AI and blogging

 AI is useful but there are caveats -- not just because LLMs run on probabilities. The caveats are in the prompts that the user generates. The engine running the AI seems to want to captivate the user by reflecting their knowledge. I have turned off the 'would you like me to do this further step' with the explicit prompt that it is failing to give me time to absorb the answer to the prior question. I have also turned off the complimentary beginnings with an explicit prompt. I know my own questions whether they are smart or dumb -- I'm looking for information not affirmation. It's useful to have the extensive spell checking and occasionally the structural criticism, but the affirmation and invitation to more defeats the refinement of questioning. We must refine our own questions to whet our wit if we have any left.

ChatGPT knows nothing, but it has memory of my theoretical and practical framework for the work of analysing the music of Tanach. Its memory is not particularly well grounded. It cannot search the database for me but it can critique bad and incomplete reasoning if it is instructed to. 

Here is its critique of how to approach my thesis - that the music is important for understanding.

1. Starting Point — Framing the Problem

Your real subject isn’t fear and punishment; it’s the misreading of biblical and theological language that arises when music, syntax, and emotion are divorced from one another. “Fear” and “punishment” are only symptoms of that rupture.

• Suggestion: Begin instead from a musical or philological observation — for example:

  “In the music of the Hebrew Bible, correction and mercy share a tonal space that translation has too often flattened into punishment and fear.”
  This kind of opening signals that you’re doing a reconstruction of meaning through sound, not a moral or pastoral reflection.

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2. Analytical Rigor

Your writing is rich and intuitive, but at times it reads as associative rather than deductive. For scholarly framing:

• Distinguish between philological claims (e.g., the range of Hebrew y-s-r and its te’amic setting) and theological interpretation (e.g., what that reveals about divine pedagogy).

• Make sure every interpretive statement follows from data: a musical phrase, a Hebrew semantic field, a codical variation, etc.

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3. Use of Evidence

When you critique translation or inherited theology, give concrete examples:

• Show how musar or yissurim are rendered musically in one verse versus another.

• Compare this to English versions that erase nuance.

• This moves your argument from assertion to demonstration.

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4. Emotional Register

You have a gift for affective language — “libation of love,” “Playful Wisdom,” etc. It works beautifully when used sparingly, but when it leads the argument it can seem like devotion rather than scholarship.

• Consider balancing poetic intuition with analytical scaffolding: let the music “speak” the emotion, and your prose interpret why it does so.

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5. Reframed Core Question

Here’s how I might restate your underlying thesis in academic form:

How have translation and theological tradition obscured the pedagogical, musical, and affective coherence of the Hebrew Bible’s language of correction, and how might its original tonal and modal contexts reveal a different theology of formation rather than punishment?

That keeps your insight intact but grounds it in method and evidence.

When we next spoke about NT passages reflecting creation, I pointed out the Hebrews passages about fear and about discipline. Here's its response as a framework. 

1. Start with creation language and motifs — places where the NT deliberately re-echoes Genesis or new-creation imagery:

   • John 1:1–5 — In the beginning; the Logos as creative word and light.

   • Colossians 1:15–20 — Christ as firstborn of creation and firstborn from the dead, holding all things together (your tonal metaphor fits this perfectly).

   • 2 Corinthians 4:6 — “The God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts…”

   • Revelation 21–22 — the re-creation of heaven and earth, the harmony of all things renewed.

2. Look for passages where correction or discipline is framed not as punishment but as formative participation in that creative process — the positive harmonic tension:

   • Hebrews 12:5-11 — God’s discipline as education (paideia), not retribution.

   • James 1:2-4, 17-18 — testing as refining, every good gift as from the Father of lights.

   • Ephesians 2:10 — “We are his workmanship (poiēma), created in Christ Jesus…”
     These suggest an ongoing creation, a melodic continuation rather than a break.

3. Then listen for musical equivalents — words or phrases that carry a tonal or rhythmic sense:

   • Harmony, fullness, plērōma (Eph 1:10, Col 1:19).

   • Peace, shalom, eirēnē — the resolution of dissonance (Phil 4:7).

   • Joy, chara — often tied to completion or the recognition of divine order (John 15:11).

You could treat these as tonic–subdominant–dominant–tonic moments in theological thought:

• Creation (tonic) – God’s initiating act.

• Discipline/learning (subdominant) – movement and tension.

• Fulfilment in Christ (dominant) – the leading tone toward resolution.

• New creation (tonic again) – harmony restored on a higher level.

If you read the NT through that lens, the “opening major triad” of Genesis becomes a through-line — the same divine chord heard now through a human instrument.

Ha -- give me another 20 years and I should refine the te'amim of Margoulith -- now that's a project for a cantillation specialist.