In the 1990s, thanks to Bart Simpson, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and George Costanza’s girlfriend in Seinfeld, Americans picked up biblical Hebrew without even realizing it: yada yada. In casual slang it means “blah, blah.” Literally, it’s closer to “I know, I know.” But in the Old Testament, yada goes deeper—naming Adam’s intimacy with Eve, describing God’s attention to Israel’s suffering in bondage, and reminding us that knowing is always more than mere brain activity.
The distance between the English idiom and its Hebrew roots is itself a reminder of the layered complexity of knowing. For what do we really know, anyway? How do we come to know what we know? And what about the fact that, by definition, we don’t know what we don’t know?
In a post-truth age of slippery facts and competing authorities, the question of knowledge is inseparable from the question of power. Cultural anthropologist Johannes Fabian highlighted this fraught relationship when he distinguished between three types of knowledge: as state, possession, and activity.
