How Much Phoenician Can I Read with Hebrew?
A Hebrew speaker reads Tabnit’s Phoenician curse against grave robbers, carved on a recycled Egyptian coffin, with the guesses and corrections left visible.
Learning & Languages
Dew of Your Youth
טַל יַלְדֻתֶיךָ Tehillim 110:3
Dew of Your Youth is about thought, memory, matters of faith, and the systems we build to keep our thinking from dissolving.
Jewish texts, personal workflows, family archives, and languages learned along the way.
If you’ve ever tried to organize your soul with Markdown, welcome.
Recent posts
Faith & Practice
What We Inherit: Tzidkat HaTzaddik 62–63
My father and I were learning אותיות ס״ב–ס״גLiterally “letters”: the numbered paragraphs of a book like Tzidkat HaTzaddik; singular os. in Tzidkat HaTzaddikTzidkat HaTzaddik (“The Righteousness of the Righteous”): Rav Tzadok’s book of short numbered teachings on spiritual life., where Rav TzadokRabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin (1823–1900), Hasidic thinker and author of Tzidkat HaTzadik. talks about the qualities people inherit from their parents. There are some interesting ideas here. There are also a few places where I had to stop and say, “Hang on. Didn’t you just tell us the opposite?”
Learning & Languages
If You Know Hebrew, Do You Know Moabite?
A Hebrew speaker reads the ninth-century BCE Mesha Stele without first studying Moabite, keeping the misreadings visible, to see how far Hebrew actually gets you.
Faith & Practice
When Piety Becomes the Minimum
Head covering, six hours between meat and dairy, an ever-longer siddur: how the practices of the especially pious quietly become everyone’s minimum.
Learning & Languages
Bread, Meat, or a Meal? Hebrew and Arabic as Cousins
Hebrew לחם means bread. Arabic لحم means meat. Trying to understand how that happened sent me back to Daniel, the korbanos, and a disagreement between Ibn Ezra and the Ramban.
Categories
Learning & Languages
Language learning as obsession, memory systems, and pedagogy.
15 posts
Faith & Practice
Jewish rituals, Torah journaling, spiritual processing, the Elul Logs.
24 posts
Heritage & Identity
Genealogy deep-dives, travel stories, cultural identity unraveling.
18 posts
Tech & Tools
Obsidian, Hugo tweaks, DevOps rants, scripts that almost worked.
15 posts