This fascinates me more than I can express here: as a devout Christian and an AI nerd. And it's so ironic I'm going to take my bible study leader role to a whole new level based on an essay by self described atheist. Thank you for this weird wondery.
This is a wonderful article. You mentioned having the Robert Alter translation of the Hebrew Bible. I love that version and the commentary is great for his style of translation. He translates that word in Hebrew as “redeeming kin” as that is the literal sense.
Growing up under Apartheid, a worldview justified by Calvinism, all I knew of Christianity was the cultural version—the institutional smoke and mirrors, complete with hypocrisy. That same government conscripted us to a war "against terrorism" on the Namibian/Angolan border. It was during my military training that I "saw the light," and a journey began.
Your post got my attention. I too run a 'BibleGPT'—but with a different aim: I prompt to minimise doctrinal, extra-biblical, and institutional accretions, focusing instead on the text’s immediate narrative and historical layers. It’s been an interesting and enlightening journey.
I hadn’t considered structuring it as a co-evolving project with shared shorthand. That idea—of building a dynamic study partnership—is one I’ll borrow. Thank you.
Parsing the different translations is an especially great use case.
Did you listen to the AI&I episode with David Perrell? The part about the "prince" vs. "author" of life was wild. And that's just scratching the surface.
I highly recommend Christine Hayes’ Yale course on the Hebrew Bible if you haven’t seen it already: https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145
This fascinates me more than I can express here: as a devout Christian and an AI nerd. And it's so ironic I'm going to take my bible study leader role to a whole new level based on an essay by self described atheist. Thank you for this weird wondery.
I was thinking similar thoughts! I love that the first focus is on the Word as
Literature.
This is a wonderful article. You mentioned having the Robert Alter translation of the Hebrew Bible. I love that version and the commentary is great for his style of translation. He translates that word in Hebrew as “redeeming kin” as that is the literal sense.
Growing up under Apartheid, a worldview justified by Calvinism, all I knew of Christianity was the cultural version—the institutional smoke and mirrors, complete with hypocrisy. That same government conscripted us to a war "against terrorism" on the Namibian/Angolan border. It was during my military training that I "saw the light," and a journey began.
Your post got my attention. I too run a 'BibleGPT'—but with a different aim: I prompt to minimise doctrinal, extra-biblical, and institutional accretions, focusing instead on the text’s immediate narrative and historical layers. It’s been an interesting and enlightening journey.
I hadn’t considered structuring it as a co-evolving project with shared shorthand. That idea—of building a dynamic study partnership—is one I’ll borrow. Thank you.
Parsing the different translations is an especially great use case.
Did you listen to the AI&I episode with David Perrell? The part about the "prince" vs. "author" of life was wild. And that's just scratching the surface.