A little over a year ago, originally due to an interest in the deeper history of #compilers, I started diving deep into the #Talmud, studying #Aramaic, #gematria, and doing #DafYomi etc in what has become my deepest engagement with the rabbinic corpus yet -- the Talmud isn't a compiler but rather an extensible interpreter, compiled by compilers over the course of many centuries (build times have gotten significantly faster, my G-d), with novel extensions in the form of rabbinic commentary, glossia and the like being added nearly every century by publishers competing to compile the most elegant editions (Vilna Shaws being paradigmatic). And through studying Talmud and the greater body of rabbinic literature I've found myself encountering #magic/sorcery occasionally, and I just gotta say -- the #SICP metaphor of programming as pure magic, with the #hacker as a sorcerer, goes insanely deep when you start to dig into it.
In ancient Nippur people drew pictures of the demons besetting them in the bottom of clay bowls and wrote the name of the specific demon around the rim with incantations (often in Aramaic) to make it go away. The demons are drawn in a childlike way, to our eyes at least. The bowls are buried upside down under the floors of their houses (to trap the demon?). It occurred to me we do the same thing here in eNowhereland. Except we draw crude selfies and bury ourselves under the bowl.
Hey #AskFedi,
Any semitic language scholars out there?
I'm looking to translate Luke 18:13's phrase "God be merciful to me a sinner" into Aramaic, with something approaching period-accurate Aramaic script (whatever Unicode can handle)