Bah! (Bike horn)

Bah, got to my bike today and found that someone had nicked the horn. (Probably whilst it was standing outside the supermarket on Tuesday, rather than whilst it was in the back garden, behind a locked door, since.) At £11 (IIRC) a shot, and with me already having had to replace one (after the bulb fell off my first and vanished, after it was damaged when I came off my bike earlier in the year) I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth replacing it again...

The Jewish War, fit the eleventh and last

As is well-known, early in the revolt against Rome, El`azar ben Ya'ir led a band of Sicarii to occupy the fortress and rock of Masada in the Judaean desert, from which he led raids on the surrounding countryside. The Romans came and besieged this fortress, which was regarded as pretty much unconquerable—it's located on a fragment of rock splintered off the western wall of the East African Rift Valley, with sheer sides, and inhospitable desert at its foot—but the Romans conquered it anyway by building a ramp up to reach it. When El`azar ben Ya'ir saw that defeat was imminent, he made a long speech in which he talked his followers into mass suicide, in which he makes the following interesting comment upon suicide in contemporary Indian religion (VII.8):

( Read more... )

I wonder what religion he's referring to. A glance at Wikipedia does not indicate any of the major Indian religions with a positive attitude towards suicide nowadays. I wonder whether what we have here is a slightly garbled account, rather, of suttee (though Wikipedia states "few reliable records exist of the practice before the time of the Gupta empire, approximately 400 AD").

---

The Torah is very strong on the theme that G-d rewards and punishes. By the time of the Mishna, however, the fact that bad things happen to good people, and vice versa, was troubling Jewish theologians, and they wrestled with the issue. In some places in the Talmud and Midrash the problem is stated in stark terms but left unsolved; in others the solution is given that reward and punishment does not occur in this world but is deferred to the World to Come.

Nowadays only the most dyed-in-the-wool Orthodox would claim reward and punishment happens in this world: the idea that all of the five million six hundred thousand murdered by the Nazis—including the children, including the babies—were morally responsible for the "punishment" that was brought upon them is morally repugnant to most people. However, less than a century before R. Akiva stated the doctrine of deferred reward and punishment, you still had one man, at least, firmly believing in the concept of reward and punishment in this world:

After spending an entire book describing the horrors of war and all the people justly or unjustly killed, enslaved and exiled, Josephus concludes his work by telling of a Jew and a Roman who conspired to blame a late Sicarian revolt upon upright citizens, and then went on to have anyone who might put the lie to this accused and peremptorily executed. Eventually Vespasian smelled a rat (as Williamson puts it) and has the Jew executed. The Roman, Catullus (not the poet!)

for the time being profited by the lenience of [Vespasian and Titus] and received no more than a reprimand; but soon afterwards he succumbed to a complicated sickness beyond remedy and died miserably, not only chastened in body but suffering from a much more terrible disease of the mind. He was tormented by terrors, constantly calling out that he saw the ghosts of those he had murdered standing before him; and losing control of himself he would spring from his bed as if he himself was being tortured and burnt. His malady grew rapidly worse and worse, and his bowels were eaten through and fell out. Such was his end—proof, if ever there was one, of the providence of God, who executed judgement on the wicked.

Josephus notes         Jewish learning notes index