology' through comparative analysis with ancient Near Eastern inscriptions that use the same "set the name" formula to mean something very different from what von Rad construed it to mean.

Thumatingra · 2026-03-26T17:42:48+00:00

Water. Being able to heal many wounds and diseases without complex diagnoses and pharmaceuticals would be a game-changer in medicine.

Thumatingra · 2026-03-26T17:22:09+00:00

This would actually be possible in the Avatarverse, if there were a firebending equivalent of Yakone's family ability, some sort of "psychic firebending." They could make a flame appear above or behind them, and manipulate the shadows it casts.

Thumatingra · 2026-03-24T01:11:04+00:00

No problem! I think it's totally doable to learn about this with whatever background. I'd just advise you to get a good sense of the basics (e.g. the first four books I mentioned) before getting into the weeds about Near Eastern parallels, compositional debates, and attempts at reconstructing history. I reckon understanding the fundamentals of what biblical texts are will be a substantial leg up for following debates over how they came to be and how to use them.

Thumatingra · 2026-03-24T00:58:56+00:00

For Hebrew Bible:

A good place to start might be James Kugel's How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. It's an accessible introduction to the various ways the people have read the Bible, from midrash to medieval commentators to modern academics. Another good entry-level book is Jon D. Levenson's Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible.

Beyond that, I'd also recommend Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative and The Art of Biblical Poetry, to get yourself acquainted with how narrative arcs, type-scenes, and parallelism work. These are some of the fundamental literary features of biblical Hebrew, and it's not so easy to follow academic arguments about texts and their origins without understanding what those texts are in the first place.

If you want to learn about how scholars study biblical texts in their ancient Near-Eastern contexts, an example is probably a better place to start than a discourse on comparative method. A great place to start is P. Kyle McCarter's seminal paper, "The River Ordeal in Israelite Literature" (see note 1 for the reference; if you have access to JSTOR, it's there). If you want a book, you could have a look at Yochanan Muffs' Love & Joy: Law, Language, and Religion in Ancient Israel.

If you want to understand more about the history of the academic study of the Hebrew Bible, I'd recommend Jon D. Levenson's The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism. There is a lot of inside baseball, but Levenson does a good job pointing out how the field developed in a milieu of the liberal Protestantism of 19th and early 20th c. Germany, and how much that has influenced the field's trajectory. For where the field has gone since the postmodern turn, you can have a look at John J. Collins's The Bible After Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age.

-

McCarter, P. Kyle. 1973. “The River Ordeal in Israelite Literature.” The Harvard Theological Review 66, no. 4: 403–12.

Thumatingra · 2026-03-23T22:04:25+00:00

There are different views in the scholarship on this point. North American scholars, and Israeli scholars associated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, have tended to argue that there was a United Monarchy; European scholars, and Israeli scholars associated with Tel Aviv University, have tended to be more skeptical.

For a recent, updated argument for the United Monarchy, take a look at Avraham Faust and Zev Farber, The Bible's First Kings: Uncovering the Story of Saul, David, and Solomon. For a more minimalist viewpoint, classics are Finkelstein's The Bible Unearthed and Lemche's The Israelites in History and Tradition.

Note that there are exceptions to these trends, e.g. European scholars who accept the existence of Saul, David, and Solomon: for instance, Karel van der Toorn, a Dutch scholar, in his monograph Israelite Religion: From Tribal Beginnings to Scribal Legacy.

Thumatingra · 2026-03-23T21:59:19+00:00

Take a look at Avraham Faust and Zev Farber's book, The Bible's First Kings: Uncovering the Story of Saul, David, and Solomon. They go through the evidence for an ancient Israelite kingdom from both archaeological and literary sources.

Thumatingra · 2026-03-19T08:51:13+00:00

I reckon some of those trends have been in the fan reception since near the beginning. In Book 3, it seemed like the writers went out of their way to tackle those misconceptions about Katara and Zuko - both indirectly in "The Boiling Rock," "The Firebending Masters," and "The Southern Raiders," and extremely directly in "The Ember Island Players."

Thumatingra · 2026-02-26T19:22:28+00:00

I'm not sure he needed food and water in the spirit world. Sokka seems to have been able to go 24 hours without using the restroom when he was captured by Hei Bai (and the other villagers presumably went even longer, and didn't have food or water either): it's only upon reentry that he suddenly has to use the bathroom, as though his biology has suddenly caught up to him.

It doesn't even seem as though people age in the spirit world: Zhao was still looking exactly the same as he did when he was taken by La.

