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I'm now imagining that the priests wrote all that stuff down to settle the Ancient Israelite equivalent of Star Trek fans arguing. "the ark was 40 cubits wide!" "that clearly wouldn't leave enough room for all the animals described in Genesis episode 7 part 2! it had to be 50 cubits wide!"
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Sep 17, 2025 21:48
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CrypticFox posted:The other source that also tells the Noah story doesn't even include the instruction to build an ark, it just presumes Noah either already has one or has access to one. *Noah leans over fence* "Hey Steve! Any chance I can borrow your ark this weekend?"
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Sep 18, 2025 01:01
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Elissimpark posted:*Noah leans over fence* "You're gonna bring it back when you're done with it, right? Was thinking of taking the family on a boating trip once this bad weather cleared up." "Eh....yyyyyyyeah, sure thing buddy."
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Sep 18, 2025 01:05
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I would not be surprised if those are the result of multiple rounds of writers/storytellers being terrible at math and mistranslating the units.
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Sep 18, 2025 01:18
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CrypticFox posted:Most of those cases come from the Priestly source, which derives from the world of the Temple priesthood. Out of all the sources that were combined to form the Hebrew Bible, the Priestly source is by far the most concerned with those kinds of details. If you remove the Priestly source version of the Noah story, it takes all of the measurements with it. The other source that also tells the Noah story doesn't even include the instruction to build an ark, it just presumes Noah either already has one or has access to one. Reading about the different sources for Genesis for the first time blew me away because for all the times I had read it as a child, I had not noticed there were in fact two creation stories. There's the one everyone knows and can recite, and then a couple chapters in God just creates the world again. Egregious editorial oversight or method to the madness?
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Sep 18, 2025 01:26
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Judgy Fucker posted:Reading about the different sources for Genesis for the first time blew me away because for all the times I had read it as a child, I had not noticed there were in fact two creation stories. There's the one everyone knows and can recite, and then a couple chapters in God just creates the world again. Egregious editorial oversight or method to the madness? Well it's important to remember that the religious traditions of Judaism are vastly older than the actual Old Testament, that only got compiled and written down as a singular canonical thing between 530-330 BCE. Lots of disparate groups and communities had slightly divergent oral traditions and theologies that nonetheless all considered themselves equally "true" and equally Jewish, so when the Persians ended the Babylonian Exile and it came down to actually chronicling it all into one unified Jewish historical/religious text the redactors figured that leaving something out would just unnecessarily piss someone off, so better safe than sorry. The inerrant true Word of God has got to be in there somewhere if you just include everything that MIGHT be relevant, right? This is where you get a lot of the doublets, where basically the same story beats happen twice in slightly different ways. Two different groups had slightly different versions, and the editors decided to split the difference and include them both to avoid a schism. Asterite34 fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Sep 18, 2025 |
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Sep 18, 2025 01:37
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My favorite part is the one where God refers to "we" -- though I suppose our Christian friends have an answer to that one, don't they?
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Sep 18, 2025 01:46
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I like the bit that's explicit there are a bunch of gods but you're only allowed to worship this one. I've never read more than a bit of the Bible so had no idea about it until a friend who did religious studies mentioned that.
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Sep 18, 2025 01:47
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Judgy Fucker posted:Reading about the different sources for Genesis for the first time blew me away because for all the times I had read it as a child, I had not noticed there were in fact two creation stories. There's the one everyone knows and can recite, and then a couple chapters in God just creates the world again. Egregious editorial oversight or method to the madness? would recommend watching the Useful Charts video on this, he presents a very convincing theory for it: https://youtu.be/NY-l0X7yGY0?si=79oMSGSuVo8pQ1Sk
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Sep 18, 2025 01:54
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Grand Fromage posted:I like the bit that's explicit there are a bunch of gods but you're only allowed to worship this one. I've never read more than a bit of the Bible so had no idea about it until a friend who did religious studies mentioned that. That would be considered monolatry, correct? In faiths where that occurs (like the early Israelite religion), are certain deities more powerful than others, or are they all equivalent, and one is just the correct one to worship?
