There are apparently two kinds of teaching and learning.
1.The kind that assumes you don't know something, and need to(Christian understanding).
2.The kind that asuumes you already know; you've just forgotten(Greek understanding).

This class has thus far operated under both understandings of teaching and learning. At least for me it has. Just like Northrop Frye's comments on page 92 that the Old Testament, while touching upon actual historical events, is not history and that the New Testament, though concerned with the life of an actual person, is not biography.

I also have (re)learned today that in the Koran passages are called surahs(sp?). I also feel stung--yet again-- by the irony that three major religous traditions that have expressed such intense animosity toward each other are so intimately connected in there roots.

The Midrash is a collection of rabbinical lore, and contained in it is an altered version of Exodus 4:24-26, where Moses is nearly consumed by a serpent before Zipporah circumcises their son, rather then nearly being killed by Yahweh(who is apparently anthropomorphic and bipolar). Of course Harold Bloom would say that this whole episode, which many have attempted to provide unsatisfactory explanations for, is ultimately uncanny and inexiplicable. And this is all it ever can be.

And I also now know what all ancient poetry is based upon: trying to make a certain thing happen by singing of it. As if there is a kind of elemental power in the human voice, used in song, that could somehow command change. Fascinating notion.

Alright, I'll stop. I've already been far too rambling and disjointed today.