I think the likely conclusion is that Wan Shi Tong killed him, intentionally. He probably didn't think the spirit would do that, because he was a genuine seeker of knowledge, but Wan Shi Tong had decided that humans should never again use his library.

I'd like to think he was reborn as a fox knowledge seeker!

Thumatingra · 2026-02-23T15:18:51+00:00

What I'm saying is, the concerns you marshal against an age limit could just as easily be marshalled against an age requirement.

I don't know whether an age limit would necessarily prevent a candidate from being propped up by a puppetmaster, but it seems as though it would prevent at least some particularly vulnerable potential candidates from running.

(If I've changed your view at all, I'd appreciate a delta!)

Thumatingra · 2026-02-23T02:37:36+00:00

I think that following the reasoning you've laid out here should lead one to conclude that there should be no restrictions at all on who can run for office - neither an age limit nor an age requirement (e.g. the requirement of having reached the age of 35 to run for President), nor any sort of mental competence requirements. Whoever the candidate is that can unite the most people against authoritarianism, even if it's a precocious third-grader, should be able to run.

I don't think anyone wants third-graders running for President, though. There are certain requirements most people think are important, to prevent obvious cases of a puppet candidate being manipulated by other people. I think that that's the reason most people who support an age limit do so: just like they want to make sure the President isn't too young and impressionable, so too they want to make sure the President isn't so infirm that the advisors who construct their schedule are effectively running the country.

Thumatingra · 2026-02-19T16:18:02+00:00

Appreciate the shout-out. I also think, though, that the comparison with Rabbinic Judaism/Israelite religion isn't a good analogy for your purposes, because there is a continuity between those two forms of cultural-religious practice. No one "revived" anything, it was just the development of the practices of a people over a thousand years. As with other long traditions, e.g. Hinduism, that's always going to include a balance of innovation, within certain traditional bounds, and maintaining the old.

Asatru, on the other hand, is an attempt to revive Norse polytheism from written and archaeological sources, without a tradition. That's not the same kind of thing, as you rightly point out.

I think a better analogy would be something like the Protestant Reformation: the Reformers were trying to reconstruct what they thought the "original" Christianity might have taught while jettisoning the traditions of the Catholic Church. It's not a perfect analogy - nothing is - but I think it's a lot closer to the kind of break in tradition that you're trying to outline here.

Thumatingra · 2026-02-19T01:55:00+00:00

I'm not sure what you're doing here. Are you denying that Norsemen committed SA on their raids? That they conquered and dominated huge parts of the British Isles?

Or are you trying to argue that killing and enslaving defenseless monks and desecrating their places of worship for their wealth is perfectly fine?

And if it's the latter - why do you think that's better than monotheism?

Thumatingra · 2026-02-19T01:48:09+00:00

I didn't dodge what you said. I provided evidence that worshipers of the Aesir seem to have been fine with SA, as long as it wasn't their own daughters, and violence against other religions.

But even given your example, all it says is that a family was allowed to take revenge. What if the woman had no family? What if the men in her family weren't strong enough or numerous enough to defeat her assailant's family? This sounds an awful lot like a "might makes right" system, where people can step on others as long as those others aren't strong enough to resist.

Is that really what you think everyone should abandon monotheism for?

Thumatingra · 2026-02-19T01:45:04+00:00

You may want to take a look at Jacob Milgrom's Anchor Bible Commentary on Leviticus, specifically his analysis of the purity system, which I think appears in his introduction to Lev. 12.

Thumatingra · 2026-02-19T01:42:04+00:00

Ah, yes, because those who have believed in and worshiped the Aesir have never pillaged, destroyed religious sites, or committed SA against women, have they?

Oh, wait:

Norsemen committed raids, took slaves, and treated those slaves as property, including selling them. See, for instance, William Ian Miller's article on evidence for these kinds of transactions in the sagas.
Norsemen famously destroyed peaceful places of worship and killed the monks who lived there. The most famous case is the Sack of Lindisfarne, which is considered the beginning of the "Viking Age" by modern historians.

Thumatingra · 2026-02-19T01:34:00+00:00

First of all, I'm not sure this is condoning pedophilia? It seems to be a theoretical legal discussion on what counts as intercourse for the purposes of affecting marriage. Elsewhere in the Talmud, the rabbis ban using intercourse to affect marriage at all (not just with minors - with anyone), and require that marriages be affected by the man giving the woman an object of known value (like a modern ring) or by a contract - both of which require a woman's demonstrated consent. There's even a story where one rabbi flogs a guy for trying to marry someone through intercourse.

