Google lacuna
The omission of information incurred by the fact that Google Books does not contain all of the pages of a book.

Thirteen years ago I wrote a paper in Old Testament studies about the puzzling section in Genesis VI where the "sons of God" (whoever they may be) take a likening to the daughters of Man and take them for wives and thereby bring forth the Nephilim, the great men of Old.

Nephilim is a very rare word in the Hebrew Bible (almost a hapax legomenon, ( Read more... )

Rarely have I learned so much methodology and philosophy of textual criticism in a single reading as in the excellent and damning review of Christoph Luxenberg's Syro-Aramaiic Re-Interpretation of Islam at the hands of Walid Saleh of the University of Toronto.

If you learn nothing else today, learn this: Etymology cannot be the key to ( Read more... )