Thursday, September 6, 2007
5b: Samuel's Old Age
I remember taking a class with Rabbi Harlan Wechsler and touching on life expectancy in the ancient world. His point was that, while we often think about the people in Talmudic times have a very low life expectancy, this wasn't necessarily the case. I can't remember now if he used this text as a proof, but certainly the discussion about Samuel's death age is interesting in this regard. After all, they assume that dying at 52 is not really old age. Does this mean they expected people to live longer? Or does this mean "old" was something special, something righteous people got to, and everyone else died "young"?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
High Holiday prep has gotten me behind on this blog (and for some reason I can't figure out how to post a new comment) so please forgive my late post. I was struck by the exchange between Rav Nahman and Rav Yitzhak on the top of the page regarding the gods of the Kadars and the Kitties. The passages reads - "The Kittites worship fire and the Kedarites worship water, and though knowing that water extinguishes fire, they nevertheless did not exchange their god..." What does this say about belief? Perhaps it is a comment on the irrational nature of belief -- that even though logic dictates that one's beliefs are wrong, it doesn't matter. It also could speak to Peter Berger's plausibility structures--namely the power of a community's culture on what we believe.
so what' the problem? nobody wanted to comment on the X-rated comments made by R. Yitzhak saying "rachav, rachav"
That's when I stopped glossing the text!
You know, I was gonna say something about rahav, but I decided against it. Glad someone has the guts!
Post a Comment