Biblical Hebrew Forum

[lorencrow AT earthling.net (Loren Crow)]

Ken, Peter, and others,

To me, the point of being a scholar is not necessarily to agree with your
subject.  What is important is entertaining the possibility that your
subject could be right and have something to teach you.  That's what I mean
by "reading sympathetically": reading with the aim of discovering some
truth.  I don't have to be Hindu to come to the Upanishads with this
expectation, nor do I have to be Jewish (let alone Christian!) to read the
OT with this expectation.  I, a white man, can read _The Color Purple_ with
great benefit.  And I can't read Thoreau or Emerson without some new
revelation dawning on me.  As a Christian I believe that truth everywhere
is God's truth, and that God's truth may be found in some very surprising
places.  Thank God!

Loren


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Certain philosophers, that have no filial piety towards their Mother
Psyche, reason as if they were pure spirits, and consequently miss the
secret of transitive knowledge, which is a spiritual expression of
interaction between bodies. The human spirit is the spirit of a body, the
thoughts visiting an animal soul; and consequently its fundamental
categories are transcripts of the modes of action and passion proper to an
animal living periously in a material world.
                                       George Santayana, "The Soul at Play"