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Sep 18, 2025 02:40
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Judgy Fucker posted:Reading about the different sources for Genesis for the first time blew me away because for all the times I had read it as a child, I had not noticed there were in fact two creation stories. There's the one everyone knows and can recite, and then a couple chapters in God just creates the world again. Egregious editorial oversight or method to the madness? There's a method to the madness. The Pentatuch, that is, the first 5 books of the Hebrew Bible (known by Jews today as the Torah), has a bunch of overlapping and repeated stories. This is because these books were produced by combining separate, independently written accounts of Israel's history into one work. The traditional model is that there 4 sources, although some people would rather propose more complex models where they want to break things up into a lot more than 4 sources. The 4 source theory of the Pentatuch is known as the Documentary Hypothesis, and its been fought over for a long time but the broad outlines are widely accepted by Biblical scholars. The 4 sources are known as P, J, E, and D. P is the Priestly source, this includes Genesis 1, much of Leviticus, most of the sections talking about holiness and ritual purity, and a bunch of other stuff. J is the Yawistic source (which is J since Germans developed this scheme), this includes Genesis 2 and a whole bunch of other stuff. E is the Elohistic source, which doesn't show up until Abraham, and includes a lot of Exodus. A distinctive feature of E is that it never uses the name of God (YHWH) until the name is revealed to Moses in Exodus. (Whereas P and J both use the name throughout Genesis). Despite that, J and E can be hard to distinguish, and most of the debate about the Documentary Hypothesis and other competing models centers around J and E (some people prefer to see J and E as a whole bunch of different stories and fragments of text that gradually merged together into one "JE" source rather than 2 distinct documents). D is the Deuteronomic source, and its the only source limited to just one book of the Pentatuch. It makes up the large majority of Deuteronomy, and its also unique in that it clearly has direct knowledge of at least one other source document. (P, J, E all appear to be independent of each other). At some point in the history of the Ancient Israelites, probably no earlier than the 6th century BCE, potentially later than that, someone or some group sat down and combined all of these separate documents into a single work -- what would become known as the Torah. This was done with great care. Its clear from how well we can pull out the different sources from the compiled text that the redactors of the Pentatuch were unwilling to edit the wording or order of their source documents. Instead, they carefully spliced paragraphs and sentences together without additions or deletions. Biblical Source Criticism is the act of un-doing this process of splicing. What emerged from this process was a document that sought to artfully merge all (or at least 4) competing traditions of Israel's history and origins, rather than choose one to elevate over the others. It seems likely that the redactors held all of their sources in high esteem and were unwilling to edit the combined narrative for clarity or choose one version of a story over another. The fact that this process led to a ton of contradictions in the text clearly did not bother the people who produced it. Answering the question of why this did not bother them is difficult at this late date, but the careful skill with which they put the Pentatuch together from their source documents makes it apparent that they knew what they were doing and made an intentional choice to create something that could not be understood easily. The difficulty of interpreting the Torah is actually something the late Biblical books, which postdate the compilation of the Torah, reflect on. Nehemiah 8, which discusses the reading of the Torah to the Israelites after the return of exiles from Babylon, says that the reading had to be accompanied by interpretation so that people could understand it. For better or worse, its a feature of the text, not an oversight. CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Sep 18, 2025 |
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Sep 18, 2025 02:44
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As with most premodern religious things I think it's helpful to remember that many of the greatest minds in their generations were analyzing this. We're not just gonna saunter in and say "actually your book says your religion is polytheist" in a way that hasn't already been accounted for and justified in at least some way or another.
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Sep 18, 2025 03:10
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two fish posted:That would be considered monolatry, correct? In faiths where that occurs (like the early Israelite religion), are certain deities more powerful than others, or are they all equivalent, and one is just the correct one to worship? My understanding, which is entirely second hand to be super clear, is they were all legitimate and similar gods and you just weren't supposed to worship any of the others. It's a holdover from the evolution of the Israelite religion from polytheism to monotheism. It's just interesting that it's still in the stories, so if you were taking every word of the Bible as literally true then there are all these other gods around doing uh... I dunno, flying around in ha'taks or something.
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Sep 18, 2025 03:16
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I always thought the first commandment ("Thou shalt have no other gods before me") could sensibly be read as acknowledging there were plenty of other gods and you could acknowledge and even propitiate them so long as they were always secondary in importance to Big YHWH.
