Stewart Moore: Stories

Author: Stewart Moore

  • Destroy This Mad Brute!

    Today’s biblical contradiction is a timely warning about not paying attention to your own propaganda. It is also a reminder of the danger of totalizing statements. The question today is, when did the ancient Israelites think they had conquered Jerusalem? Biblical scholars will often tell you that the book of Joshua tells the story of…

  • Necronomicon Ex Mortis

    Ray Bradbury was once asked what his favorite topics were. He immediately said, “Dinosaurs!” A moment later, “Egypt! Mummies!” When a seven-year-old version of me read this, he had to agree that Bradbury had put his finger on one and two. Today, my list would probably be more complicated, but these would still be top…

  • The Imp of the Perverse

    You will think me mad, no doubt. How could it be otherwise? To have embarked on such a project is itself a sign of madness in the eyes of world. Yet see how I proceed, rationally, step by step. Can one who speaks thus be mad? Therefore, hearken when I tell you: the three most…

  • Pandora’s Boxes

    This has bothered me practically my whole life, since I first read the D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths. Pandora is given a box, right? And in it is every evil in the world, right? And she opens the box and releases every evil, right? Except she slams the lid down right at the end, so that Hope…

  • Sour Grapes

    Today’s biblical contradiction involves the Ten Commandments, so you know it’s juicy. In fact, it’s “juicy” in more ways than one. The Second Commandment reads: You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in…

  • The Fantastic Voyage

    Tzvetan Todorov. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. This book has been on my list for at least a decade. I don’t remember where I read about it first. It’s a typical mid-20th-century scholarly effort, dense as hell but mercifully short. I’ve seen it referred to…

  • It’s a Cookbook!

    Today’s biblical contradiction is so basic, so obvious, that it even has the dictionaries running scared. There is a Hebrew word, bashal. It means “to cook by boiling.” It’s very specific. It doesn’t mean generically “to cook by any means.” Just “to boil.” A look at all the uses of the word bashal (aside from…

  • Under the Sea

    Steve P. Kershaw, The Search for Atlantis: A History of Plato’s Ideal State (New York: Pegasus Books, 2018). This is a rollicking account of Atlantis from its forebears in other mythical islands of the Greeks, to its source in two dialogues of Plato (the Timaeus and the Critias), through many of the speculations that have…

  • I Don’t Care How Dorky You Think It Looks, You Have To Wear the Name Tag

    When I first read Everett Fox’s translation of the Torah, I was surprised to learn that God had a proper name. Fox used only the consonants, as in the Hebrew: YHWH. The vowels traditionally printed in Hebrew Bibles are actually the vowels for the Hebrew words equivalent to “the Lord.” Mistakenly pronouncing them together, the…

  • The RDA of Irony

    I read the Symposium in seminary almost 20 years ago, and I read the Allegory of the Cave back in high school, but other than that my exposure to Plato has been entirely second- and third-hand. He comes up in Second Temple Judaism in the study of Philo of Alexandria’s works, but not in much…