A Little Help: Milestone Women in Biblical Studies

What women would you include in a list of major figures in the study of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament? In particular, who are among the movers and shakers: critical scholars whose work must be taken into consideration by anyone approaching their subject matter?

I invite you to be as subjective and idiosyncratic as you like in your proposals. Nobody has to defend their choices, though by all means describe your reasons as you like.

I ask because I am drafting up some reading lists to use as a resource for designing some courses and for revising courses I already teach. I don’t want to limit myself to the women scholars toward whom I already habitually gravitate.

For obvious cultural reasons, we tend to tick off the major turning points in biblical studies according to men's names: Wellhausen, Gunkel, Noth, von Rad, Muilenburg. From that point, it has been easier (relatively speaking!) for women’s work to be published and to receive regard. As much as possible, I would like to get names from a broad range of periods and approaches.

Taking the study of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament as a whole—old names and new, from every aspect of critical biblical study—what women would you include in a list provisionally titled, “Women biblical scholars with whose work you really must be in conversation, if I am to take seriously your treatment of texts”?

Jargon, Phlebotinum, Bad Explanations, and Bible Woo

Professional jargon gets a bad rap, but it is a useful and indispensable tool: jargon is precise speech that allows experts to speak efficiently with one another. Technical terms have the virtue of being able to mean more narrowly, in fewer words, than does the usual language.

Like any tool, jargon can be misused. Both Ben Goldacre (Bad Science) and Mark Liberman (Language Log) have called attention to a recent study (Weisburg et al, PDF)* showing that bad explanations about human behavior are made more convincing if you sprinkle them with jargon from the field of neuroscience. This can undoubtedly be generalized: bad explanations about anything can seem more convincing, especially to the non-specialist, if served up with a helping of techno-babble.

I want to touch on two categories of misuse: the accidental misuse of jargon in teaching and learning, and the intentional misuse of jargon in pseudo-scholarship. Toward that end, I propose to slightly extend the usual use of a favorite word: phlebotinum.

“Phlebotinum” (sometimes “phlebotnum,” rarely “flebotinum”) was coined by David Greenwalt, screenwriter for Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. It refers to any magical/mystical force or item that exists to further create the show’s narrative world or advance its plot. (Compare to the better-known term, “McGuffin.”) As phlebotinum, an item is intrinsically meaningless: it can be the Orb of Zanzum, the Arm of Ragnok, gamma rays…its significance is purely utilitarian. As that last example shows, real-life things can be used as phlebotinum (here, gamma rays in Spider Man The Hulk) if narratively employed in a fictionalizing way. From a writer’s standpoint, phlebotinum is a placeholder: “Tragically, the heroine allowed the (phlebotinum) to touch the (phlebotinum), allowing the (phlebotinum) to escape (phlebotinum) and wreak havoc on the city.”

As has any teacher, I have seen student work reduce the jargon of my field to meaninglessness. “Form critically, the Deuteronomistic Historian is a source, whereas saga is a narrative where God is ideological.” (Example is made up, thank God, but not by much.) Any student can misunderstand a technical term, but this is different. The student is not so much showing a genuine misunderstanding of the terms, as rather desperately plugging in phlebotinum to “move along the plot” of her doomed explanatory narrative. From a teaching perspective, there is some diagnosis to be done here: has the student simply blown off the material until late in the game? Has she been going outside the course material and cramming with bad explanations from irresponsible sources? Or has she been attending diligently to explanations that are accurate enough but for which she has not adequately been prepared?

Finally, there is the intentionally misleading use of technical terms in pseudo-scholarship, or “woo.” Just as the writer of speculative fiction uses phlebotinum to create her narrative universe or advance her plot, just so does the woo-meister use otherwise-sound technical terms in a fictionalizing way in order to mischaracterize the actual universe or advance her lying narrative depiction of the real world. That is, she seeks to dupe the hearer by employing perfectly good jargon as phlebotinum.

