On Leisure

Alan Jacobs: “I think we’re living in the aftermath of a slow-motion cultural and moral apocalypse. I really do. I’m trying to keep some beautiful things alive for the people who are willing to encounter them and maybe even to love them.”

AKMA: “I want to note that almost everyone in today’s neoliberal economy has been squeezed for productivity like a lemon wedge until there’s little left but macerated pulp and skin. ... Everyone ought to benefit from the leisure, the slack time, that insulates workers from the parching, fraying, abrasive effects of unrelenting demands to extract more from our lives, all to the profit of the unimaginably wealthy. ... [O]ne way we can push back on this matrix of extraction can involve recognising and encouraging a clerical vocation of leisure (for the benefit of our cures, not for self-interest, though some will of course abuse that opportunity). ... Demand that real academic communities offer their teachers the time to ruminate, not just pump the human equivalent of AI slop into print month after month. ...”

Arthur C. Brooks in the Atlantic: “Leisure, in other words, is far from the modern notion of just chillin’. It is a serious business, and if you don’t do leisure well, you will never find life’s full meaning. Properly understood, leisure is the work you do for yourself as a person without an economic compulsion driving you. For Pieper, this work of leisure—no contradiction, in his view—would not involve such ‘acediac’ activities as scrolling social media and chuckling at memes, getting drunk, or binge-streaming some show. Rather, true leisure would involve philosophical reflection, deep artistic experiences, learning new ideas or skills, spending time in nature, or deepening personal relationships. ... Left to our educational experience and its basic assumptions, many of us naturally oscillate between being Homo economicus and Homo trivialus—in other words, a cycle of laborious slog by day and unproductive, numbing pleasure-pursuits in the evenings and at weekends. This is a culture of unenriching, unrelieved monotony. We have two ways to change this: One is through work; the other is through leisure. For many people, the former is not possible, at least not in the short run. But for everyone, leisure can be customized to make it enlivening, not deadening. How you use your leisure can be made to reflect your values and connect with other people in deeply meaningful ways.”

Great minds think alike.

Early Judaism Video Lectures

Five years ago, the college where I teach responded to the Covid pandemic by radically altering our regular semester schedule. To ensure flexibility in case an outbreak meant we had to switch everything online, our fourteen-week semester was divided into two more intensive seven-week terms, with daily classes but shorter class times to satisfy our Province’s restrictions on in-person meetings. (Chairs also had to be six feet apart, which meant that those of us with larger classes had to teach multiple sections.) Thankfully, we were still able to meet in person, students were obviously glad to be there, and the smaller class sizes and more intensive format helped contribute to the learning experience.

The big challenge for those of us who teach content-heavy courses was making up for lost lecture time. To solve this problem we were encouraged to “flip” our class format by pre-recording lectures and saving face-to-face class time for discussion. I have to say I hated this. The videos took an enormous amount of work, and the quality of what I produced was, I thought, very poor. 

In subsequent years, however, I have found myself returning to the videos I produced for my 300-level introduction to early Judaism course (“Jewish Backgrounds to Early Christianity”), sometimes to remind myself what I said in class and sometimes to require my students to watch specific videos as assigned “readings” when we get behind or to leave more room for discussion in class. 

The first few videos are indeed a wash. I won’t be posting them anywhere! But the quality does improve, the content is, I think, pretty good, and, if you speed up the video to at least 1.5x speed, you can get beyond my stilted delivery. It occurred to me that there might be some value in posting some of them to my YouTube channel and linking to them on this blog. 

I intend to keep this post updated as an index page as I upload more videos:

• Purity and Impurity in Second Temple Judaism - The first video, from about two-thirds of the way through the course, is on the ancient Jewish purity system. As it happens, I originally created a blog post about the video back in 2020. That post has been updated with a link to the YouTube version of the video. As I mention there, anyone interested in the topic should now subscribe to Logan Williams’ and Paul Sloan’s excellent “Jesus and Jewish Law” podcast.

