Behold! Episode 21 of OMGWTFBIBLE with Michael Malice is now available!
This episode was recorded at Beauty Bar.
There are so many ways to listen to Episode 21!
You can listen using the embed above or here. OMGWTFBIBLE is now on SoundCloud! Explore our SoundCloud here.
You can also: subscribe in iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or listen via Stitcher!
OMGWTFBIBLE is live on May 26!
This month, Michael Malice will join me as we read about Yoseph revealing himself! Yay!
OMGWTFBIBLE Episode 21 Live
Beauty Bar
231 E. 14th Street
May 26, 8PM
$FREE$
21+
There will be food.
It looks like I’m going to have to start all over again. A group of scholars is working on something called “The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition,” aiming to finally redact all the wacky versions of the Hebrew Bible that have been floating around into one single, corrected text.
If this sounds confusing, it’s because it is. According to JTA News:
The text of the Hebrew Bible now being used descends from what is called the Masoretic text, which was assembled between the sixth and 10th centuries by Jewish scribes and scholars in present-day Israel and Iraq. But even among the various versions of the Masoretic text there are subtle differences.
Many of today’s printings of the Hebrew Bible come from the Second Rabbinic Bible, a text assembled in 16th-century Venice. The Jewish Publication Society uses the Leningrad Codex, which at approximately 1,000 years old is the oldest complete surviving text. Still others use the 10th-century Aleppo Codex, which the Torah scholar Maimonides praised for its accuracy but has been missing much of the Torah since a 1947 fire.
Contemporary scholars seeking to understand the history of the Hebrew Bible’s text utilize a range of other sources, including ancient Greek and Syriac translations, quotations from rabbinic manuscripts, the Samaritan Pentateuch and others. Many of these are older than the Masoretic text and often contradict it, in ways small and large.
You’ve probably heard me refer to these various texts and the differences between them on the show. It’ll be cool to have all the variations in one place. No word yet on whether the Orthodox communities are flipping out.
Behold! Episode 20 of OMGWTFBIBLE with Leah Vincent is now available!!
This episode was recorded at Beauty Bar.
There are so many ways to listen to Episode 18!
You can listen using the embed above or here. OMGWTFBIBLE is now on SoundCloud! Explore our SoundCloud here.
You can also: subscribe in iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or listen via Stitcher!
ALSO: The episodes pages is now totally overhauled! Each episode now has an individual page, so you can navigate through them all easily and comment on each episode right here on OMGWTFBIBLE.com!
Episode 20 of OMGWTFBIBLE with Leah Vincent is now gracing the front page of Jewcy. Don’t be a slowpoke! Check it out now!
I’m glad you asked! Especially since I just recorded a new episode but nothing was posted in all of April.
First of all, to answer your question, Episode 20 with Leah Vincent will go live on Jewcy.com a week from today, on May 8. It’ll show up in iTunes the next morning.
There’s more about the new podcast schedule under the fold. Continue reading
I don’t know if you’ve realized, but by making fun of religion, OMGWTFBIBLE is actually serving a greater sort of holiness. In The American Scholar, Brian Doyle writes about the benefit of weaving humor into religion:
For all that religion has been a bloody enterprise through history, and for all that religious people seem often the most almighty easy people to offend, and for all that there are many people in my faith tradition who think I am an idiot to grin over the most colorful of our traditions, I think we should grin over the more colorful parts of our faith traditions. For one thing, they are often funny—imagine the wine steward’s mixed feelings at Cana after the miracle, for example—and for another, it seems to me that real honest genuine spirituality is marked most clearly by humility and humor. The Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Meher Baba, Flannery O’Connor, Sister Helen Prejean, Pope Francis—all liable to laughter, and not one of them huffy about his or her status and importance. Whereas all the famous slimy murderers of history—Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, bin Laden—what a humorless bunch, prim and grim and obsessed with being feared. Can you imagine any one of them laughing, except over some new form of murder? Think about it—could laughter be the truest sign of holiness?