This dimension of phlebotinum—the deceptive use of jargon to advance a fictional narrative explanation of real-life phenomena—goes to the heart of what makes woo, woo. I would propose as a working definition of “Bible woo” the following:

Bible woo: any discourse about the Bible that advances its claims using the appearance and trappings of reasoned argument, while systematically avoiding responsibility to the strictures of reasoned argument.

In a later installment, I will address the objection that any speech about the Bible must be woo: a necessary step, since the term “woo” originates in circles that are traditionally antagonistic to religion in general and therefore to the Bible by association.

* That PDF seems to change locations regularly. If you try the link and it’s broken, notify me in a comment to this post and I’ll track it down again.

iTunes U and YouTube-Edu

Truth is, I am still researching my planned blog entry. So, as a ready placeholder, I offer a couple of resources that many readers will already know, but some will not (and should!).

iTunes U: If you have iTunes (which is free for Mac and Windows), you can go to the iTunes Store and will find there a tab for “iTunes U.” (iTunes U is a component of Apple Mobile Learning.) In iTunes U are found podcasts that come from institutions of higher education: colleges, universities, divinity schools, and so on. You can browse by category, or look at top downloads, or even browse the most frequent providers. Near the bottom of the window, a link offers an introduction for those new to iTunes U.

YouTube/EDU: Use the regular address for YouTube, but add "/edu" to the end of the URL, like so: http://www.youtube.com/edu . As with iTunes U, this yields a portal to YouTube content uploaded by institutions of higher education. You can scroll horizontally through specific institutions, or browse tabs of most-viewed content. Also, there is a search window that is limited to YouTube/EDU. This means that you can do a search, for example, for “Bible,” and get hits from the EDU portal alone (not videos uploaded by every yahoo or charlatan in the world).

Through both of these resources, you may find high-quality lectures and presentations to supplement your teaching.

Have you browsed these resources for Bible fare? What sorts of things have you found there? Feel free to offer links or search terms in the comments here.

[Addendum for Twitterers: there is a hashtag for iTunes U: #iTunesU. There is not at present a hashtag for YouTube/Edu, but a search for YouTube EDU (with space) yields reasonable if imperfect results. I plan to start using a hashtag #iTunes #YouTube/EDU. The “slash” is not recognized in regular word searches, but appears to be recognized as part of a hashtag word.]

Out of the Belly of Grading I Cried

The cords of Grading are wrapped around my neck,
The snares of Grading confront me.

I have gone where there is no blogging
Nor memory of blogging.

Until the LORD brings me up alive from Grading,
Restoring me to life from those who go down into the Office,

You may as well stop by Four Stone Hearth 67,
Visit the anthropology news of which Duane makes me aware.

Online and Traditional Discussions of Equal Quality, Study Suggests

Asynchronous collaboration at a distance, such as that common in an online learning environment, can produce results of the same quality as traditional, synchronous, face-to-face collaboration. This is the result of a study published in the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. (H/T to the Teach Online blog).

The controls on the study look good to me. Additionally, the only negative comments made by the online participants involved the environment’s unfamiliarity. That problem is self-correcting, and (I would add) not limited to online collaboration: plenty of my first-year students are initially unfamiliar with the norms and practices of traditional classroom discussion.

The complete study is legible and worth a look, if only to satisfy yourself about its integrity and the details of the tabulated results.

Why Do They Have To Be All Wrong…

…For Us To Be Right?

I am teaching adult ed at a community church this weekend. The topic has evolved from “Hebrew poetry” to “things that Hebrew poetry shares with Ugaritic narrative poetry.”

I will be showing them the usual grab-bag of divine epithets and motifs: divine council, mountain of God, cherub throne, cloud-rider, and so on. I am going to teach them enough about the Ugaritic pantheon that they can distinguish between El elements and Baal elements, with some historical notes on how Israelite religion embraces or rejects such shared elements over time.

