Maybe check out Koheleth/Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes. It considers and rejects various conceptions of the good life before settling on something vaguely Stoic. The bits about God read like later emendations.
Large parts of the so-called Wisdom in Qohelet actually come from earlier Mesopotamian and Canaanite texts the Jewish sages didn’t want to admit to having read. The earlier versions are actually considerably more fun: the Epic of Gilgamesh advises that the lot of mortals is, basically, to eat, drink, and be merry—not that bad if you add some puzzles and an exercise routine!
Qohelet, on the other hand, shows an immense cognitive bias that we’re really going to have to work around if we ever want a genuinely useful ethics: depression. However supposedly Stoic the ancients may have preached about being, starve them to death or cut off their heads and they’d complain. Clearly there was something they actually cared about, but because they were, like most of us, all too human, they could only really tell you what it was in the negative. They didn’t want to die (at least, not with much suffering), they didn’t want to be enslaved, they didn’t want to be in debt, they mostly didn’t want the lifestyle they were accustomed to disturbed in any way.
But if you had asked them if they wanted chocolate or vanilla ice-cream, they’d have had a hard time making decisions.
Tell them God commands a war on the other hand, and aha, now the world is making moral demands on them! Now they can stop mucking about having a good time and really get something done!
And this is why I am reluctant to cite Qohelet. Anyway, Nisan, how goes the model-theoretic semantics work?
Maybe check out Koheleth/Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes. It considers and rejects various conceptions of the good life before settling on something vaguely Stoic. The bits about God read like later emendations.
Large parts of the so-called Wisdom in Qohelet actually come from earlier Mesopotamian and Canaanite texts the Jewish sages didn’t want to admit to having read. The earlier versions are actually considerably more fun: the Epic of Gilgamesh advises that the lot of mortals is, basically, to eat, drink, and be merry—not that bad if you add some puzzles and an exercise routine!
Qohelet, on the other hand, shows an immense cognitive bias that we’re really going to have to work around if we ever want a genuinely useful ethics: depression. However supposedly Stoic the ancients may have preached about being, starve them to death or cut off their heads and they’d complain. Clearly there was something they actually cared about, but because they were, like most of us, all too human, they could only really tell you what it was in the negative. They didn’t want to die (at least, not with much suffering), they didn’t want to be enslaved, they didn’t want to be in debt, they mostly didn’t want the lifestyle they were accustomed to disturbed in any way.
But if you had asked them if they wanted chocolate or vanilla ice-cream, they’d have had a hard time making decisions.
Tell them God commands a war on the other hand, and aha, now the world is making moral demands on them! Now they can stop mucking about having a good time and really get something done!
And this is why I am reluctant to cite Qohelet. Anyway, Nisan, how goes the model-theoretic semantics work?
The wisdom literature is pretty heterodox, yeah.