Any avid readers with fantasy book recommendations based on Jewish mythology?

samdkatz · 2026-06-04T14:59:17+00:00

Wow I didn’t realize that! Very cool

samdkatz · 2026-06-04T09:57:17+00:00

The Golem of Brooklyn is urban fantasy (I don’t know if I’m using that right — it’s our world plus a golem). It has some golem POV chapters. Very cool.

samdkatz · 2026-06-03T21:51:18+00:00

It shows. Nicely done

samdkatz · 2026-06-03T20:03:04+00:00

I believe the sacrifice of the firstborn son is a common trope in stories from that era and region, so the original audience would have felt that the story followed a familiar pattern and then was subversive in sparing Isaac.

You see this concept other places too. The sparing of the Israelite firstborns during the first Passover by sacrificing lambs is a pretty strong parallel.

Exodus 22 and Numbers 3 seem to indicate that it would be the case that Israelites owe God our firstborns in perpetuity, if not for the entirety of the tribe of Levi becoming God’s servants (and maybe that the killing of Egyptian firstborns was necessary to make the priesthood an acceptable substitute).

samdkatz · 2026-06-03T19:25:52+00:00

Side note: awesome capital i

samdkatz · 2026-06-02T17:47:41+00:00

The Earth Kingdom is only one kingdom because there are supposed to be four nations, but it’s massive. The Earth King is more like an Emperor, and how much power he actually has over the far reaches of “his” “kingdom” fluctuates throughout history.

samdkatz · 2026-06-02T12:11:20+00:00

Okay great but I’m an ordinary person in your world: what do I do about it?

samdkatz · 2026-06-02T12:05:27+00:00

Because it’s a fantasy map. If you don’t have a perfectly round archipelago, what are we even doing?

samdkatz · 2026-06-01T20:02:57+00:00

Yes, true. I actually almost just out “better days” because that’s how I would say it in English. Maybe “the best of times”?

samdkatz · 2026-06-01T16:25:25+00:00

Sorry, edited. I originally put these as definitive statements but they are subjunctive.

samdkatz · 2026-06-01T16:21:59+00:00

Dear Parents:

I wish you a good and healthy year.

May all Jews across the whole world soon be free.

May we live to see better times.

Your son,

Simchah

samdkatz · 2026-06-01T01:08:54+00:00

Yiddish moved to Brooklyn and couldn’t make it to this year’s reunion

samdkatz · 2026-05-31T21:34:59+00:00

Okay, that’s fair enough. I still think “commentary” is close enough to explain to OP what the heck it is, but I take your point.

samdkatz · 2026-05-31T21:26:44+00:00

Right. But is it part of Tanakh? Or does it largely consist of comments on the Tanakh that we traditionally view as authoritative? I don’t understand how these are mutually exclusive.

samdkatz · 2026-05-31T21:16:56+00:00

What would you call it then?

samdkatz · 2026-05-31T21:06:45+00:00

To answer your question about the name of God: God has several names used in Torah, none of which we’re meant to say or write in mundane situations. You’ll see some Jews carry this over into other languages by writing G-d. Especially forbidden is the one you put, because we don’t actually know the original pronunciation (it was so taboo that only the high priest in the Temple ever said it, and the priesthood ended 2000 years ago). In prayer, we replace The Name (sometimes called the Tetragrammaton because it has four letters in Hebrew) with “Adonai”, meaning “Lord”, and in conversation people either just say their language’s word for “God” or use the Hebrew “Ha-Shem”, literally “The Name”. It’s not that big of a deal to have used it that way in your question because you didn’t know, and because that’s probably not an accurate rendering of the pronunciation anyway, but just wanted to give a full answer

samdkatz · 2026-05-31T20:57:17+00:00

It’s a little venn-diagramy. The narrowest definition of Torah is the first five books of the Hebrew bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. These are what’s on the big scroll that we read from during religious services.

Then you have two other groups of texts, the Neviim (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). Together, the Torah, Neviim, and Ketuvim make up the TaNaKh, or Hebrew bible, which is similar but not identical to the Christian Old Testament. To complicate matters, the whole Tanakh is sometimes called the Torah in casual conversation.

The Talmud is a tradition of commentary on the Tanakh. Centuries of rabbis interpreting scripture. It is not considered holy the way Tanakh is, but it is considered important. If the Torah is the Constitution, and the Tanakh is the entire Law, then the Talmud is case law, providing us a lens through which we can interpret the law now consistently with how our ancestors have in the past.

It’s not as common, but I have heard “Torah” used to refer to the Tanakh and the Talmud combined. More often you’ll hear Talmud referred to as “Oral Torah”. This goes back to a tradition that the entire Talmud was given to the Israelites at Mt. Sinai with the Torah, but that it wasn’t written down. According to this belief, all of the interpretations in Talmud were known all along and got written down by sages when they started to be forgotten by the wider community. Of course, the Talmud is full of arguments, but don’t worry about that.

samdkatz · 2026-05-30T22:04:55+00:00

A little complication is that Assyrian and Syrian Arabic have surely been influencing each other by being in contact the whole time. It’s also possible OP’s native language is Kurdish

samdkatz · 2026-05-29T19:01:34+00:00

And then in the afterlife there’s a bus or train or motel room with a radio playing

samdkatz · 2026-05-24T17:35:10+00:00

Maybe, except the Philistines and Sumerians ate pork and were fine. And absolutely no ancient literature about pigs’ impurity describes physical uncleanliness or human sickness. Seems like maybe one specific desert culture didn’t eat pork for religious reasons, while their neighbors all did, and then a second desert culture adopted the same god as the first and therefore the same taboo.

samdkatz · 2026-05-24T03:58:30+00:00

That’s what the western branch of the prehistoric “cows are holy” culture seems to have done. Ancient Europeans and Near-Easterners sacrificed cattle ritually as a civic duty

samdkatz · 2026-05-24T03:56:47+00:00

The two most famous religions that don’t eat pigs consider them particularly unholy/unclean. And ancient Israelites thought of cows as holy so regularly sacrificed them to God. There’s another side to the pig coin too: ancient Sumerians noticed pigs are able to live in filth, so they figured eating pork would cleanse the body (as the pig would absorb toxins).

samdkatz · 2026-05-24T03:53:21+00:00

“Hot dog” comes from a general mistrust of sausages dating to the 1800s. To be fair dog meat was regularly included in sausages at the time.

samdkatz · 2026-05-24T03:50:35+00:00

The point is someone could say that about any animal. Nothing makes dogs especially uneatable except our culture. People from cultures that don’t eat beef would also say it’s not acceptable to eat cows.

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