In order to relate the data to modern pressing theological concerns, I will invite them to reflect on how we reflexively attach theological importance to what is (or is thought to be) uniquely “Israelite.” As the title of G.E. Wright’s The Old Testament Against Its Environment (1950) suggests, Christian biblical scholarship has tended to theologically privilege whatever it thinks is uniquely Israelite, whether that thing is ethical monotheism, or social egalitarianism, or what have you. (Not to dismiss clear counter-currents: consider the title Ancient Israel in Its Near Eastern Context [Yairah Amit et al, 2006.]) Where the “uniquely Israelite” is theologically privileged, any religious elements that Israel shares with its neighbors and that we find unfamiliar or problematic are dismissed as “borrowings” or “accretions” (insofar as Israelite religion is viewed as originally wholly unique), or as “primitive” elements rightly left behind (insofar as Israelite religion is viewed as arising from its ancient Near Eastern context but as evolving toward uniqueness). Conversely, elements we prize in Israelite religion will tend to be denied its ancient Near Eastern neighbors.

This embarrassment about shared religious expression lays bare a very human, but wrong-headed, emotional reflex: a conviction that the overlap between “our” religious system and “theirs” should amount to zero, or put another way, that in order for “us” to be right about some things, “they” must be wrong about all things.

This urge to deny shared convictions can give rise to an arrogant sense that we know other faiths better than they know themselves. So, many Christians will insist that their own good works are responsive to a covenant dependent upon God’s gracious act, yet declare the covenant of the people Israel with God to depend upon works of the law: never mind how the Hebrew Bible or Jews in history have described their experience of covenant. Or, a Christian may hear with suspicion the Muslim claim to revere God as “merciful and gracious” (cf. Exod 34:6-7): they can’t really mean it or understand it, the implication runs, with an appeal to the existence of Islamic terrorists.

My favorite thing about introducing Ugaritic narrative poetry to lay Christians and entering divinity students—aside from its innate beauty and grandeur—is the challenge that it presents to this habit of denying to the “Other” particular religious convictions that we embrace for ourselves.

Do you see the impulse that I describe here as “they must be wrong about all things for us to be right about any things”? Are there areas or episodes in religious or academic life where you see it played out?

[Edit: added hyperlink, because I remembered that this is the internet.]

To Debunk or Not to Debunk?

Christopher Hays commented on my link to PaleoBabble, and my answer became  convoluted textured enough that I thought I’d bump it up into a post. Chris writes:

…imagine Dan Brown sitting on the deck of his Malibu home (or wherever he lives off all the money his craptastic books and movies earn) laughing about all the religious people “debunking” his crap.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying “debunking” makes the situation worse. It could not be worse. But damn, why add to the noise?

That is a really good point. My analogy here isn’t quite right, but for example, when some hate group publicly demonstrates, my view is that everyone should just stay the heck home and let the haters stand around by themselves. Why dignify their claims by engaging them? Why “add to the noise” as Chris says?

In the case of pseudo-scientific woo, or pseudo-historical “paleobabble,” or pseudo-linguistics, or whatever, there are for me a couple of considerations that could tilt me toward engagement:

1. Does the misinformation threaten real harm, especially to definable groups under my care? For example, some crazy stuff on YouTube about biblical Hebrew turns out to be a platform for some ugly anti-Semitic propaganda. Further, in my Hebrew class, I am already encouraging students to search the Web for info on biblical Hebrew—the point is to give them a chance to exercise their developing skills of critical assessment. In this case, I have a responsibility to do the frankly tiresome work of anticipating some of what’s out there. Nobody to blame but myself, of course: I made my bed.

