Latest news with #Semitic
Spectator
3 days ago
- General
- Spectator
Spinoza, Epicurus and the question of ‘epikoros'
With surprise, I heard from a Jewish friend that a Hebrew term for a heretic is epikoros, apparently derived from the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 bc). The word cropped up recently in a row over a film on the life of Baruch Spinoza, showing that he is not forgiven more than 360 years after his expulsion from the Sephardic community in Amsterdam. An American professor of philosophy, Yitzhak Melamed, asked the Portuguese Jewish synagogue there for permission to film some footage. The rabbi pointed out that Spinoza had been excommunicated 'with the severest possible ban, a ban that remains in force for all time'. So, no he could not visit the synagogue. The rabbi's letter called Spinoza an epikouris, a form of the word used of him in the 17th century. The reason for Spinoza's excommunication (herem in Hebrew) is unknown. Spinoza did write difficult stuff later about all things being God, but not when he was cast out in 1656, aged 23. Anyway, 12th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides discussed the nature of an epikoros as someone who denies God's providence. That is what Spinoza was to deny, as far as I can understand him, and what Epicurus had denied. To add a complication. Maimonides said in an early work that epikoros came from Aramaic, and others have since derived it from the p-q-r Semitic root, signifying 'licentiousness'. By the time he wrote Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides had learnt about Epicurus's philosophy. Do, then, epikoros and a modern form, apikoros, come from the Greek philosopher, or was his fame projected on to an extant Semitic word? Professor Melamed eventually received a letter from the Ma'amad (churchwardens) of the synagogue saying the rabbi had exceeded his authority and he was welcome to visit.
India.com
23-05-2025
- Science
- India.com
10 Oldest Languages In The World
photoDetails english 2905301 Language is one of humanity's oldest and most powerful tools, shaping civilizations, preserving cultures, and connecting generations. While thousands of languages have emerged and evolved over millennia, a few have withstood the test of time, remaining in use—either in daily life, liturgy, or scholarly circles—since ancient eras. Updated:May 23, 2025, 07:13 PM IST 1 / 11 These languages offer a fascinating glimpse into our collective past, showcasing the richness of human expression across centuries. In this article, we explore 10 of the oldest languages in the world, tracing their origins, historical significance, and continued relevance today. Tamil 2 / 11 One of the oldest classical languages with origins dating back over 2000 years. Sanskrit 3 / 11 Ancient Indo- European language, considered the language of classical Indian literature and Hindu scriptures. Hebrew 4 / 11 Ancient Semitic language, sacred in Judaism, with origins dating back over 3000 years. Aramaic 5 / 11 Semitic language, used in ancient Mesopotamia and spoken by Jesus Christ. Greek 6 / 11 Ancient language with roots dating back to the 3rd millennium BCE, know for its rich literature. Chinese 7 / 11 Ancient language family with written records dating back over 3000 years. Egyptian 8 / 11 Ancient language of Egypt, with hieroglyphic inscriptions dating back to around 3200 BCE. Farsi 9 / 11 While not the earliest known language in the Indo- Iranian language family, Farsi is the longest surviving spoken language of the Iranian family of languages almost 522 BC. Latin 10 / 11 Classical language of the Roman empire, influencing many European languages. Italian 11 / 11 It is quite challenging to determine whether this is one of the oldest languages in the world or if it is now extinct. It's possible that the language originated around 75 BCE, or even earlier—perhaps during the time of the Roman Republic, which was established in 509 BCE. Modern Italian is a direct descendant of Latin.
