Facts Not Narratives

This week, a few listeners reached out to wish me well on my sabbatical or to ask what I plan to do with my free time. First, please be assured that I will not be eating ice cream. Second, as my oldest Palestinian cousin Tina said while doing manual labor at St. Elizabeth, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” In her honor, let’s make good use of the time because the days are definitely evil. Teaching is about conveying facts from the text, not your ideas about the text, let alone your institutional narratives. On a personal level, you want to talk about “narrative” or “narrative context” because you want to give yourself importance. On an institutional level, if you take just five minutes to stop gossiping about or psychoanalyzing each other, you’ll discover that your obsession with “narrative” is all about the Benjamins.  You fund the Tower of Babel; thus, it is utterly disgusting. “And that,” Fr. Paul explains this week, “is the price we are paying in so-called Judeo-Christianism.”Just watch Tik-Tok, Habibi. Thankfully, the God of Scripture is not mocked in his syntax. What is written cannot be undone—for those who have ears. The canonical syntax of the original, consonantal Hebrew text is a fact unless you want to go back and dream about your facts while sleeping with the New York Times. Sleep well. Make-believe stories—even the scary ones—are for children. Lexicography, on the other hand, is the transmission of facts. Facts are common and accessible to all—they stare back at you from the page—just like canonical syntax. As Fr. Paul has said for decades, Biblical-Semitic consonants are situated on the scroll, like the organs of your body. No NATO narratives are required. So before launching into the exciting developments I mentioned last week, Fr. Paul will spend some time explaining, once and for all, why the syntax of the Hebrew canon—and not the Septuagint—is our canonical reference for word study in the Biblical text. (Episode 315)

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