Seth L. Sanders

@nabalkattu

"A Laid-Back Country Picker with a Laid-Back Country Mind" McLeod Chair of Classics, Dalhousie University UC Davis Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies Ancient Semitic languages and religions, Jewish Studies, Liberation Philology.

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Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· 21d

Finally assembling the chapters that will become Towards a History of Ancient Hebrew Litrerature to show my Fortress editor while sitting by the River Cam, one of the most chaotically idyllic places I've been

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· 23d

IIRC that's Akkadian Qadištu, cognate with Hebrew Qedēšâ. Qadištu's sometimes did infant care but it's tricky; probably not because it meant 'wetnurse' but because they were women attached to the temple 'family' (rather than a patriarchal one) who also e.g. had kids. Some Old Babylonian examples..

Examples of Old Babylonian Qadištu women who also did wetnurse work from Chicago Assyrian Dictionary Q volume

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Jul 15

"The focus on scribes leads to the understanding of many of the texts as scribal exercises" but "Whether or not the specifics are convincing, these raise a larger issue: what did all the scribes do after graduation?" The picture of life as one long grad seminar seems implausible on the face of it.

The focus on scribes leads to the understanding of many
of the texts as scribal exercises. Three recent examples are
Schniedewind’s understanding (2019) of the Kuntillet ‘Ajrud inscriptions
to be scribal practice texts, Mandell’s suggestion (2022) that Lachish 2
was a model for letter writing rather than an actual letter, and Fossé et al.’s
argument (2024) that the cuneiform Ugaritic text from Beth Shemesh is a
scribal exercise. Whether or not the specifics are convincing, these raise a
larger issue: what did all the scribes do after graduation?

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Jul 15

Or as Aaron Koller incisively put it in a recent critical review,' The idea that ancient texts were written by scribes is tautologically true if by “text” we mean the physical copy, by “written” we mean physically written and by “scribe” we mean anyone who writes a text.' But how would we know?

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Jul 13

It's a reclining backward K. There's a brief window in the 9th century when you get one or two shapes like this but it's an outlier.

a symbol shaped like a tilted backwards K

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Jul 8

though on the other hand some of the Platner discourse resembled the "Berniebro" discourse which is why I took it with a grain of salt

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Jul 7

Where do Israel and Palestine come from and how have they changed over time? People are curious about how we can trace the ancient heritages of Palestinian, Jewish, and other peoples in the Levant. But there aren't any fresh, up-to-date accounts good for beginners--so I wrote one.

Plate of fried Akkoub (Thistle) with olive, lemon, pickles, and hot pepper sauce, a traditional Palestinian delicacy

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Jul 3

Biblical scholars: Alex Jones is going off on how the Phoenicians didn't disappear after inventing the alphabet but found pathways to hell and now he's doing Gematria on the Declaration of Indendence

alex jones talking about the phoenicians

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Jun 24

RETVRN to when "foreign communists running New York" meant Jews too lol

'new york will now be run by foreign communists'

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Jun 22

we could use a return to good ol fashioned hospitality here

alice cooper 'welcome to my nightmare' album cover

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Jun 10

It sometimes felt like the Assyrian empire would never end, but when it fell in 612 BCE the Bible devoted a whole book to celebrating it. I don't feel the right bite from the existing translations. So for my new history of Israel, Judah, and Palestine here's my version of Nahum 2:14:

I will deal with you
—declares the LORD of Warriors:
I will burn your chariots til they smoke
And the sword will eat your great beasts;
I will cut your savage killing out of the world,
So the sound of your messengers
Will never be heard again.

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Jun 10

For the last 10 years the main kind of hardcore I was seeing was bands like Drain from Santa Cruz who have...a different self-presentation

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Jun 3

New (very short) book, The Concert of Songs and Drums That Always Thundered for Humbaba! Taking off from a newly discovered Gilgamesh fragment, this is the first work to show how heterophony works across genres, from folk music, avant-garde Jazz and 20th century classical, to New York Scuzz Rock...

Pharoah Sanders wearing sunglasses playing a sax

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· May 29

Tonight I finished the first draft of The World That Made the Bible, my history of ancient Israel, Judah, and Palestine. With thoughts of Judaism and empire ringing in my head here's the last thing I wrote, the conclusion to Rome and the Rise of the Rabbis...

By contrast, in Galilee a culture had been developing that would long outlast not just the revolt but the Roman empire itself. This was the Rabbinic leadership that negotiated autonomy with Rome and the following empires. Here we see a very different way that historical memory was put together--if Josephus was the last Jewish figure to write history until the Renaissance, the Rabbis approached time itself as a repetition of the key archetypal events of the Torah. If the different Israelite and Judean kingdoms had approached authority as a matter of military sovereignty, later Jewish communities created different kinds of autonomy, based in religious observance and negotiated with the states in which they lived.
The Rabbis became the masters of a subtler form of political life, within the four cubits of halakha, the boundaries of everyday human action we saw at the beginning of the chapter. Their claim that this is what God still has in this world can be read in two ways. Either as a melancholy and nostalgic statement, of longing for something lost—or a claim to enduring victory, for in this-worldly historical terms it is a claim to being central and at the heart of things.