Indian Express
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
2 Israeli embassy staffers shot dead in US: What's known about the killings, suspected attacker
A man and a woman who worked at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, were fatally shot while leaving the Capital Jewish museum on Wednesday evening (May 21). The couple, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, was set to be engaged soon. US President Donald Trump reacted to the incident in a post on X, saying, 'These horrible DC killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW!' and that 'Hatred and Radicalism have no place in the USA.' Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office also mentioned anti-semitism (meaning prejudice or hatred towards people belonging to Semitic religions) in its statement, saying he was 'shocked' by the 'horrific, antisemitic' shooting. What exactly happened, who is the suspect, and what is the context behind the responses to the attacks? We explain. Lischinsky, an Israeli citizen, was a research assistant, while Milgrim, a US citizen, organised visits and missions to Israel. The couple left the museum around 9.15 pm, when the suspect approached a group of four people and opened fire, Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith said. The suspect walked into the Jewish museum after the shooting and was detained by event security. When he was taken into custody, the suspect began chanting, 'Free, free Palestine,' Smith said. However, law enforcement did not believe there was an ongoing threat to the community, she said. Who is the suspect? Chicago resident Elias Rodriguez, 31, has been identified by law enforcement officials. He is being questioned both by the local police and the FBI. According to The New York Times, he was not previously known to be on the police's radar. And what is the larger context? Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar argued that the attack was 'the direct result of toxic antisemitism against Israel and Jews around the world that has been going on since the Oct. 7 massacre.' Following the Palestinian militant group Hamas's attacks on Israel in 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed, Israel launched a military offensive that has claimed the lives of at least 50,000 people in the Gaza Strip – a majority of them women and children. Israel has drawn worldwide condemnation for its actions, including from Western countries, which urged restraint. In the US, protests have been organised in colleges, including the premier Ivy League, which have become a flashpoint for the limits of academic freedom guaranteed to higher education institutions. Police have been deployed at times to stop such protests because classes were being disrupted and, more importantly, the agitations were linked to antisemitism. However, protesters said that targeting the religious identity of Jewish people through slogans or signs only happened in a few cases of individual protestors, not as part of the stated aims of the student movements. By and large, their focus has been cutting funding and collaborations with Israel on a university level, boycotting brands operating in Israel in a more general sense, and ultimately building pressure on Israel to cease its military action. Even though the US has been the staunchest ally of Israel historically, student protests have also questioned the larger actions of the Israeli state towards Palestinians, even before 2023. Students have argued that anti-semitism was being used as a bogey to end the protests. Under the Trump administration, the government has taken a harder stance and deported students for joining pro-Palestine protests, citing anti-semitism. In recent weeks, the Israeli blockade in Gaza has come under a renewed bout of criticism, for its role in the region nearly running out of food, including baby food. In one of the strongest condemnations from Western countries thus far, France, the UK and Canada issued a joint statement on May 19. They said they 'strongly oppose the expansion of Israel's military operations in Gaza' and 'The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable.' On the larger question of Palestine, they said, 'We are committed to recognising a Palestinian state as a contribution to achieving a two-state solution and are prepared to work with others to this end.' Following the Wednesday attack, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said, 'antisemitism is an evil we must stamp out wherever it appears. My thoughts are with their colleagues, family and loved ones, and as always, I stand in solidarity with the Jewish community.' French President Emmanuel Macron also reached out to Netanyahu following what he described as 'an antisemitic attack.' (With Associated Press inputs)
Forbes
19-05-2025
- General
- Forbes
A Church Built By Slaves Inspires An Artwork On View In Savannah
Nari Ward, "Breathing Bars Diagonal Left," 2020, oak wood, copper sheet, copper nails, darkening ... More patina,152 x 152 x 5cm. The First African Baptist Church in Savannah — which was founded by enslaved people and is the oldest continually open black church in North America — has many unique features. Among them, original gas lighting fixtures from when the sanctuary was completed in 1859, pews carved with ancient Semitic languages including Cursive Hebrew and Ethiopian Amharic Ge'ez, and floorboards drilled with holes that form a triangular pattern. These floorboards were of particular interest to the artist Nari Ward, who first saw them while visiting Savannah to prepare for a solo exhibition at the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2015. There are theories for why the holes exist in the otherwise smooth floor. Many surmise that they represent the Kongo Cosmogram, a religious symbol that portrays the relationship between