Anumma: Hebrew Bible and Digital Learning
We all knew that Akma’s Random Thoughts is an Awesome Blog by one of the World’s Smartest People, but it is nice to see it made official. (Link: www dot onlineuniversities dot com/blog/2009/05/100-awesome-blogs-by-some-of-the-worlds-smartest-people/ )
H/T to James McGrath, who notes that the alert eye will find around the blogosphere other lights who are not less in brilliance.
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?
Bound copies of my dissertation arrived from Pro-Quest yesterday!
Handsomely bound, suitable for display, stopping doors, and as a coaster. Also cures insomnia (which is ironic, considering how many nights the thing woke me in a clammy sweat.)
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.”
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:
I had read him by the reading of the blog, but yesterday I had the chance to talk with him in person for a while. John Hobbins was here at G-ETS and was good enough to track me down. I enjoyed a fine hour with John, chatting on Hebrew, teaching and learning, pastoring, blogging, and varia. Somehow we forgot to talk about the book of Daniel, concerning which we have both written (see the bottom of his About page). Next time!
It’s always mildly surprising when one of these iPeople turns out to have a real face, and in this case a special pleasure. Thanks for taking time to stick your head in, John.
The world’s smallest Hebrew Bible will be given to Pope Benedict XVI by Israeli President Shimon Perez.
I had reported earlier on the Hebrew Bible, which is etched onto the gold face of a silicon chip that is one half of a millimeter square.
The news came as a surprise to elementary Hebrew students worldwide, who had assumed that their 5.5"×7.5" BHS already used the most miniscule type modern science could produce.
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).
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?
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.
Biblical Studies Carnival 41 will be hosted by James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix. James offers instructions for nominating posts to be included in the carnival. Tyler Williams had also posted instructions.
It’s a piece of cake, so if you feel the urge, take a look at posts from April in biblical studies that you have bookmarked, or Delicious’d, or Diigo’d, or Digg’d, and get them some exposure in the Carnival so the rest of us can sink our teeth into them, too.
See the homepage of the Biblical Studies Carnival for more information and links to the meaty current carnival and also to previous carnivals.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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?
Bryan Bibb posted recently on Ben Witherington’s review article of Bart Ehrman’s latest book, Jesus, Interrupted. I have not closely followed Ehrman or conversations about his work, but Witherington’s review gripped my imagination, because he brought the “Ehrman conversation” into the context of some of the essential critical questions that animate biblical studies. I am interested in his words on the “hermeneutic of suspicion,” a mode of reading in which the reader remains warily alert to the text’s worldview with its peculiar heirarchies and how the text at hand will 1) reflect and reinforce that worldview, silencing and marginalizing other voices with their concerns, and also 2) seek through its rhetorical devices to reproduce in the reader that worldview and its heirarchies. (The phrase “hermeneutic of suspicion” is Ricoeur’s but the definition mine, expressed in terms of ideological criticism). Witherington writes in part:
to actually understand an ancient author you must start by giving them the benefit of the doubt and hear them out, doing one’s best to enter creatively into their own world and thought processes before understanding can come to pass. To approach the text with a hermeneutic of suspicion is to poison the well of inquiry before one even samples the water in the old well.