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Sep 18, 2025 03:42
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“Elohim” has the form of a Hebrew plural and can also be used in precisely that way (to mean “gods” or “the gods”) independent of its use as a name of the God of Israel. “Adonai” is also plural form (literally “my lords”). Elohim speaks of himself in the plural on occasion: Genesis 1:26 is faithful to the Hebrew when it has Elohim speak of making man “in our image”. (The verse is not in complete agreement with itself on this though: when the narrative says that Elohim speaks, it uses a singular form of the verb) the traditional monotheistic cope for this is that it’s a kind of “royal we” where God gets to be multiple people grammatically (but not in real life, that would be wrong) because hes just that cool. But it is quite obvious in numerous places in the Bible that there was an ancient concept of the God of Israel as the chief of an assembly of divinities (angels, heavenly host (=Tzevaot/Sabaoth), in Job 1:6 the “sons of Elohim”) As a separate problem, it is also clear from the Bible that its authors thought the YHWH/Elohim/Adonai cult at Jerusalem was extremely not the only religious practice of the ancient Israelites & Judahites. Probably it never had been. The implication of the Bible itself is that that kind of monotheism and legalism didn’t become firmly established until the exile at the earliest and possibly not until well into the second temple period.
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Sep 18, 2025 03:45
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it's dramatically interesting and evocative to have an Enemy, even if logically speaking if your guy created the universe and did not, like, dissipate into the universe or perish of old age or some similar mythic 'the Creator WAS real, but is now gone' explanation -- then any Enemy, he created for himself. I suppose if you see everything as being a test of faith created by God, one could envision angels who were assigned to the roles of various pagan gods and allowed to improvise, and who may have even had the latitude to provide decent moral foundations or these convenient traces/gestures towards our theology, which are certainly not the work of our clever theologians and interpreters. did i just create a new heresy? e: to spin this out a little, presumably opinions would differ on whether those angels might still be 'on the job' in some form, or if they've wound down and you'd better get with the program even if grace is still extended to little children. Nessus fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Sep 18, 2025 |
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Sep 18, 2025 04:09
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I like the tradition in Kabbalah that Satan is not an adversary but has the task of testing creation, ensuring that in the end everything has its place in the hierarchy of being. From memory, the point is that creation is a process of God perceiving God.
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Sep 18, 2025 05:42
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When archaeological remnants are found of precursors to modern religions, how are they generally viewed by that religion? Like would statues to other Israelite gods be seen as offensive in Judaism, or would it just be seen as a relic of a more ignorant time?
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Sep 18, 2025 11:09
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That's one of the cases where you need a strong sense of religious unity and canon, which basically means that it's only relevant to Judaism (Christianity and Islam being revealed at specific historical times). For polytheistic religions, having more gods or even changing gods is less of a problem, although I don't really know anything about them. As for Judaism specifically, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most modern Jews understand the historical context of their religion, although I'm sure you can find some who will tell you it's a fake put there by Satan (who is not generally a part of Judaism). You might even get some Christians to agree with that point of view, but I feel like it's marginal. It also helps that the Bible/Torah is full of artifacts of polytheism, like the commandment against sacrificing your children to Moloch. (Bible hack: child sacrifice is actually okay if you pick another deity, of which there is one...)
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Sep 18, 2025 11:46
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Well now I'm contextualizing Abraham sacrificing Issac as one of those hosed up Tiktok relationship test things.