human and spiritual worlds and has been used for many centuries by the Bakongo people, who live in what is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo. Others say that the holes were drilled into the floor to allow escaped slaves to breathe. The church may very well have served as a hiding place in the Underground Railroad, given that March Haynes, a deacon of the church, was a known member of the network. In "Breathing Bars Diagonal Left' (2020), Ward took the shape of these holes, and made them radiant. On a crepuscular blue background covered with faintly gilded symbols of hand cuffs and prison bars, the Cosmogram explodes with beams of light, which in the artwork are represented by thin gold lines. Each hole, which embodies a place where someone might have drawn a breath, is surrounded by golden nails, which cluster like worker bees. Or the spirits of ancestors. One gets the physical sensation, looking at the artwork, that you are witnessing life itself. Oxygen inhaled; carbon dioxide exhaled. Exuberance, miracles. Hope stubbornly clinging on in a dark hiding place, and despite it all, exploding outward with exuberance. In times like these, I looked at the artwork, and started crying. An installation view of "In Reflection: Contemporary Art and Ourselves," an ongoing exhibition at ... More the Jepson Center in Savannah. The artwork is installed as part of 'In Reflection: Contemporary Art and Ourselves,' an ongoing exhibition at the Jepson Center in Savannah that showcase the museum's modest but mighty contemporary art collection, which includes works by Kara Walker, Elaine de Kooning, Chul Hyun Ahn and Rocío Rodríguez. 'One of the best parts about working in a museum is continually looking at these cutting edge artists, and what they are saying about the current moment and the times we are living in,' says Erin Dunn, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the museum, who also organized the exhibition. The Ward piece, however, is on loan from Alice Walton's Art Bridges Foundation, which aims to provide financial and strategic support to museums across the United States, in part by lending out pieces from its permanent collection upon request. Such as the Nari Ward piece lent to the Jepson Center for a year. 'Our goal is getting art out of storage and into museums,' says Ashley Holland, the curator and director of curatorial initiatives at Art Bridges Foundation. As the curator at a small museum in a city of just under 150,000 people, Dunn works with a modest budget which does not always support the acquisition of works by notable contemporary artists. She was grateful, therefore, to see one of Ward's works on Art Bridges Foundation's website. She applied for a loan, and it was granted by Holland and her team. Dunn notes that the loan came with very few stipulations, and that the foundation even paid for shipping. Art Bridges Foundation also loaned 'Black Girl on a Skateboard Going Where She's Got to Go to Do What She's Got to Do and It Might Not Have Anything to Do With You, Ever' (2022), a ceramic sculpture by Vanessa German, to the Jepson Center for the exhibition. 'We really expect all of our partner organizations to also be doing learning and engagement,' says Holland, noting that she was thrilled to lend the artworks by Ward and German to the Jepson Center. 'There were so many local connections,' says Holland. 'Both pieces were a great fit for them.' An installation shot from "In Reflections." The presence of philanthropy from billionaires was visible throughout the show, which was marked by artwork that refused to cower, including 'Black Cotton Flag Made in Georgia' (2018), a 27-foot tall draped American flag rendered entirely in black, and collapsed against a flagpole, by Paul Stephen Benjamin. There were the two pieces from Art Bridges Collection, which is funded by Walton, the richest woman in the world. And then, there was signage leading visitors to Bloomberg Connects, a digital guide to the exhibition funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies. At a time when arts organizations are facing budget cuts — President Trump started eliminating grants funded by the National Endowment for the Arts in early May — these programs from wealthy philanthropists are lifelines for small museums like the Jepson Center. Dunn, for one, is honored to have the piece by Ward, even if it's not in the museum forever. Already, a few weeks after opening, school children have visited. They've seen the breathing holes, and they've felt the life emanating from them. 'I think it's so cool for them to realize that artists come here to Savannah and when they leave, take ideas with them,' Dunn says. 'It helps them understand that our small community actually has a really outsized influence on our world.'
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Filler vs. action engine: ‘It came to pass' carries more weight than you think
This article was first published in the ChurchBeat newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox each Wednesday night. Like most believers, most Latter-day Saints learn early and often how to take a joke about their faith. After all, Mark Twain made fun of the Book of Mormon in 1891, writing that if someone removed the phrase 'it came to pass' from that book of scripture, it 'would have been only a pamphlet.' When Elder Quentin L. Cook was a young college student, a university professor that he enjoyed quoted that bit of Twain in class 'with great glee,' Elder Cook said recently at BYU Women's Conference. In the footnotes of his talk, Elder Cook made some notable observations about Twain's words and how they are used against the Book of Mormon and believers. 'Each new generation is presented with Twain's comments as if it is a new significant discovery,' he wrote. 