Remembering Carl Conrad

Members of the B-Greek forum have been posting tributes in memory of Carl Conrad, the forum's long-time co-moderator, who passed away on February 20th at the age of 90:

AKMA: "Carl was a mighty man of old of the B-Greek mailing list, back when it was strictly a mailing list, and we all learned much from him — many of us about Greek, but all of us about how to conduct ourselves with grace and patience in a mixed group of international scholars, intermediate and beginning students, autodidact experts, axe-grinding non-experts, and wayfaring strangers. ... I know my colleagues all well enough; I can estimate what they might say, how they’re likely to respond to an argument. I never dared assume I could anticipate what Carl would make of my ideas, not because he was arbitrary or capricious, but because his judgement was so much more richly funded with knowledge of the texts and with the experience of worked through them and taught them so fully and carefully. I'm surrounded by great classicists here [at Oxford], all of them erudite and judicious. And I still think of Carl as my Greek-analytical conscience."

Steve Runge: "His insights regularly filled in gaps, highlighted broader patterns, or shattered ill-formed ideas (including mine), always in the name of deepening our understanding of and appreciation for ancient Greek. I came to rely on his instincts as an early sanity check or corrective for the discourse features I sought to describe. He was one of the loudest voices in my head when I wrote. ... His persistence, curiosity, attention to detail, patience, respect for those with whom he disagreed, incredible memory, and an insatiable thirst to learn indelibly shaped my understanding of what it means to be a scholar."

Randy Leedy: "The unflagging persistence with which he responded to nearly every imaginable question on B-Greek is a tribute to his dedication as a teacher. Those who did not know the forum during its heydey probably can't imagine the workload that his fully engaged participation entailed. And if you knew Carl, you know that his replies were not terse: he regularly expanded the discussion into realms that the questioner had not even been aware of but that were important for adequate perspective to understand the fullest possible answer that Carl wanted to provide. The hours required for such thoughtful interaction with such a large number of discussions must have mounted well beyond 10,000--likely double that--over the years. All free of charge, as a public service, out of his love for the language and its students."

Jonathan Robie: "Carl welcomed me graciously, answered my questions, suggested better ways to go about studying the language, and even putting me in contact with other people who could help. I never felt like he was talking down to me. He was always the consummate teacher, taking the time to understand how I was thinking about something before suggesting other ways that might be more helpful. For me, that was at least as important as his vast knowledge and deep intuitive grasp of the Greek language."

I first encountered Carl when I joined the B-Greek email list (as it was then) as a young seminary student. (I am still embarrassed by my claim to be a "Greek scholar" on a survey Carl conducted in 1997.) A short while later I came across a reference to Carl's unpublished Harvard PhD dissertation from 1964, which seemed like a long time ago, though it is now almost as long since I joined the list!

Carl's "Observations on Ancient Greek Voice" (originally posted to the list in 1997) anticipated a spate of publications on the subject by others in the early 2000's and shaped my own thinking on the topic. His enthusiasm for a living approach to learning ancient Greek served as strong validation for those of us "Little Greeks" moving in that direction.

Gary Anderson on Hebrew as the Language of Jesus

Reviewing the endnotes to Gary Anderson’s impressive history of sin (!), I came across this gem on New Testament scholars, Modern Hebrew and the language of Jesus:

Mishnaic Hebrew, in its limited sense, refers to the Hebrew of the Mishnah itself, a relatively early rabbinic work [ca. 200 CE] …. But when we speak of the dialect of Mishnaic Hebrew, we are talking about the living Hebrew language of the first couple of centuries of the Common Era, in other words, the language of Jesus himself.”

“Scholars vary in their opinions as to how fluent Jesus was in the various languages with which he was familiar (Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek). Most New Testament scholars assume that Aramaic was his mother tongue and that Hebrew was a secondary language. …. Part of the problem is that the best scholarship on the Hebrew of the late Second Temple period is being done at the Hebrew University and is written in modern Hebrew. Only a handful of New Testament scholars could follow this discussion, and I know of none who do. As a result, the case being made for Hebrew as a living language in the first and second centuries CE has gone unnoticed.” 

~ Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 95-6, 215 note 1 (emphasis added)

The book itself is a fascinating analysis of a shift from sin conceived as burden to sin conceived as debt, that ranges across the testaments, through rabbinic literature and Christian Syriac, concluding with a rousing defense of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo? I wager that only a handful of Old Testament scholars could attempt such a feat.

Back to the topic of Hebrew as a living language during the Second Temple period: My posts on Jesus’ mother tongue from 15 years ago (!) are here:

Jesus’ Mother Tongue

Jesus' Mother Tongue Part 2: The Supposed Dominance of Aramaic in First Century Galilee

A Whole Canadian

Some 40 years ago I announced to an auditorium full of students at the American missionary boarding school I was attending that “I am a whole Canadian!” Unlike my three older siblings, who were born in Somalia and carried US passports, I was born in Canada not far from where our Canadian father was raised, and I traveled under a Canadian passport. 

Only later did I learn that US citizenship could not be so easily avoided. Because my American mother spent the first eighteen years of her life in the state of Oregon, I inherited US citizenship automatically. Like it or not I am a dual citizen. I brandish my US passport when I need to enter the United States, and I file US taxes as required by US law, but my political allegiance remains the same as it was for that 10-year-old boy: I am a whole Canadian. 

And so it is with considerable dismay that I watch the US president threaten a (now postponed) trade war intended to wreak havoc on his country’s closest ally under the false pretext of enhancing border security and the false claim of a trade deficit, but with the apparently serious aim of annexing Canada (!).

• On enhancing border security as a pretext: The amount of Fentanyl passing through the Canadian border into the US is a tiny percentage of the total. Trump will not say what changes have to be made for the threat of tariffs to be lifted: “Figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) show the agency [seized 19.5 kilograms](https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/drug-seizure-statistics) of fentanyl at the northern border last year, compared to 9,570 kilograms at the southwestern one.” (Source)
• On a so-called trade deficit: “Trump is fixated on the Canada-U.S. trade deficit, which is largely driven by American demand for cheaper Canadian oil. When oil exports are excluded, the Americans actually have a trade surplus with Canada, according to Canadian government data.” (Source)
• On the economic impact of 25% tariffs: “The Canadian economy is set to face the most severe shock since the COVID-19 pandemic and will probably sink into a recession if a tariff war persists, say top economists.” (Source) 
• On Trump’s desire to make Canada the 51st state: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6633776

It occurs to me that Trump’s bullying might stem from genuine ignorance as well as malice. He may not realize that Canadian identity has historically been formed by its opposition to the United States. Why wouldn’t Canadians want to join the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? An answer from someone who has lived in both countries, as well as Africa, Europe and the Middle East: Let me count the ways. 

There is precedent for Trump’s behaviour—none of it good: In 1866 “a bill to annex Canada was introduced in the U.S. Congress” (Source). Thanks to the aftermath of the American civil war, it never came to a vote. No coincidence that Canadian confederation occurred one year later, in 1867. More recent precedent includes Germany’s annexation of of German-speaking Austria in 1938, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

To my American friends: This isn’t right. Please say something, at least in prayer.

As a Christian, Trump’s threats to my own nation prompt a different sort of reflection:

• What does it mean to love my enemy? 
• What does it mean to affirm that my primary political allegiance is to the one who is “Lord of all” (Acts 10:36; see Phil 3:20)?
• I’ll be honest here: Evangelical American support for first-term Trump was a faith-shaking sucker punch to the gut. What does it say about the Truth I affirm when so many who profess it are so quick to believe lies? How can those who claim to be concerned with character and morality follow someone who cares not a wit for either of these things? … What, then, does it mean for me to treat my misguided co-religionists as brothers and sisters?