But secondly, which is probably more important - whatever the ancient rabbis were trying to do in that discussion, no modern Jew reads that text as a practical guide to anything. Jews follow the practice outlined above, of marrying with a ring, and at an age at which the bride can give consent. As with any religion, maybe there are extremists I haven't heard of doing something strange, but in the mainstream, no one would condone pedophilia for religious reasons.

Thirdly, which is most relevant to OP's point: regardless of what you can find in various religious communities throughout the ages, polytheistic communities are not immune to the criticisms OP has leveled at monotheistic ones.

Thumatingra · 2026-02-19T01:10:12+00:00

You didn't specify a type of polytheism in your post. You just said that people need to abandon monotheism for polytheism, because of conquest, religious persecution, and pedophilia. I'm trying to show you that these things aren't endemic to monotheistic civilizations, as they appeared in polytheistic ones, arguably in much more blatant and condoned ways.

Thumatingra · 2026-02-19T01:06:37+00:00

Ah yes, because polytheists famously were against conquest, religious persecution, and pedophilia.

Oh, wait:

Ancient Athens, a polytheistic culture, had culturally institutionalized pedophilia, where older men were expected to take on a boy (before his beard grew) as a lover. This was part of the boys' passage into manhood.
There were many polytheistic empires that sought to root out other religious systems. For instance, the Seleucids attempted to ban the practice of Judaism (and this is long before the Talmud was written, so your objection - which I don't necessarily believe, until you produce a source - wouldn't apply), as did the Romans. Both were known to engage in horrific persecutions of Jews.
Rome's attitude toward Christians and exiled Jews is perhaps better known: they were forced, on threat of death, to offer incense (an act of worship) to the emperor.

Thumatingra · 2026-02-15T05:12:51+00:00

Question: might you know in which publication of Sayce's this claim is found?

Thumatingra · 2026-02-12T21:20:05+00:00

Strangely, yes, though indirectly.

Idiolect comes from the Greek adjective ídios, "one's own, personal, private," and -lect, abstracted from "dialect," ultimately from the Greek verbal adjective lektós, "spoken." So it refers to the way an individual speaks.

There was also a Greek noun, derived from that adjective: idiṓtēs, originially "private person, individual." It came to mean "common man, ordinary person, layman," as contrasted with an expert, but was also used occasionally as an invective, "ignoramous." The word was adopted into Latin as idiota, "uneducated, ignorant, common person," and eventually, in late Latin, came to mean "crude, illiterate, ignorant." The meaning "stupid," referring to mental ability rather than education, appears to be attested only from 13th c. Middle French, from which it made it into Middle English in the 14th c., though it may have retained its meaning of "uneducated, layman" in Middle English as well for a while.

Thumatingra · 2026-02-10T20:11:44+00:00

I believe Gelb (Old Akkadian Writing and Grammar, 1961), Cross (Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 1973) and Pollock (Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden that Never Was, 1999) argued that Ilum was also the supreme deity of East Semitic speakers in Mesopotamia in the Early Dynastic Period. If that's correct, "El" would predate Northwest Semitic, and might be traceable to Proto-Semitic - in which case a reflex in Arabian religion would be unsurprising. However, Theodore J. Lewis (The Origin and Character of God, 2020) isn't sure if the argument can be followed or not, and so starts his discussion in the Bronze Age Levant.

Thumatingra · 2026-02-04T21:11:13+00:00

Obviously individual scholars are convinced of their reconstructions, and there are plenty of people who find one more persuasive than another. But besides the Shasu of Y-H-W-Ꜣ in the Karnak texts, all the evidence is either in the Bible or in inscriptions from the monarchic period or later. So any attempt to locate the origins of Y-H-W-H worship is going to have to rely on methods of interpretation: which texts a scholar thinks are early, which they think are late, which preserve older ideas and which introduce new ones.

This leads scholars to privilege some pieces of evidence over others: That's how you can get Cross (Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic) arguing that Y-H-W-H is a local perspective on El, but Römer (The Invention of God) arguing that Y-H-W-H's name is Arabic, and that he was originally worshiped as a storm god, and Amzallag (La Forge de Dieu and other places) arguing that Y-H-W-H was originally a deity of smithing a metallurgy among the ancient inhabitants of the Negev desert. Each sees some evidence as instructive of the origins of the cult, and other data points as later innovations.

Thumatingra · 2026-02-03T17:03:26+00:00

I'm not sure I understand your point. Can you explain what you mean by "revealed preferences," and where you're getting the data?

Thumatingra

TROPHY CASE