1. Does the misinformation offer biblical studies an opportunity to raise its public profile in an attractive way? Dan Brown’s book a good example: he has already drawn the press and the crowds, all we have to do is step into the spotlight and be heard. Sadly, it turns out that a decade of graduate work in philological-linguistic biblical studies does not an able marketing executive or a sexy talking head make. Hundreds of biblical-studies folks found a familiar platform doing adult education talks at churches about Da Vinci Code, but I don’t know of any who became darlings of The View and the Today show. Still, the opportunity is there. In theory, an entertaining and attractive dialogue with the Bible woo could, over time, translate into funds for academic jobs for my ilk (cue swelling strains of “The Impossible Dream”).

All this said, Chris’s point stands as long as our engagements with bunk profit them more than us. There are some skill sets to be sharpened here, and I’d take Chris’s words as a notice that the burden is on the debunker to show that she does more good than harm with her engagement. Do any shining examples of public biblical debunking come to mind for you? Or any less-shining examples from which there are lessons to be learned?

Post coming (I promise) on pseudo-biblical-history and pseudo-Hebrew-linguistics as a species of “woo.”

New Link: PaleoBabble

I have a post in progress about “pseudohistory” as a species of woo. In the meantime, have a gander at the blog that inspired my reflections on the topic: Mike Heiser’s PaleoBabble, dedicated to the ongoing struggle against “cyber-twaddle and misguided research about the ancient world.”

Linky Linky: Post-Carnival Edition

So you have consumed everything you can handle at the April Biblical Studies Carnival, and are hungry for more linkage (proven effective for End-of-term Grading Procrastination, or “EGP”)?

First, languages and higher education:

• Do you have a passing interest in Proto-Indo-European? See why some people want to revive this reconstructed language into living use. (The post includes some words on wholly constructed languages like Esperanto and on revived languages like Hebrew.)


• Many educators, including me, are interested in what happens when you read this article and substitute “higher education” for “newspaper publishing,” “universities” for “printing presses,” and so on. What will preserve educational institutions? The provocative answer: “Nothing will. But everything might.”

Then, the academic social web:

• There are some…places…where you can search Twitter profiles to find people in your field (like “Hebrew Bible” or “Bible AND instructor”) or in your geographic area (like “Evanston, IL”).


• The academic networking site Academia dot edu continues to come together. Have a look if you haven’t already. You can also follow Academia dot edu on Twitter.

And speaking of collegiality:

• The Biblioblog April Top 50 post is out, and the main post lists many additions whom you may not already know. Call it “Biblical Studies Carnival 41.5” and have fun.

“Essential Questions” and the Book of Job

Please help me shape a list of “essential questions”[*] raised for you by the book of Job. Offer suggestions or questions in the comments.

What are “essential questions”? Briefly, they are big, open-ended questions that force one to evaluate one’s own evaluations. “What is worth fighting for?” is an essential question. “Should the U.S. continue fighting in Iraq?” is not. “What makes good art ‘good’?” is an essential question. “Is the Piss Christ (warning: explicit content) good art?” is not. These examples show that a question can be thought-provoking but not yet itself be in the form of an essential question.

Essential questions:

• lend themselves less to argument than to reflection;


• invite participants to reconsider their own norms and valuations;


• prove themselves to be interdisciplinary;


• generate an unpredictable set of other questions;


• are “non-judgmental,” and often have “ethical or moral foundations”;


• are “life-long” questions to which one may return again and again, in different life contexts.

This is how I would begin a list of essential questions raised by the book of Job:

• What does a Creator God owe to God’s creatures?


• What is “blasphemy”?

If you would, take a moment to continue this list in the Comments. I also invite further discussion on what makes an “essential question.”

Thank you!

[*] I was first exposed to the notion of “essential questions” by Brigid Schultz of Loyola University Chicago, in her keynote address to the Focus on Teaching workshop of January 7, 2009. Her title was, “Strategies for Sustaining Teaching Effectiveness.”