On Memorizing the (Whole) Bible

When I read Ruth in Hebrew I can still hear my first Hebrew teacher, Dennis Magary, declaiming the text. In class, when students would ask about a particular construction, Magary would pause for a moment, and then say, “It doesn’t occur.” If nothing else, I thought, that’s a neat teaching trick. None of us could call his bluff! But, John Monson claims in this rollicking podcast, Magary has the whole thing memorized. 

If you want to do the same, take a look at Kim Phillips’s article on medieval Bible memorization techniques: 

The verbatim memorisation of large stretches of the biblical text is almost entirely neglected today. We might do ‘memory verses’, but what about ‘memory chapters’ or ‘memory books’? For medieval Jews and Christians, on the other hand, large-scale scripture memorisation was a vital part of spiritual formation. Could it be that this neglect, perhaps encouraged by the ready access we have to the bible via our phones, means we are missing out on a once-treasured tool for discipleship?

Large-scale text memorisation played a significant part in education and spiritual formation throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. This involved the disciplined training of one’s memory via intricate mnemonic techniques. Memorisation devices and techniques were discussed at length by various classical and medieval authors. This training aimed not at the ability merely to reel off large stretches of text parrot-fashion, but rather to encode a text in one’s memory in such a way that any part of the text could be retrieved at any point, or systematically searched.

Kim recommends beginning with the book of Psalms:

In historian Mary Carruthers’ fascinating study of memory in medieval culture, she notes: ‘The book which Christians, both clergy and educated laity, were sure to know by heart was the Psalms.’ In a recent study of manuscripts created as memory aids by members of the medieval Jewish community in Egypt, I have come to similar conclusions. Among all the biblical texts, the Psalter is the most frequently memorised, and this was not merely the feat of an exceptional minority, but was attained by a range of the Jewish community.

Or take Ellie Wiener’s account of memorizing the entire book of Job in Hebrew in 6 months: 

My routine was as follows: rising early, I would start familiar chapters of Job rolling through my head soon after popping out of bed. As my memorised chapters accumulated, I developed an elaborate system of rotating chapter review, practicing chapters every day until I felt confident to review that block of text every two days, then every three. Eventually, before arriving at Tyndale House to begin the work day, I had already gone over 7–10 chapters in my head. I was becoming a ‘mobile Job,’ able to bring the book with me to the gym, the shower, or the streets of Cambridge.

Then I devoted my first 60–90 minutes of library time to reviewing my most recently learned (and therefore most tenuous) material and adding new verses. My brain’s ability to absorb Hebrew happily increased over time, allowing me to raise my rate of acquisition: initially I added 5–6 new verses per day, and by the end, I was learning 8–10 new verses per day. … After finishing the whole book, I ran through 14 chapters in my head every day, 6 days per week, such that I would complete Job twice per week. With the text now well secured, I review just 7 chapters per day before coming to the library.

Or, if you prefer, be like Paul and memorize the whole Bible in Greek. According to E.P. Sanders,

“Paul had probably memorized the text of the Greek translation of Jewish Scripture. … Christian scholars with whom I have discussed this usually regard massive memorization as being so difficult that it is not worth considering as a possibility. Jewish scholars, however, think that it is not only plausible but probable. Jewish scholars still live in a world in which a good rabbi can quote not only the Bible but many rabbinic passages as well. They are consequently better positioned to understand the ancient world. … We would all understand Paul much better if the words of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures were running through our brains, as they were through his.” - E.P. Sanders, Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought (London: SCM Press, 2016), 73-74.

As a modern analogy, someone in my household observed that any concert pianist will have 10’s of thousands of bars of piano music committed to memory.

Full disclosure: I am not currently engaged in any large-scale memorization project. Baby steps.

Peter Brown and Learning Languages

Interviews with and bios of Peter Brown routinely mention his extraordinary facility with languages ancient and modern. For example:

Thomas D’Evelyn (1988) for the Christian Science Monitor on the occasion of Brown’s award of a MacArthur Genius grant: “Brown learned modern languages - German, French, Italian, and Russian - before Greek. He knew the impact of the Middle Ages on modern man before he knew the classics, which gave him a unique view of his field.”