'There is usually little reference to the fact that Mark Twain was equally dismissive of Christianity and religion in general. When this kind of remark is done with humor, it is probably best to join in the amusement.' Elder Cook's story didn't end in his college class. Months later, he was serving a mission in London, England, when he met an Oxford-educated teacher at London University who took a position opposite to Twain's. Dr. Ebeid Sarofim was a native Egyptian and expert in Semitic languages who discovered the Book of Mormon by accident and sent a letter to President David O. McKay asking for baptism. When Sarofim met with missionaries, he told them that 'it came to pass' was part of his intellectual belief in the Book of Mormon because it mirrored the way he translated phrases commonly used in ancient Semitic writings, Elder Cook said. The missionaries told him it was essential to have a spiritual testimony, too, Elder Cook said. The professor gained a spiritual witness and was baptized. 'So, what one famous humorist, Mark Twain ... saw as an object of ridicule, a scholar of Semitic languages recognized as profound evidence of the truth of the Book of Mormon which was confirmed to him by the Spirit,' Elder Cook said at Women's Conference. That anecdote, which has a resolution I'll come back to, didn't fit in my original coverage of Elder Cook's talk, but it drove me to look at some of the research about 'it came to pass' over the past 60 years. The first place I went was my copy of 'Charting the Book of Mormon,' which shows that 14% of all the instances of the phrase in the 1830 edition were in 1 Nephi. So, if 2 Nephi actually were the first book in the Book of Mormon, with far fewer instances (3.5%), would the phrase stick out as much to casual or first time readers like Twain? Second, King James translators faced the same redundant phrase, which in Hebrew is ויְהִי (vay-yihi). It shows up about 1,200 times in the Hebrew Bible, which contains most of the Old Testament. Those British translators sometimes ignored it and regularly deployed a variety of expressions in its place, such as 'and,' 'and it became' or 'and it was,' according to the BYU Religious Studies Center. Still, there are 727 examples of 'it came to pass' in the King James Version of the Old Testament, the RSC reported. You can find plenty of jokes online about all of those uses of the phrase in other faith traditions, too. (The best of all, in my estimation, is the use in the title of a book on BYU quarterbacks, 'And They Came to Pass.' Yes, I own that one, too.) Of course, the same phenomenon happens in the New Testament. Just think of two famous instances in Luke 2: 'And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.' 'And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.' So, why was this Hebrew phrase so popular in Semitic writings in that age? Because it was 'an engine of narrative storytelling' in its day the same way quick visual cuts drive action movies today, BYU professor Taylor Halverson has noted. In fact, Halverson says the phrase contains a deeper spiritual driver as a representation of Jesus Christ. 'It came to pass,' he says, is built on the same root word for God, Yahweh, the source of all things and the one who drives forward the narrative of each life. 'When we read 'it came to pass,'' Halverson writes, 'we see God's presence, his love, his concern, his energy, his knowledge, his direction, his guidance.' That is certainly more challenges to Twain's suggestion that 'it came to pass' could be cut out without losing any meaning. Elder Cook's underlying message for both of his anecdotes also pointed to deeper personal action. 'Dr. Sarofim's true account is interesting,' Elder Cook said, 'but I would suggest the best approach for gaining a testimony is to immerse ourselves in the Book of Mormon so we can repeatedly experience the ongoing witness of the Spirit.' (Note: Similar to the KJV translation, the number of uses of 'it came to pass' was reduced in the Book of Mormon, too, between the 1830 and 1837 editions," according to Royal Skousen's work in 'History of the Text of the Book of Mormon.') Church of Jesus Christ begins 10-day public open house for Antofagasta Chile Temple (May 13) The pioneer ethic that is a key to thriving companies, communities and the Church of Jesus Christ (May 7) The members of the First Presidency offered their 'heartfelt prayers and greetings' to Pope Leo XIV. President Russell M. Nelson released social media posts on Mother's Day. Here's what he and other leaders said, in case you missed their Mother's Day messages. How a prayerful surgeon — Dr. Russell M. Nelson — helped ensure many joyful years for BYU coach Heather Olmstead and her family. Sheri Dew, a former member of the Relief Society General Presidency and now executive vice president and chief content officer of Deseret Management Corp. was Southern Virginia University's commencement speaker. She encouraged graduates to 'stack wins.' Two apostles and the leader of the Relief Society spoke at a BYU-Pathway Worldwide devotional and answered students questions. Church leaders broke ground Saturday for the Lagos Nigeria Temple. The First Presidency announced that the Singapore Temple groundbreaking ceremony will take place on June 28. Baseball has decreed that tainted star Pete Rose, who died last year, now will be eligible for the Hall of Fame. Here's a smart look at the issues. BYU has a new athletic director, Brian Santiago. This is what he said at the news conference where he was introduced. BYU's Jewish quarterback and Latter-day Saint wide receiver are in Israel with other team members to work out with the Israeli national football team as part of the Athletes for Israel program. This is just an enjoyable story about another terrific player with his own controversial past but a love for the game and a desire to generously share it with others.