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· May 25

One promise I'll make right now about my History of Ancient Israel, Judah, and Palestine. It WILL be the first to include this poem casting low-key brutal shade on Hasmonean kingship by the (Alexandrian!) poet Constantine Cavafy, "Alexander Janneus and Queen Alexandra"

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· May 22

Writing the final chapter of my history of ancient Israel Judah and Palestine and had to spend time looking into exactly what the fuck a balustrade is because freshman and regular people are told that Herod's temple had one and I'm hoping for this history to be in plain English.

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· May 21

I always found the major religious views Hellenistic and Roman period to be hard to grasp. PHARISEES VS SADDUCEES: A THEOLOGICAL FISTFIGHT from my forthcoming History of Ancient Israel, Judah, and Palestine solves this by cutting directly to the violence. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

2. The Competing New Visions of Judaism of the Hellenistic Period

A Theological Fistfight
Sadducees
The priestly class, even without being directly descended from the high priest, considered themselves Zadokites. These are the people that Josephus called Sadducees (after the biblical high priest Zadok). They included a kind of rump class, a large contingent of junior priests and Levites who officially worked in the temple but had to rotate because there were so many that if they all showed up for work at once the temple would not have been able to hold them! Scholars estimate the total at around 8,000-10,000, with only a minority even living in Jerusalem, with most in the countryside where they farmed and did crafts to support themselves.

The Sadducees represented a political elite because they controlled the Jerusalem temple, which was both religiously and economically the center of Judea. While they were aware of other temples in Egypt and Samaria, the Jerusalem temple held a monopoly of the religious imagination of many, who claimed it was the sole place to directly access God through ritual offerings. Similarly, these offerings, of both money and sacrificial food, brought great wealth in to the temple. Some of this had to be shared with the empire in taxes, but much of it went to the priests and temple treasury.

If the Jerusalem temple was a powerful and memorable way to get access to God, it was also a narrow and exclusive one–after all, you had to live close or travel far enough to make an offering. It is not clear how affordable this would be to the average rural Judean worker. And by this period many Judeans lived outside of Judea, in Egypt, Libya, Babylon, and across the Mediterranean, as the synagogue inscriptions we will see later demonstrate.

Pharisees
An alternative religious group provided broader access to God. These were the Pharisees, a group of religious experts who rather than handling sacrifices at the temple alone, instructed people across Judea and beyond in Jewish traditions of ritual and prayer. Our most detailed descriptions of their beliefs are somewhat later, from the New Testament and Josephus (mid to late first century CE) as well as early Jewish literature like the Mishnah (2nd to 3rd centuries CE), but they consistently depict a sharp divide that would eventually lead to terrible political conflict. According to Josephus, the Pharisees drew on a deep well of ancient traditions which they claimed to go back to the revelation to Moses at Mount Sinai. By contrast, the Sadducean priests claim to rely only on scripture itself, not tradition:

the Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many regulations handed down from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses: and for that reason it is, that the Sadducees reject them: and say, that we are to esteem those rules to be obligatory which are in the written word; but are not to observe what are derived from the tradition of our forefathers. And concerning these things great disputes and differences have arisen among them. While the Sadducees are able to persuade none but the rich; and have not the populace obsequious to them, the Pharisees have the multitude on their side.

A crucial theological difference was that the Pharisees–like the later Christians and Rabbinic Jews–believed in the resurrection of the dead while the Sadducees did not. This becomes an important dispute in the New Testament when Paul manages to start an actual fistfight over it among a council of Jewish leaders. Thus Acts 23:6-10

...called out in the council, “Brothers, I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees. I am on trial concerning the hope of the resurrection of the dead.” When he said this, a dissension began between the Pharisees and the Sadducees

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· May 4

The Sonics, "He's Waiting," one octave lower through Cliff Burton Power Fuzz Wah: Too much is always better than not enough.

Big purple amp head, black baritone guitar with pink curly cord, Morley power fuzz wah

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Apr 28

Palestine vs Israel: who was there first? To sum up 1000 years of inscriptional evidence the answer is 'yes.' Details in my forthcoming introductory history of ancient Israel, Judah, and Palestine linked below.

Barbarians Trading Places with States: A Timeline of “Israel” and “Palestine,” Amorites, and Arameans

2300 BCE West Semitic (Amorite) names first appear in Babylon
Amorites appear as subject of complaint about barbarous tribes
1900 BCE Amorite tribal leaders including Hana (“nomads”) take over Mari in Syria
1800 BCE Amorite tribal leaders take over Babylon
1600 BCE Kingdom of Hana (“Nomad-land”) appears in Syria
1400 BCE Kingdom of Amurru (“Amorite-land”) appears in Northern Levant
1300 BCE First Amorite/West Semitic literature appears in Syria at Ugarit
1206 BCE Israel (ysrỉꜣr) first mentioned as population group
1175 BCE Philistines (Pleshet) first mentioned as population group
1100 BCE Arameans first appear as subject of complaint about barbarous tribes
Palestine (Palashtu) as Egyptian name for Southern Levant
11th century Palastin as Luwian name for kingdom in Southern Anatolia
9th century Israel (Sir’ila) as Assyrian name for Northern Kingdom
Palestine (Palaštu) as Assyrian name for Southern region of Levant
8th century Judah (Yahuda) as Assyrian name for southern territory in Levant
Aram mentioned as kingdom
Aram mentioned as larger region
700 BCE Assyria conquers last Aramean kingdoms
Aramaic becoming major spoken language of Assyrian empire
600 BCE Aramaic is main spoken language of Assyrian empire
200 BCE Numidia (“Nomad-land”) appears as kingdom in North Africa