The Library of Congress (2008) on the occasion of Brown’s award of the Kluge Prize: "As Brown developed linguistic capacity in Arabic, Persian, Syriac, and Turkish, as well as in the major classical and European languages, he reconceived Western history from the sixth to the 11th century as a pan-Mediterranean era.”

Ruby Shao (2017) in The Daily Princetonian: “Every day, he wakes up at 4 a.m. He then studies up to three languages, each for an hour, using books and recordings. Language learning constitutes Brown’s main hobby. He dismissed his familiarity with over 20 languages as ‘not so difficult,’ given the numerous cognates involved. ‘I speak as many as I need for traveling,’ he said.”

Joseph Epstein (2023) reviewing Brown’s memoir: “In Journeys of the Mind he seems always to be off learning another necessary language, contemporary or ancient, for the composition of his own books. After the Latin and Greek he acquired in school, he learned German and subsequently the modern romance languages. Then there was Hebrew, which he learned ‘as a prelude to Syriac.’ He resolves one day to learn Coptic to be able to read Manichaen in manuscript, and eventually does so. In preparation for travel through the Middle East, he acquires Arabic, also Ottoman and modern Turkish. On page 699, in the penultimate sentence of the last page of his book, he reports, ‘I have begun to read in Ge’ez (in Classical Ethiopic) texts that still echo, at a vast distance of time and space, the controversies and ascetic legends of Syria and Egypt of the fifth and sixth centuries, which had trickled down the Nile and Red Sea to Ethiopia, to yet another “micro-Christendom” founded in late antiquity and still surviving in the Horn of Africa.’”

The part of Brown’s 99-chapter autobiography that left the deepest impression on me is his description of how he went about preparing to write his biography of St. Augustine by reading through Augustine’s entire massive oeuvre in Latin:

“First and foremost, these were years of deep reading. I would sit in a large armchair with a board across the arms and read my way through the folio volumes of the works of Augustine published … between 1679 and 1700. I would work my way down those generous pages noting on a piece of paper the page … and the position … of the passages that interested me. … Then, having read through the entire text, I would return to copy into my notes those passages that I had marked. This method of taking notes had a direct effect on the way in which I absorbed the works of Augustine. I hardly ever made a précis of what Augustine wrote. Instead, I went out of my way to copy by hand every passage in the original Latin. By doing this, I aimed to capture, through citations, not only what Augustine said, but, quite as much, how he said it. By taking notes in this way, I found myself catching his tone of voice.” - Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton University Press), 249.

Later in the book, Brown reflects on the difference between this sort of extensive reading and the fluency that it produces, and grammatical analysis:

“Confronted with a class of keen graduate students, mainly in classics and comparative literature, I suddenly realized that I knew the Confessions inside out—but I did so only as a historian, instinctively looking at it for evidence of Augustine’s life and times. I had never expounded it as a masterpiece of Latin prose. I had been like a window cleaner, wiping a pane of glass until I could see through it into the fourth century. Now I was expected to be a chemist, and to analyze the texture of the glass itself. I had to know how to parse each sentence in correct grammatical terms. … I realized that I had read Augustine’s entrancing Latin for so long that I took it for granted.” - Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind, 566.

All very impressive. But what is the point? Brown puts it this way, in a 2024 interview with Nawal Arjini in The New York Review:

“I travel because it always surprises me. Places and monuments, works of art and landscapes are never quite what one imagines them to be. Nor are people. Some of the languages useful for my research abroad are what we call “dead” languages: Latin, Greek, classical Hebrew, Coptic, Ge’ez (Ethiopic), etc. These are keys to entire past civilizations. But even in the modern world, languages are a reminder that all societies have their own surprises. To attempt to read and use languages other than one’s own, even if only a few phrases, is a mark of respect for the otherness of other people. For this reason, I have always encouraged my students of late antiquity to learn not only the classical languages but the languages in which modern scholarship has been conducted, so that they realize that historical research is a worldwide matter, and that it is many centuries old—like a great symphony that has been playing for centuries.”