Andean Bear with her cubs an mage of YHWH (Photo by Smithsonian's National Zoo)
In this podcast I’ll again argue that Robert Carroll gets it wrong. Despite his own fierce black humour he fails to acknowledge its presence or at least its prevalence in the prophets. He writes about humour in Hosea in:
Carroll, Robert P. ‘Is Humour among the Prophets’. On humour and the comic in the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Yehuda T. Radday and Athalya Brenner. Continuum International Publishing Group, 1990, 179-180.
Bob was a fine friend, and a great scholar, I wish he was still around to argue against me! Since he isn’t perhaps you will do him the honour of looking for the gaps or weaknesses in what I say and pointing them out in the comments (he’d appreciate it 😉
Here’s the audio: Humour in the Bible: book 28: Hosea
thanks Tim – your spontaneity is a delight. I must get around to reading the 12. It’s a troubled child that can find the mouth of the womb.
Re vs 11, all too seriously, I have been considering the missing nun verse in Psalm 145 – and the missing ‘all’ in that missing verse (it’s in the LXX).
Note that faithful is ?????? in his words
and merciful in all his deeds
Can committees pick words that are faithful?
O – I forgot – no Hebrew here – the ?????? is the tetragrammeton – six question marks required for the pointing
[…] he not see it in Hosea? (I explore one example, drawn from Bob’s own article in my podcast Humour in the Bible: book 28: Hosea.) Was Bob right to write: Brilliant, almost Shakespearian wordcraft; gives the book of Hosea a […]