Biblical Views: Judaism—Back to Basics

Home > Magazines > BAR > November/December 2009

“You never get too good for the basics.” Some such caution will be familiar to anyone who has trained in a sport, musical instrument or language. We understand that we will have to get through the basics at the start. The hard part is realizing, months or years into training, that we can never leave behind those building blocks: working endlessly on balance and form; constantly practicing scales; struggling with the unsexy conjugation of verbs. It is the same with academic work. Important insights have originated in the teaching of introductory courses. That is where we come to grips […]

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Endnotes

This column is an abbreviated form of an essay I wrote for Bible and Interpretation (www.bibleinterp.com), August 2009.

The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (www.tlg.uci.edu) is a research center at the University of California, Irvine. It has collected and digitized most literary texts written in Greek from Homer to the 15th century C.E.

See, e.g., Tacitus, Histories 5.4.

See Galatians 1:13–14 and Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Magnesians 10 and Letter to the Philadelphians 6.