Painting Fakes

Finkelstein and Silberman suggest that the glories of the Israelite kingdom of David and Solomon are greatly exaggerated.  They say the archaeological evidence points to a small territory with a tiny population of limited literacy, and that the united kingdom of Israel and Judah is unlikely to be historical. They may or may not be right.  I'm hardly qualified to judge.  However, even if the biblical accounts are scrupulously accurate, they were of little help to the Jews who wrote the books of the Apocrypha .  For them these kingdoms were so long ago, and so far from the realities of their lives, that all they provided was a memory of past greatness and a dream of a possible future. The big problem they faced in their day was this: How do you survive a dominant and often hostile empire?  For most of Israel's ancient history, including the period of the later kings and prophets and the period of the Apocrypha, the Middle East was dominated ...

Esther is one of those books with one foot in the Old Testament and the other in the Apocrypha - others include Daniel and Ezra.  This is because the book exists in two different forms; the Hebrew version included in the Masoretic Text and a Greek version in the Septuagint that includes an extra 107 verses, plus some subtle but significant variations.  When Jerome translated it into Latin at the end of the 4th Century CE, he used the Hebrew version as his primary source, but included the extra Greek verses at the end as a kind of appendix.  When the Reformers separated out the apocryphal books from the Old Testament, the extra verses of Esther went with them.  I'm very grateful to the translators of the NRSV for putting the two parts of the Greek edition back together and providing a translation of the whole Greek text.  Chronologically, this book belongs with Tobit and Judith as a story about the period after the exile.  Its likely date of ...

Amid much hoo-har over the past few days, recycled Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been reported as announcing his government will scrap the carbon tax.   Of course these reports are greatly exaggerated, possibly with Rudd's tacit approval.  Rudd and his supporters will do no such thing.  When the Gillard Government introduced the carbon tax in 2011 (with operation beginning in July 2012) they did so with a two stage plan.  From July 2012 to July 2015 industries which emit carbon would have to pay a fixed price (a carbon tax) per tonne of carbon emitted - starting at $23 and climbing with inflation.  Then from July 2015 this scheme would be transformed into a market based emissions trading scheme similar to (and linked with) the one in Europe, in which permits to emit are sold through a market mechanism to the highest bidder.  What Rudd has announced is that his government will start the second phase a year earlier, in July 2014. This gives us a g...

Not many books in the world are genuine "must reads" but surely Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning is one of them*.  How could it be that I bought this book for two dollars from a throw-out table at my local shopping centre?  How is that none of my teachers, lecturers, pastors or mentors has ever recommended it to me? Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who died in 1997 at the age of 92.  He is famous as the founder and leading light of the psychiatric technique he called "logotherapy", and as a high profile holocaust survivor.  He was interred in Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic in 1942 with his wife and extended family, transferred to Auschwitz in late 1944 and finished the war in a camp affiliated with Dachau.  Man's Search for Meaning is a collection of three brief essays.  The first and longest, Experiences in a Concentration Camp, describes his time in Auschwitz and Dachau as a means of illustrating his psychologi...

I have to confess to being completely over hearing about the Australian Labor Party's "faceless men".  The phrase is trotted out by journalists, egged on by Coalition politicians, every time there is a change of Labor leader - and there have been a few of those recently! The notion of "Labor's faceless men" originated with Daily Telegraph journalist Alan Reid in 1963.  Reid was a disillusioned Labor man, on the DLP side of the 1955 party split.  In 1963, during the lead-up to the Federal election which saw a Robert Menzies-led Coalition government returned for yet another term, Reid and photographer Vladimir Paral captured images of Labor parliamentary leader Arthur Calwell and deputy Gough Whitlam cooling their heels outside Canberra's Kingston Hotel.  Inside, the 36 members of Labor's National Conference - six representatives from each State - apparently discussed the party's position on the location of a US military base on Australian...

So, to continue my journey thought the Apocrypha , here's a look at the Book of Judith. Just like Tobit , Judith is best seen as a work of historical fiction, except that in this case it is even less historical and more fiction.  It is described as taking place during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar as emperor of Assyria, although historians are unanimous that he was emperor of Babylonia.  Yet the Israelites have already returned from exile and are ruled by their High Priest, something that that did not happen until the rise of the Persian Empire a century later.  Furthermore, the main action happens around the walls of the Israeli city of Bethulia, the location of which is, shall we say, "uncertain".  And this is all before we even get to the actual story! The story itself is an exciting and amusing tale of deception, a late successor of the kind of holy trickery practiced by the patriarchs and Moses.  You can imagine its origin as a fireside tale, with vo...

My search for a decent Christian apologetic has had mixed results so far.  I have read many fascinating books, as well as some disappointments, and seen some very silly claims made in the name of the Christian faith.  The search has recently brought me to Dinesh D'Souza's  What's So Great About Christianity, the lack of a question mark providing a most eloquent summary of the author's views. I was nervous before I picked up this book.  D'Souza is an unlikely person to write something I would enjoy.  Born in Mumbai, India, he moved to the USA as an exchange student in 1978 and stayed to become a professional right-wing nutter.  He worked as an advisor in the Reagan White House, and has written books with titles like What's So Great About America (also without question mark), The Enemy At Home: The cultural left and its responsibility for 9/11 , and most recently The Source of Obama's Rage in which he suggests that Obama's foreign policy is driven b...