Fact-Checking “Irrelevance,” and Open-Access Ed

David Hymes wrote a thoughtful response to a Deseret News article in which Professor David Wiley was quoted as saying, “Institutions [of higher ed] will be irrelevant by 2020.” It turns out that Wiley claims to have been misquoted: his original utterance began along the lines of, “IF universities do not respond to certain crises and trends…” What is more, Deseret News went on to publish an editorial challenging Wiley’s claim: not the moderate claim he actually made, but the unqualified extreme claim that their own journalist redacted his words to produce.

In other words, it gives the appearance of a common media practice: produce a wild-eyed zealot if possible, and if none is available, edit somebody’s words to create the impression of wild-eyed zealotry. Sure, it fails to advance a conversation responsibly, but it does produce a lot of page-hits for the advertisers.

Let’s tease a couple of positive threads from this (in addition to David Hymes’ constructive reflections).

• The Google video “What If?” (wrongly described in the original Deseret News article as a YouTube video) is thought-provoking and funny: an Enlightenment history of “OMG new tech will destroy learning.” Go ahead and have a look.


• The Flat World Knowledge catalogue of open-access textbooks: do you notice anything about what sorts of topics are and are not currently available? Would you write an open-access textbook in Hebrew Bible, New Testament, ancient Near East studies, or whatever you teach or plan to teach?

Lachish 4 for Elementary Hebrew

Inspired by a completely Megan Moore's random comment on Facebook, I have decided to walk my Hebrew students through Lachish 4 (Google Books: Old Testament Parallels). I always save a couple of hours at the end of the year to vocalize an inscription together, usually the Siloam Inscription.

I plan to bring my Lord of the Rings DVD so that we can open with the signal-fires scene (I don’t find an online clip for this).

Anyone have strong opinions on a reading of Lachish 4, or any suggestions for evocative ways to illustrate context?

Kings on NBC: Who Knew?

How have I missed this? Kings on NBC: A show…based on the rise of David to the throne…set in a monarchy that is culturally and technologically more or less modern-day American. David Shepherd slays a Goliath-class tank, to become a feared darling in the court of King Silas of Gilboah, in the modern city of Shiloh. And I don’t know about it? Clearly I need new minions.

On Hulu, I have watched the first three episodes of five. I will not offer a review, except to say that I remain intrigued and am enjoying it enough to keep watching (and I don’t watch much).

A thoughtful reviewer at Epic Beat reflects on the fact that, while Christian Americans are supposedly always asking Hollywood to give them something biblical, Kings is not dominating our culture’s discourse or the ratings charts.

I think that Kings has been under Americans’ radar because it is not extreme. It is not beholden to a precise adherence to the biblical narrative nor to irreverent iconoclasm, preferring to work more fluidly and thoughtfully with the biblical plots, themes, and symbols. It is not beholden to the Vast Conservative Conspiracy™ or to the Left Wing Liberal Agenda™: for example, a major character describes another’s gayness as “disgust[ing]” to him, but at the same time presupposes that it is “what God ma[kes]” that person. The God of Kings is, so far, an offstage character, invoked on screen but not entering pyrotechnically to take anybody’s side in a decisive display of disambiguation.

That is, Kings is using the David story to ask questions about God, not to deliver answers. The irony is, this may be just the kind of show that the religious 90%-ers—those not served by the bullhorns at any given polarized extremes—could take ownership of. But it may be just because the bullhorns aren’t sounding off about the show that it dies of anemia before anyone takes notice.

Being a Student: Letters

Bryan Bibb’s recent post on “How to Argue with Your Biblical Studies Teacher” has me reflecting on that hatful of things I’d like my students to know about being a student. Expect occasional posts on the subject, beginning today with “letters of reference.”

Imagine it’s the first day of the first year of your course of study. Besides everything else on your plate, take a moment to focus your gaze on that figure at the front of the room. Think: “I will be asking this person for a letter of reference.” It may be for admission to a degree program, or for a scholarship or fellowship, or it may be for the thing you don’t know yet you’ll need. That is, it will involve money and opportunities: can you hear me now?