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Sep 18, 2025 12:13
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Mad Hamish posted:Well now I'm contextualizing Abraham sacrificing Issac as one of those hosed up Tiktok relationship test things. oh 100%
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Sep 18, 2025 12:23
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BonHair posted:As for Judaism specifically, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most modern Jews understand the historical context of their religion I don't know what Jews you met but I grew up Orthodox (not haredi) and I would say maybe one of a hundred religious Jews would be aware / would believe in the historical context (multiple gods, being yet another Cnaanite god, being compiled from multiple sources etc). When the Bible is taught it is taught, as mentioned, alongside interpretation. The Bible we used had the Rashi commentary in it. Unrelated probably dumb question (though still about religion): I was reading Weavers, Scribes and Kings recently (highly recommended) and it talks a lot about Mesopotamian religions. It emphasises that people genuinely believed in their religions and their beliefs effected the way they behaved (and not just the other way around). While it is clear that parts of the religions were simply practical - either by being just common sense / good advise or "labels" the rulers would put on things that they wanted the populace to do (e.g. I'm the husband of the goddess so you must worship me). For example - the kings would often ask their seers for war advice. They would do things sacrifice animals and then try reading for signs in their innards. How much of this was the seer (and the king by extension) truly believing they were receiving a message from a god in the black blotches, and how much of that was the seer functionally acting as an adviser and consciously or unconsciously providing advice in the guise of a godly message? If we consider memetics, how would these nonsense ideas hold on for thousands and thousands of years? If kings rely on them to make important decisions, wouldn't you expect those kings to do worse? Instinctively I'd want to say that the religion only acts as a "label" or "colours" what the king (or whoever) would do either way. The seers tell them what they want to hear, or what the seer thinks. But when you look at specific examples you see many where there appears to be these acts of genuine belief that are counterproductive. How and why did this seemingly happen everywhere all the time? kiminewt fucked around with this message at 13:08 on Sep 18, 2025 |
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Sep 18, 2025 12:41
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Nessus posted:it's dramatically interesting and evocative to have an Enemy, even if logically speaking if your guy created the universe and did not, like, dissipate into the universe or perish of old age or some similar mythic 'the Creator WAS real, but is now gone' explanation -- then any Enemy, he created for himself. That's pretty similar to some forms of Gnosticism where the day to day running of the universe is done by a hierarchy of Archons ranging from anywhere from 7 to 365 in number. They're at best flawed and at worst actively evil.
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Sep 18, 2025 13:14
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Nessus posted:it's dramatically interesting and evocative to have an Enemy, even if logically speaking if your guy created the universe and did not, like, dissipate into the universe or perish of old age or some similar mythic 'the Creator WAS real, but is now gone' explanation -- then any Enemy, he created for himself. This is just the Silmarillion
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Sep 18, 2025 13:46
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aardvaard posted:would recommend watching the Useful Charts video on this, he presents a very convincing theory for it: https://youtu.be/NY-l0X7yGY0?si=79oMSGSuVo8pQ1Sk Hey, thanks for this! Was not familiar with this channel. And thanks to everyone else for chiming in on the textual criticism 
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Sep 18, 2025 14:06
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kiminewt posted:For example - the kings would often ask their seers for war advice. They would do things sacrifice animals and then try reading for signs in their innards. How much of this was the seer (and the king by extension) truly believing they were receiving a message from a god in the black blotches, and how much of that was the seer functionally acting as an adviser and consciously or unconsciously providing advice in the guise of a godly message? I think the usual thing said here is to believe that they believed it More cynically if you wish to be, the grand vizier or whomever does have a vested interest in giving good advice that keeps the country running smoothly and prosperously so even when they're taking inscrutable auspices or translating dreams they're like to be advising honestly in some way or another. and if it's good advice well maybe it is a message from god after all anyway ! ! ! wow. I think a lot of it was less vibes based than the modern curious might realize to begin with. "reading the bones" sounds very informal but even something like scapulimancy has examples of teachable, systematic divination manuals that recorded the organized methods of interpretation/belief. Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian religion are full of texts on omen interpretation, dreams were an area of pretty common interest in both regions. the i ching further east is a robust divinatory language refined over thousands of years and still in use across the world today (multiple witnesses attest). I think it happened everywhere and all the time because we are always searching for something to strive for, life is a series of pursuits and desires and we all end up circling back to the need to strive toward something better than the world we're currently in. Is that thing (God) real is a whole other argument to itself but. well.
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Sep 18, 2025 14:44
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it's impossible to know the subjective mental state of ancient diviners unless they happened to record journals that came to us miraculously... my best guess is that they interpreted the signs to the situation, so obviously if there's a blemish on the goat lung that's probably referring to the weakness in the left maniple that y'all have been worried about and clearly your advice should be 'don't attack, you need to get the left maniple in order.' There probably were marginal cases where a clean divination was a green light and went poorly, though there may also be cases where a success was not pursued because they opened up a goat and it was full of worms or something. skasion posted:This is just the Silmarillion
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Sep 18, 2025 14:50
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And sometimes the omens are pretty skewed one way. Did the sacred chickens eat the sacred grain? The gods must approve of this plan, let's go for it.
