I have had another very busy week working on my dissertation and following the courses I’m attending.  So, unfortunately, I have not had time to do any research on this week’s OT lesson, “How Can I Do This Great Wickedness” from Genesis 34; 37-39.  And that is unfortunate, because I really love the story of Joseph. However, tomorrow is my wife’s birthday and we have some things planned, so (as my wife is more important, alas, than my blog), it looks like I won’t be able to provide a post on this week’s lesson.

I will mention, briefly, some cool experiences I had this week in attending my courses.  In Kristin de Troyer’s  text criticism class, we went to the library and looked at exact replicas of the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus.  The two books are some of the oldest Christian documents in existence. The Codex Vaticanus, specifically, is the oldest complete copy of the Bible in existence, having been put together in the 4th Century. From what I understood, and I am no expert on the history of the biblical canon, this codex was the first “Bible” ever put together. Before this, there were only diverse, separate manuscripts (at least for the NT). The Codex Vaticanus, as it was explained to me, is what gives us the concept of the Bible as one complete book. This is interesting as someone was just recently talking to me about how the Bible has been complete — one organic whole– since the time of the apostles. Of course I knew that that was not the case, but it was neat to see the book (at least a replica of it) that was the first full Bible (centuries after Christ).

My course with Jim Davila was also eventful. We looked at the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice and the Hodayot, which are documents that I am looking at for my dissertation. It was interesting to see the distress on the students’ faces as we discussed issues of “suprahuman priests”, angelified humans, heavenly ascents, and deification (all of which are featured in these writings).  When explaining that these people probably practiced a ritualized heavenly ascent which resulted in their deification, Davila called this notion “performative deification.”

I’ll leave you with that…



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