You all send your friends memes with no context whatsoever like I do with all of my friends?

I have text chains back and forth with one buddy in particular where we never say a dang word.

It's just memes from pop culture that I think make real interesting

points. And I know that deep down, he's laughing and whatever I send him, but I don't need like

L-O-L or anything like that you know it's just

meme bouncing back and forth it's real real fun. Memes are kind of entertaining

because they assume a shared knowledge of pop culture and they're riffing on an

established story to make comment on other stories or to make comment on current

events or whatever it might be and it's not a new idea

it's just new in terms of the way we package it up. Well the only stories you can

really riff on or meme on are ones that are great and well enough known, popular enough that people will get the joke, they'll get the context.

And so I don't think it should probably be any surprise then that the story is great as the one that we just worked through that being Esther that a lot of people over the ages have maimed on it and have rifed on it and one dude in the early 1900s a man

named Lewis Ginsburg went out of his way to record a whole bunch of the best memes and riffs and legends and bonus

teachings and religious fan fiction if you will from within historical Judaism's this would be stuff from the

Talmud and the Midrash and other places as well and he clumped it all together

in his one seminal work called the legends of the Jews. That is an awesome title by the way. I was

clearly born a hundred years and changed too late because I I really like to have claimed that one that's rad but only

Louis Ginsburg gets to own it and in this he goes through and he did his best to

grab all of these legends from all of these different

sources that had emerged about the most famousest stuff from the Old Testament.

So you got stuff about the patriarchs,

you got stuff about the age of the judges, the conquest.

...