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Apr 27

It stands to reason that it wasn't a Ranger with PTSD or a John Brown Gun Club member but a centrist who thinks Hasan Piker is too radical that tried to assassinate the president this time

tweet "a person who thinks Hasan Piker is too radical but then proceeds to try to assassinate the president"

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Apr 24

Learn Yiddish this summer in Halifax with @daljewishstudies.bsky.social!

flyer for summer intro yiddish course 2x per week M and W 6-7:30pm at Dalhousie, email jewish.studies@dal.ca for more information

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Apr 9

THIS SHABBES ONLY at Chicago's KAM ISAIAH ISRAEL, "The Pride of the South Side"! "Rebuked and Scorned: Is There Jewish Soul Music? and "The Invention of Hebrew and the History of Ancient Israel and Judah"

Red bearded guy with Frazetta, Sunn, and Current 93 Pazuzu sneaking up on him

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Mar 29

about 5 years ago a fellow Classics teacher experimented with a carefully-framed partial phone ban and got pushback but I am seeing a genuine appetite for relief from this invasion of our attention spans and minds.

Our institutions have a role to play here as well, as rules and regulations that reduce distraction in group settings can help support the strengthening of cognitive abilities. In the wake of the success of the N.Y.U. psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book, “The Anxious Generation,” many school districts around the country began banning smartphones from classrooms. These efforts have proved to be exceptionally fruitful. A 2025 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that school phone bans were followed by “significant improvements” in student test scores; similarly, three-quarters of the 317 high schools surveyed by a Dutch research team reported that phone bans improved focus, and two-thirds reported that they improved the “social climate” in their school.

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Mar 26

case in point, guy with Minnesota banner complaining about his Maine election choices

guy from minnesota saying how he'd vote in maine senate race

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Mar 22

Naptime after getting his first axe set up, a cherry red First Act Junior. One knob, one pickup, the most inappropriate possible pairing. Not shown: old Hooked on Phonics books

little red guitar next to big Atlas Cabinet and 200w Science Mother amp, Electric Wizard and Thrones posters in background.

Truck-napping mini-me with me in foreground

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Mar 22

Life PR despite all, 2x325. Now playing, "Freya" by The Sword

Messy garage gym with moss-green squat rack, colourful olympic weights on bar and barely visible 1970s Frazetta calendar

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Mar 19

This isn't some isolated slip-up in the book of Ezra--historians have found it extremely difficult to explain how Ezra the scribe could both replicate and coexist with the less appealing figure of Nehemiah the Persian governor.

Ezra as a Rewrite of Nehemiah

“Ezra’s story is apparently patterned upon Nehemiah's—yet it is different. Ezra rejects the Persian military escort that Nehemiah accepts (Ezra 8:22; Nehemiah 2:9). Ezra arrives with an open letter from Artaxerxes and waits three days before declaring a public fast (Ezra 8:15-23); Nehemiah arrives with directives known only to himself and conducts a secret, nighttime inspection at the end of three days (Nehemiah 2:11-16). Ezra hears of exogamous marriages and tears his hair and clothes in ritual mourning (Ezra 9:3-4); Nehemiah reacts violently and tears the hair and clothes of the offending husbands (Nehemiah 13:23-27). In each case, the comparison portrays Ezra more positively than Nehemiah. Ezra also proclaims the Torah as the law of the land.”

Meyers, “Exile and Return” in Shanks, Ancient Israel p. 227

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Mar 19

For example, one of the ways Ezra "explains" the apparently scandalous delay in the building of the Second Temple is that the later king Artaxerxes forced them to wait...until the earlier king Darius appears!

The Embarrassment of the Temple’s Delay---Ezra 4:23-24

“Then when the copy of King Artaxerxes’ [465-424 B.C.E] letter was read before Rehum and the scribe Shimshai and their associates, they hurried to the Jews in Jerusalem and by force and power made them cease. At that time the work on the house of God in Jerusalem stopped and was discontinued until the second year of the reign of King Darius of Persia [520 B.C.E.!]”.

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Mar 13

While the Umm el-Marra texts were carefully excavated if hard to understand, another set came from the illegal antiquities trade and dating 1000 years later, when the Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley published what she described as 4 alphabetic "dockets" on cuneiform tablets from the Sealand Dynasty.

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu· Mar 13

Clay cylinders found in Syria at Umm el-Marra may date back 500 years before the earliest previously known alphabetic inscriptions in Egypt. When my archaeology teacher Glenn Schwartz published them he cautiously suggested that 4-5 of the 8 signs seem alphabetic, while 3-4 were more uncertain.