Who knew?
<h/t: The Daily Dish>
This is totally what Pharoah looked like back in the day.
Episode 19 is now available on Jewcy!
This month, Rabbi Joshua Yuter joined me as we read chapters 42-44. When we started, Joseph was stuck in jail. By the end of the episode, through some very unlikely dream analysis, Joseph ends up running the show in Egypt. Along the way, Rabbi Yuter and I discussed an Orthodox approach to Biblical criticism, what Pharaoh’s birthday parties must have been like, and alternate analyses of Pharaoh’s dreams.
Here’s my attempt to modernize the interpretation of those dreams:
At that point, people saw dreams as either telling about a thing that had happened, reflecting a thing that’s going on right now, or as predicting the future. And people immediately say “OK what does this dream predict?” Which is not something that we do. Now we tend to think of dreams as reflecting a vulnerability, reflecting our unconscious. So I thought about that and tried to figure out what, if we were to use that kind of analysis, what Pharaoh’s unconscious might be saying.
What was Rabbi Yuter’s analysis? Listen to find out. But not here! Head on over to Jewcy.com to listen there, the ONLY place on the Internet you can get new episodes of OMGWTFBIBLE. Until tomorrow.
I’m very excited to announce that Jewcy.com is now the Internet co-host of OMGWTFBIBLE. Starting with episode 19, recorded last night, new episodes will be available exclusively on Jewcy for a full day before they get released elsewhere. So if you want to get your OMGWTFBIBLE fix before anyone else does, point your browser to Jewcy.com in the week after each episode is recorded (Did I just say “point your browser?” What am I, somebody’s grandma?). Episode 18 with Ari Mandel is already up. Really, though, I’m just honored to be part of the blog network behind Jewcy, Tablet, and the Vox Tablet podcast.
As we geared up for this partnership, I sat down with episode 12 guest and Jewcy editor, Elissa Goldstein, to talk about the genesis (sorry) of the show and where it might go in the future. The whole interview is on Jewcy, but here’s a taste:
Where did the inspiration for OMGWTFBIBLE come from? How long do you think it will take to complete?
I find this question difficult to answer because I can’t really name one source of inspiration. To me, OMGWTFBIBLE is the merging of a few strands I was following at the beginning of 2012. I’d long been fascinated by how few people had read the Bible, let alone in the original Hebrew, and would sometimes drunkenly take a Tanach off my shelf and try to read the story of Tamar and Judah to people. In my stand-up, I started reading very loopy sci-fi stories I wrote when I was 9 and interrupting them with jokes about how silly they were. I had just learned about Mishnah Nazir and thought it was absolutely crazy and, for a week, was considering using the interruption story model for the Talmud: I’d project snippets of the Mishnah for stand-up audiences and translate them live, emphasizing their goofiness.
But then I realized I should go back even further.
– See more at: http://www.jewcy.com/jewish-religion-and-beliefs/omgwtfbible-comedy-podcast-david-tuchman#sthash.K2BIxb5s.dpuf
The stage for Esther’s pitch is set in Chapter 4 of the Megilla named for her. That’s when she learns, through Mordechai, of Haman’s plan of genocide for all the Jews in Achasuerus’ (or Xerxes’, if you’re nasty) domain. She’d like to petition the king to change his mind but, as she tells Mordechai, “any man or woman who goes to the king’s inner court without permission–there’s just one rule–they die.” It’s pretty clear her pitch is a risky one.
Esther goes anyway. After 3 days of fasting and market research (we can only assume), she enters the king’s inner court. Without permission. Achasuerus points his golden scepter at Esther, signifying he won’t kill her. Esther invites her husband and Haman to a string of parties, the second of which is her pitch meeting. When she finally pitches, in chapter 7, Esther demonstrates an intimate knowledge of her audience and the market context.
OMGWTFBIBLE 