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Sep 18, 2025 14:54
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Stories like Pulcher also reinforce that people believed in this stuff. The point is the gods were telling him correct information through the chickens and he chose to defy them. The underlying assumption to make the story work there is the sacred chickens refusing to eat is meaningful and if you know what's good for you, you listen to the omens when they're taken. And the other side of that is, did it actually happen or was that story made up after the fact as moral instruction? That's hard to say, but even if it was made up the moral of the story is to not defy the gods.
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Sep 18, 2025 14:57
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Nessus posted:it's impossible to know the subjective mental state of ancient diviners unless they happened to record journals that came to us miraculously... my best guess is that they interpreted the signs to the situation, so obviously if there's a blemish on the goat lung that's probably referring to the weakness in the left maniple that y'all have been worried about and clearly your advice should be 'don't attack, you need to get the left maniple in order.' True, but we can look to modern analogues, lilke glossoalia, where individuals believe they are moved by the holy spirit and engage in a specific type of babbling that another individual, who also believed they are being moved by the holy spirit, translates that message (usually some horror story Left Behind poo poo). I know these people, I've been to their services more times than I would've wished, and they are 100% sincere in their beliefs that they happened, or they are keeping up kayfabe at all times. Also I doubt most divinations were at the tactical level, more big picture stuff about not being wicked and which sacrificies and obeisances to perform. And if the advice was bad? Well people still pray for illnesses to be cured and if they are it's a miracle and if they aren't it's just god's will. These are diametrically opposed theologies that the vast majority of humans on earth hold in their heads without effort. There's a fun scene in Kingdom of Heaven that kind of gets to this, I'm not saying it's a historical document but Saladin arguing with a mullah about who wins battles, gods or good generals, I'm not sure if it's based on anything Saladin actually said but it's about a guy trying to navigate secular realities and religious mores. (Also I love the guy who plays saladin) zoux fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Sep 18, 2025 |
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Sep 18, 2025 15:04
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One of the issues of history is that it's a bit like classic rock. People sometimes think music used to be better and more soulful than the corpo dreck we get now, but mostly it's just that all the old corpo dreck got forgotten by posterity and the passage of time has distilled out only the stuff worth remembering that everyone now in hindsight acknowledges was actually really good all along. All the seers and prophets who claimed their system had perfect infallibly accurate predictions and then kept guessing wrong over and over were seen as laughingstocks and charlatans, and the ones who get remembered are the guys whose predictions happened to be right, and so the belief in various methods of prophecy continued and were generally accepted as valid authorities, whether it was True Believers happening to guess right or some more canny practicioners who fudged their numbers to give predictions with a bit more oomph than sheep livers would suggest by themselves.
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Sep 18, 2025 15:04
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One important thing to keep in mind with ancient divination is that they didn't expect 100% accuracy or 100% consistency. A diviner being wrong wouldn't disprove the system, since it was expected that divining the will of the gods was challenging and mysterious. Diviners could and did disagree over interpreting the same omens, so we shouldn't think about divination as something that produced a exactly one falsifiable claim. Different traditions of diviners, exorcists and astrologers for example, would approach the same situation quite differently sometimes. This is something we can see in the letters of scholars to the Assyrian kings, they were constantly trying to advocate for their methods and undermine those of others.
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Sep 18, 2025 15:29
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Well obviously goat entrails aren't going to tell you when the enemy is going to attack, are you stupid? Ram's guts, that's the scientific consensus.
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Sep 18, 2025 15:40
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It's pretty certain that omens were manipulated to gently caress at times, because the priests knew who were paying the bills and also what they wanted to hear. Kinda like we know various ordeals were blatantly rigged, like a trial by river where the guy was weighed down with stones. Other times, I'm sure it was genuine belief. I think a modern comparison would be impartial bureaucrats providing briefings and opinions to governments. We all pretend they're objective, but some bureaucrats are extremely good at reading the room and providing the facts that happen to agree with the government policy, while others provide facts that agree with objective reality because they believe in the system.
