Talmud
Article
Talmud is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 19, 2023 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “There is a weird echo of this story in, of all places, the Talmud”; “All that stuff in the Talmud about how the hands of masturbators should be cut off”; “the Talmud says “The following have no part in the World to Come”. It most often appears alongside effective altruism, God, Iliad.
Metadata
- Category: Publications
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: September 19, 2023
- Last seen: August 08, 2024
Appears In
- Book Review: The Alexander Romance
- In The Long Run, We’re All Dad
- Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
Related Pages
-
- effective altruism (2 shared issues)
-
- God (2 shared issues)
-
- Iliad (2 shared issues)
-
- Jesus (2 shared issues)
-
- Jews (2 shared issues)
-
- John (2 shared issues)
-
- Scott (2 shared issues)
-
- Torah (2 shared issues)
-
- 10240 (1 shared issues)
-
- 15th century Sicilian manuscript (1 shared issues)
-
- 4chan (1 shared issues)
-
- @slatestarcodex (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
People ate it up. The Romance stayed near the top of the best-seller lists for over a thousand years. Some people claim (without citing sources) that it was the #2 most-read book of antiquity and the Middle Ages, after only the Bible. The Koran endorses it, the Talmud embellishes it, a Mongol Khan gave it rave reviews. While historians and critics tend to use phrases like “contains nothing of historic or literary value”, this was the greatest page-turner of the ancient and medieval worlds.
There is a weird echo of this story in, of all places, the Talmud, although here Alexander is interviewing the sages of Israel, who we assume are clothed. Taken from here, slightly edited:
Inline links: here
The [Talmud] relates that Alexander asked the [sages of the Negev Desert]:
Modern academics have a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this. If Onan had impregnated his brother’s wife, the resulting child would have been the heir to the family fortune. Onan refused so he could keep the fortune for himself and his descendants. So the sin of Onan was greed, not masturbation. All that stuff in the Talmud about how the hands of masturbators should be cut off, or how masturbation helped cause Noah’s Flood (really! Sanhedrin 108b!) is just a coincidence. God hates greed, just like us.
In general I’m skeptical of most attempts to draw a bright line between Jewish and Christian philosophies (“Jews think like this, Christians think like that”). Christianity grew out of Judaism, and most post-1400s Jewish scholarship was written in Christian societies, so both religions had ample chance to influence each other. “Everybody knows” that Christianity judges you by belief and Judaism judges you by your actions, but the Talmud says “The following have no part in the World to Come: One who says that the resurrection of the dead is not biblical, or that the Torah is not from Heaven, or the Epicurean.”
Inline links: the Talmud says