Advance preparation:

• Don’t be a wallflower, even a high-performing wallflower. Come to class with genuine questions that engage the subject matter. Check in with the prof before or after class occasionally. Sign up for office hours. If you are self-conscious, do this enough that you can relax and be yourself: after all, you are the self that she will be supposed to be writing about.


• Do what you can to perform well. Do you devote two hours outside of classroom on the course for every hour inside the classroom? More on “performing highly” in a later post, but for now: if you follow that 2:1 formula and do not get the results you want, check in with the prof about tips on how to spend that time.


• Get advance permission: “Would it be possible for me to ask you for a letter of reference in the future?” This translates to, “Don’t forget about me while two or three more waves of incoming students crash over your bow in the next year or two.”


• Cultivate more than one professor. When you need a letter, any one prof might be out of commission: What if she has been denied tenure and left; or had a family emergency; or been carried off by a twister?

Getting the letter:

• Give your prof a month’s notice if at all possible. For one thing, she’s probably over-booked already with responsibilities that are out of her control. For another, her writing practices may include multiple sittings with periods of “percolation” in between.


• Be ready to offer a portfolio. Besides any official instructions for the letter, I like this to include 1) the graded copies of everything you have written for her; 2) copies of any personal statement and cover letter that you are sending to the approving institution; 3) a URL for the approving institution. The point of this is to help the prof write a personal and on-target letter rapidly. You win because it’s the best letter it can be; she wins because it takes as little of her time as possible.

Think on the difference. In one scenario, the prof is unhappy to find herself rushed, to fill a page about a student she doesn’t remember well, and whose records show sub-optimal performance. In another scenario, the prof is grateful to have time to woolgather, concerning a student with whom she has a relationship, producing a letter that recalls detailed and individual accomplishments.

All of these steps are simple to do (even the one on “2:1” homework: in the long haul, “short cuts make long delays”).* However, none of them can be made up later if missed.

Remember that profs want to write good letters: we need students in the chairs, and when the “housekeeping” aspects of your life are going well, you hypothetically are better positioned to focus on our coursework and do well. Take care of your end, and we’ll do our part to help you reap some benefit.

* Peregrin Took to Frodo Baggins, Chapter Four of Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkein).

New Blog: Biblical Scholars and Personal Religion

Folks…are…talking about Alan Lenzi’s new blogchild, “Biblical Scholars and Personal Religion.” As you can see from the introductory post, the plan is for biblical scholars to reflect on how they find the ongoing academic study of the Bible to affect their religious faith. This could be an exciting and illuminating collaborative work, and I hope scholars—especially those with long experience, but ideally a range of contributors—choose to participate.

I only have a moment today, but two thoughts come to mind, aside from my unbounded enthusiasm for the idea:

• The academy does still suffer ambiguity concerning blogging, especially self-revelatory writing. On the one hand, the academy is still somewhat uncertain about its scholars having an online presence at all. On the other hand, there is a sense that distance learning can solve certain pressing problems, and distance teachers are increasingly inclined to break out of closed CMSs and make use of the fullness of the interactive possibilities of Web 2.0. With some 2/3 of higher educators being “contingent faculty” (non-tenure track), scholars who write on the Web under their true name are aware that what they write may come under the scrutiny of hiring committees or review committees. Eventually the residual stigma of online writing will likely pass, while we are not there yet. That said, we only get past it by making it happen: respected scholars contributing to unstructured online discourse is exactly what the doctor ordered.


• What a great learning opportunity for M.Div. students! The mere fact that this topic is discussed by biblical scholars could really help put some nervous students at ease. And it is discussed: the topic  comes up regulary in my personal talks with colleagues. I will be watching very closely for the possibility of involving my students in some conversation about any entries.

So who will be first to thank Alan by stepping out from us nervously smiling, foot-tapping onlookers and getting out onto the dance floor?