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Sep 18, 2025 15:47
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One of my favorite stories is Claudius Pulcher and the sacred chickens. The Romans had military tradition where sacred chickens were offered a bunch of grains and seeds, and if they ate them, it meant it was a good omen. Obviously rigged, because they're chickens and of course they're going to eat the seeds and grains you scatter in front of them. Anyway, before the naval Battle of Drepana in the First Punic War the sacred chickens are consulted and, shockingly, refuse to eat. Claudius Pulcher declares "well if they're not hungry, maybe they're thirsty" and throws the chickens overboard. The Roman navy is subsequently annihilated by the Carthaginians, probably 75% of their ships are sunk and 20,000 sailors lost. Pulcher managed to escape execution but was exiled for sacrilege (abusing the chickens). It may or may not be true - I don't believe Polybius mentions the anecodte at all - but it's a good illustration of "rig the omens"
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Sep 18, 2025 15:55
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People do believe their own religion for the most part, but we shouldn’t necessarily assume ancient diviners saw their divinations in the same light as the people who were the audience of their divinations. Cicero, who was an augur, wrote a dialogue On Divination. I recommend reading it if you want an ancient perspective on the subject, there is a major explanation of the theory and quite a bit of detail on the practice. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cicero/de_Divinatione/home.html Admirably short summary from that page: quote:He doesn’t believe in it. But there is some nuance (Cicero doesn’t think augury should be abolished or anything like that, it has pragmatic value to him—he elsewhere calls his augurship the greatest office of the republic and his career due to its procedural powers). the existence of the book indicates that his skeptical point of view was not the default. he also tells some interesting stories in process of arguing it. Cicero gives himself the task of arguing that divination is cooked (he frames this as the position of the Skeptic Academy), and his brother Quintus the task of defending it (the Stoic position). He also gives his brother a hilarious line about why divination can still be valid even though it doesn’t always work: On Divination 1.14 posted:Again, is statecraft devoid of method or skill because political mistakes were made many times by Gnaeus Pompey, occasionally by Marcus Cato, and once or twice even by yourself? Just once or twice, Marcus, that’s probably why they exiled you. Anyway, it is acknowledged by both “sides” here that divination practices like augury or haruspicy can be cooked. But Cicero makes Quintus argue that in addition to that, there are two kinds of divination which are valid: one where the diviner sees which way the wind is blowing and makes a deduction of the future couched in religious terms; and one where the diviner is a visionary or oracle who predicts the future in a dream or inspired/altered state. Cicero proceeds to trash him by arguing that, pretty much, the former guy is nothing special and the latter guy is nuts. Quintus says the Delphic oracle’s historical reputation for accuracy must have a basis in fact, and her acknowledged uselessness nowadays is a real change (maybe her inspirational fumes dried up); Cicero says the Pythia was already doing publicity for Philip of Macedon 300 years ago and she was probably always bullshitting: “When did the virtue disappear? Was it after men began to be less credulous?” On Divination 2.35 posted:I think that, although in the beginning augural law was established from a belief in divination, yet later it was maintained and preserved from considerations of political expediency.
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Sep 18, 2025 15:59
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:I think a lot of it was less vibes based than the modern curious might realize to begin with. "reading the bones" sounds very informal but even something like scapulimancy has examples of teachable, systematic divination manuals that recorded the organized methods of interpretation/belief. Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian religion are full of texts on omen interpretation, dreams were an area of pretty common interest in both regions. Haruspicy also has specific "reference manuals" in the form of little sculptures used like diagrams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_of_Piacenza. Here's an Oxford scholar trying it out by asking the livers if there would be an election soon: https://www.queens.ox.ac.uk/news/reading-the-past-ancient-liver-divination/ quote:I obtained a couple of livers from one of the Fellows who keeps sheep in a field next to his house. This was an ideal opportunity to compare the ancient texts that I study with what the diviners would have seen in real life. I asked the livers a question and then analysed them in the same way that the ancient Assyrians would have done, looking for positive and negative signs, and then looked up the results in a series of clay tablets that explain what individual omens mean. If there are more positive signs and negative signs the answer to the question is yes, whereas if it is the other way round the answer is no. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM1eNrfQLfs She doesn't say what the answer was! 
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Sep 18, 2025 16:10
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They were performing technical analysis on leading indicators such as the behavior of the sacred chickens, obviously. Not like the obviously self-serving clap-trap of the establishment/mainstream ram-liverology.
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Sep 18, 2025 16:30
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Who is the earliest identifiable deity?
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Sep 18, 2025 16:32
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There's the idea that, in a military context, divination is useful as a way of injecting true randomness into your tactics to make you less predictable to the enemy. Human brains being really bad at true randomness, and also not likely to go along with flipping a coin for life and death decisions.
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Sep 18, 2025 16:35
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