Then and Now
At the beginning of the semester I assembled a team of students (Gabriel Burstyn and Songkai Zhao) to explore ways in which AI and machine learning can contribute to the academic study of early rabbinic literature. This is a burgeoning field and … [Continue reading] about Word Similarity in the Talmud
Strange image generated by DALL-E for this post First published on my Substack. In an earlier post, I discussed a very simple and quick experiment that I did on a photograph of an ancient Jewish inscription written in Greek. The results … [Continue reading] about AI and Ancient Inscriptions
Hanukkah is the only Jewish holiday not mentioned in the Jewish Bible. About four hundred years after the events that gave rise to the holiday, the rabbis were still uneasily puzzling about it: The Gemara asks: What is Hanukkah, and why are lights … [Continue reading] about What Really Happened on Hanukkah?
This was originally published in my Substack, available here. I sometimes call myself a scholar of “Late Antiquity.” But what does that mean? There is nothing obvious or natural about how we name historical eras. Such names are both loaded and … [Continue reading] about What is “Late Antiquity”?
This was originally published on my Substack, available here. For many years, I have been directing a project to make available the inscriptions that date from around 520 BCE - 620 CE (the Persian, Second Temple, and Rabbinic periods, using a Jewish … [Continue reading] about Can ChatGPT Read Ancient Texts?