Painting Fakes

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 composition is similar to thei

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 glimpse of the medium term futu

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 psychological ideas an

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 soi

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 voices, dramatic

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 by

There's a kind of post-modern irony in the fact that some of the final images of Julia Gillard as Australian Prime Minister to flood the mass media depict her knitting a toy for the new royal baby.  Why is our feminist heroine doing something so stereotypically feminine?  The rest of the tale, though, has a more classical feel, like a Shakespearean tragedy with its cycle of hubris and retribution.  Many of my feminist friends feel Gillard's treatment over the last few months is a sign of ongoing sexism and misogyny in politics and the media.  There is something in what they say.  "Ditch the witch", the fake menu and (if we reach back to the beginning) Bill Heffernan suggesting she wasn't qualified to lead the country because she didn't have children are all incredibly gendered pieces of abuse.  But when Rudd was deposed three years ago, did anyone say it happened because he is a man? At risk of alienating some good friends I have to say I'm not enti

I've been working on a theory about why elite sportsmen seem to get in trouble so regularly. We've been hearing a bit about this recently.  Australian cricketer  David Warner has two strikes to his name - tweeting angrily at journalists, and punching an opposing player in a pub.  Souths and Queensland Rugby League player Ben Te'o  found himself drunk and in the company of two former team-mates and woman none of them knew.  What happened next is a matter of dispute - did he punch her, or did she injure herself in a drunken meltdown? - but either way the whole situation is completely dumb.   Another Rugby League player, Blake Ferguson , has been charged with sexual assault of a woman in a bar on a Sunday evening while in the company of another former team-mate.  All this in the last month.  A fairly typical month, really. Of course you could blame alcohol, which is involved in all three incidents.  It's a convenient scapegoat, but alcohol doesn't drink itself.

When I write about music, I almost always find myself writing about middle aged men.  My songwriting pantheon includes the holy trinity of Bruce Cockburn, Richard Thompson and Tom Waits, as well as minor deities like Shane Howard, Paul Kelly...I could go on but you get the picture. Now I'm an equal opportunity sort of guy and recently I started to worry that all my musical heroes are men.  Is this a hidden corner of chauvinism in my otherwise PC world?  Of course I could argue that music is very personal and that I found people I could relate to.  I could argue that my choices are purely emotional and nothing to do with gender or power.  But when you claim not to be prejudiced yet consistently favour one group over another, the chances are you are kidding yourself. Of course I could initiate an affirmative action program, and start to review music by women I don't like that much.  On the other hand, I could just tell you about the marvellous Martha Tilston and her latest re

Anyway, enough of this angry politics. I promised you a little while ago that I would write some posts about the Apocrypha , so here is the first. The book of Tobit is the first book in the Christian Apocrypha, and it tells you immediately why most Christian and Jewish authorites give these books less authority than the other parts of Scripture.  Probably written in the second century BCE, it is a kind of literary mash-up - a narrative spiced with extracts from wisdom literature and a couple of lovely pieces of poetry. It's framing story is, I think, best understood as a piece of historical fantasy.  Some scholars think it may combine two stories that were originally unconnected.  We have an angel disguised as a human, a besetting devil, the symbolic use of the number seven, a magic fish and a curious and unexplained dog. Tobit is a faithful Israelite of the tribe of Naphtali, taken captive to Nineveh when the Assyrians invaded the Northern Kingdom in the seventh century. 

Sorry everybody, I'm going to break the rule again and talk about something related to my work.  It's because I'm feeling frustrated.  To put it mildly. In Queensland we have a service called the Tenants' Advice and Advocacy Service (TAAS).  It's a network of little services that provide advice to, and advocate on behalf of, tenants who are in dispute with their landlords.  The service is funded from the interest on tenants bonds held in trust by the Residential Tenancies Authority. In the midst of their cost-cutting frenzy last year, the then Housing Minister Bruce Flegg announced that the program would be discontinued and the funds reallocated to build new public housing.  Flegg and his successor Tim Mander have been unmoved by the outcry that has followed this decision.  Not so the Commonwealth Government, who stepped in with interim funding to keep the services open until the end of June this year.  They even offered another $2.5m to take it up to the end