Pay No Attention to Those Facts behind the Curtain

What do we try to keep from our students, and why? On examination, it often turns out to be stuff that’s too good or too bad. And either way, that’s too bad.

A number of Hebrew Bible professors and their doctoral students were discussing fine points of the “local origins” approach to the Israelite settlement question. One asked, “How might we communicate this to our M.Div. students?” Almost reflexively, some replied, “Oh, we won’t, of course.” The implied warrant wasn’t that the material might be too advanced, but that it might be too upsetting (or, as I suspect, too disruptive: and let’s face it, taking away the exodus can lead to an eruption of disruption). I have pretty well completely rejected this idea in my practice. True, on practical grounds, some concepts are too advanced for an introductory class to explore deeply, and potentially upsetting ideas must be introduced with care, but their existence is not a secret. Solid food, please.

So it was with surprise that I realized I habitually keep another set of facts from my students: the Bad Stuff, the junk food. As do many professors, I teach my students to recognize and find peer-reviewed or time-tested scholarship, and except in carefully controlled circumstanes I restrict them to those sources. “No Internet Sources” is a dictum seen in many syllabi, and for excellent reasons. It is also for excellent reasons that Josh McDowell is not on in our reading for the Israelite origins question.

In principle, I have always been willing for students to read low-quality scholarship, if only they are willing to subject it to the critical knife. In practice, the main obstacle is time. But assuming for the sake of argument that you have a new syllabus that finds room for critical evaluation of sketchy claims (upcoming entry), then why not?

As a starting move in that direction, I have begun to create public pages of aggregated web-feeds for my students. (A shout-out to Michael Wesch here and to AKMA for bringing him to my attention). These are rudimentary at this time, just a set of searches for key terms: much more is possible.

Later, I will discuss two issues that this practice brings in:

• How do we teach the critical reasoning that helps the student to know the solid food from the junk food, and to taste sanely of the junk?


• Where do we find time for that task?

The “tabs” of my aggragate page are called “Hebrew Bible,” “Hebrew Language,” and “Holiness/Purity” (this last for an independent study on holiness and purity in the Priestly Writer), and they can all be found on my NetVibes page.

Accordance: Finding the Weak Roots

This post at the Accordance Bible blog was a revelation for me. (Yes, it is now a revelation that is over five weeks old. So I percolate.) It shows that I can use Accordance to search for particular kinds of weak Hebrew roots, like geminates, middle-weaks, even III-liquids and the like.

Long ago, I had done far worse than give it a whirl and give up. I had glanced the problem over and decided it couldn't be done.

Serves me right, then, that I've spent long stretches of minutes looking at indiscriminate search lists of, say, Qal infinitive constructs, picking the weak roots I wanted from the crowd until my eyes bled.

The big insight here is that you can describe a root as “???” then define any of the three radicals in parentheses: ??(w, y)? for roots middle wāw/yōd, for example. Why would I want to find these sorts of results? Two reasons:

1. In my research or when reading the Hebrew Bible, I will pop up with a question or provisional hypothesis of the “what would it look like” variety. "Hey, I see that the nūn doesn’t assimilate in לִנְפּוֹל, perhaps because the initial lin- derives from lĕnĕ- (“rule of shewa”). Let’s have a look at the rest of the I-nūn Qal infinitive constructs with preposition –לְ, and see if the nūn is typically preserved, as we suspect.” This sort of thing happens all the time when I’m reading, including when I’m reading other semitic languages. The search term in this instance looks like this:


2. For my students, I like to create worksheets, exams, or presentation slides that a) demonstrate a phenomenon in weak roots, like the assimilation of nūn or the loss of III-hē before a suffix, and b) demonstrate it with nominal or verbal forms that they already know, like Piel perfect or participle when they have not yet learned the Piel imperfect. This helps me find relevant biblical examples, eliminating the risk that I’ll create on my own an unattested or incorrect form.

So, a big ol’ fist-bump to David Lang. I’m not even bitter about all the time I have wasted in the last 8–10 years doing this the hard way with overly-broad search terms. Really. Just a lesson well learned about asking for help on this sort of thing, and looking forward to at least 8–10 years of doing exactly the searches I want on weak roots.

Distance Learning Strategies in the Brick-and-Mortar Classroom (SBL 2009)

My paper proposal has been accepted for the Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies section of the annual conference of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). The working title is, “The Contribution of Distance Learning Strategies to Brick-and-Mortar Learning.”

This fall, I am again thoroughly revising my courses “Introduction to Old Testament” and “Elementary Hebrew I.” In this revision, I plan to focus on building the classes as online collaborating communities that happen also to meet for four hours each week in a physical classroom. This presentation at SBL will report on the use in the brick-and-mortar classroom of strategies still typically associated with distance learning: podcast lectures, course wikis, blogging, the use of Web resources for research and as grist for critical thinking, online groups, and so on. I am also interested in the use of existing social community platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and social bookmarking sites Delicious and Diigo, as alternatives to the more restrictive possibilities folded into Course Management Systems like BlackBoard.

As my plans come together, I will blog on the separate aspects of this plan, with a focus on how they might contribute to desired learning outcomes like critical thinking, taking ownership of learning, forming essential questions, collegiality, and the like.

In what ways do you think that the tools of distance learning offer unique possibilities for learning, beyond what has been possible in the physical classroom? How do you imagine putting such strategies to work in your brick-and-mortar or online classrooms?

Like (a Grain of) the Sand of the Sea

Researchers at Haifa Institute of Technology have printed the entire Hebrew Bible—with vowel points, I’ve read elsewhere—on a chip that is the size of a single grain of sugar: 0.5 mm sqare. When displayed at 7 meters square, the text’s line-height is a legible 3 mm high.

“[T]he aim of the project is to increase young people's interest in nanoscience and nanotechnology.” This seems to me a creative approach to that goal, a sensitive mix of the sensational and the reverent.

The words are etched onto the gold face of a silicon grain using a focussed ion beam, but I see no word on what sorts of type-face decisions were made. I expect that a printed text was photographed and fed to the machine's computer, but I wonder: is it a serif font like “SBL Hebrew” and therefore similar to the BHS? Sans serif like JPS Tanak and so more like “Lucida Grande”?

Where would you like to see the Hebrew Bible inscribed or painted? I’ll start with my vote: a nice, accessible bit of rock face on the moon, ideally not far from Neil and Buzz's haunts.

Jonah in Comic Form

Holy Mackerel, Batman (sorry): The Book of Jonah is in comic form, with all of the Hebrew text. You can even put the font in Paleo-Hebrew if you want, or have it read out loud to you.

Students in Biblical Hebrew: I suggest you take the opportunity to try to read aloud from some unpointed biblical Hebrew, eh? Excellent practice. Here is a possible approach:

1. Read the first several verses of Jonah 1 in your BHS or JPS Tanak. Read aloud, of course, as I ask that you always do.


2. Repeat your reading until those verses feel comfortable.


3. Go to the Jonah comic and read aloud the unpointed Hebrew there (play the cool legacy video game while you wait for it to load). Mouse-over the section you're reading to check it against the pointed text at the bottom of the screen, or if you like, check yourself against the recorded reading that the site offers.


4. When you are doing well on the first several verses, repeat the process with a few more, until you complete at least Jonah 1-2.

For my part, I've been practicing reading from the Paleo-Hebrew text that the site offers. Good times! Reading unpointed Hebrew text forces you to ask yourself what you think you see, especially verb stems: the imperfect verb especially will be indistinguishable among the common stems in the consonantal text. Pronounce your words with real vowels (not just murmuring through, treating everything as shewa), and have fun.

H/T to Biblical Studies and Technological Tools.