Second Aleph-Bet Learning Video

I have made available the second video in my series on learning the Aleph-Bet through active use. The first video covered א, ה, ח, ע, and all of the vowels. This second video covers בּ, ב, ו, מ, פּ, פ.

I plan to edit them at least once when they are all finished, so please offer any feedback that you think would be helpful. להתראות!



[Second Aleph-Bet Learning Video was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/01/19. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Reading the Hebrew Bible—Aloud—over Two Years

As Charles and Daniel had made known, the Miqra Group plans to read the Hebrew Bible over a two-year period. So, you‘ll find me blogging and commenting over there as well as here.

My own “twist” on the reading program is to read the entire^[note] Hebrew Bible aloud in two years. Despite years of teaching, and despite my continuing efforts to shape my teaching of biblical languages into an immersive mode, my reading fluency is not yet of a quality to satisfy my harshest critic (me). At some point, maybe I will add the Greek New Testament into the mix.

Anybody want to read the Bible aloud?

BACK TO POST And by “entire,” I mean, “except when grading, administrative emergencies, or urgent opportunities for professional development intervene.” Let she who is not a junior instructor cast the first stone.

[Reading the Hebrew Bible—Aloud—over Two Years was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/01/18. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Aleph Bet Learning Video

Next year, I will be teaching Hebrew using an almost completely immersive approach. Preparing for that, I have begun recording and editing a series called, “A Foundation for Biblical Hebrew.” This series will include:

• A handful of short videos introducing the Aleph-Bet through usage;


• Eight or nine short videos each introducing words that can be used in daily life (greetings and pleasantries; coping phrases; classroom words; useful adjectives; adverbs of time; body parts; numerals; colors; seasons and weather);


• About 350 slides showing photographs or clip art of biblical Hebrew words (nouns, adjectives, verbs) that are very common in the Bible, or that are very useful for daily modern conversation.

Production values will be, er, moderate, but the videos will be freely available on my YouTube channel (“AnummaBrooke”), and the slides—in whatever format I decide to produce them—will be “open access.”

If you are able to take ten minutes to view my efforts, thank you, and I welcome feedback!



[Aleph Bet Learning Video was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/01/17. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Stop Making the Blogosphere So Damned Interesting, Jim Getz

Grades are due Monday evening, and I am still crawling along.

As if I don't have enough distractions, a riveting conversation on Pentateuch criticism broke out at Jim Getz's place. The trigger was David Carr’s RBL review of Joel Baden’s J, E, and the Redaction of the Pentateuch. When the RBL newsletter had come out, some friends and I emailed one another about the tone of the review (as junior scholars, our reaction amounted to “There but for the grace of God…”).

The comments thread to Jim’s post is striking for the attendance of actual players and other luminaries. Bloggers tend to be more junior than senior, and the place of senior scholars in the blogosphere has sometimes been isolated, rarely-updated news-release outlets, not closely in conversation with other Bible-centric blogging. At Jim’s post, the comments thread became the kind of discourse, with the kind of participation, that I think we’d all like to see more of.

Which really ticks me off this week, because as I have said, I don’t have time for that kind of thing right now. :^) Back to papers.

Hang On In There, Baby…

…January's coming, the Endless Semester will have passed, and I can do some recrea-professional writing again.

Links for SBL10 Workshop Presentation

“‘To Those Far and Near’: the Case for Community at a Distance.”

The Background:

A Community of Scholarship, Emory’s Candler School of Theology.

Episode CXXVIII of the Endless Thread, Pharyngula.

Losers of Friday Night on Their Computers, Twitter search. [link fixed]

SBL Annual Conference 2010 (#sbl10), Twitter search. [link fixed]

Intro to OT Online Group Paper (concluding summary), Wetpaint.

Dissecting Community: Example from Sociology:

Community, Infed (Informal Education).

The Project:

Bible and Teaching Blogs via feeds, NetVibes.

Collaborative Wiki on the Hendel Affair, Wetpaint.

[Links for SBL10 Workshop Presentation was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/11/22. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

What's (Not) Going On around Here?

“What's not going on around here?” That's easy: writing.

“What is going on around here?” is another question, and amounts to, “Why isn’t writing going on?”

The easy—far too easy, and therefore false—answer is, I am just way, way too busy. And I am too busy, so that is not the part that is false. What is false, is the notion that there is such a thing as “Too busy to write,” if writing wants to be happening.

I have in mind a short series of short posts, in which I think aloud a bit about why I write here, and what sorts of things get into the way of writing in a space like this. It will not be about “blogging,” so much as it will be about “blogging here at Anumma.”

So, feel free to read or not read. Without anticipating the results of my inquiry, I can say that it is likely that there will be, at the other end, blog posts having some continuity with what has gone before: reading CoS in a year, how to be a student, the social web and teaching higher ed, a little light debunking of Bible woo, and of course, Hebrew Bible (Old Testament).

What’s (not) going on around here? Every few days, on a schedule negotiated between a crushing teaching load and a persistently impatient desire to write, we’ll just see.


[What's (Not) Going On around Here? was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/10/24. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

James Cone Live Today at 11 and 3 CT

Dr. James Cone is delivering our Convocation address at G-ETS this morning at 11:00 CT, and there will also be a panel discussion at 3:00 CT.

His address is titled, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen: The Cross and the Lynching Tree in the Black Experience.”

The link for the live webcasts is www.garrett.edu/convocation. Viewers will need to have downloaded and installed Apple's free QuickTime Player, and may begin viewing fifteen minutes before events begin.

[James Cone Live Today at 11 and 3 CT was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/09/15. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

"Good Morning, Eager Young Minds."

This is the first day of the new term. My classes this time around are:

• “Introduction to the Old Testament”: yes, we are reading backwards again. We’ll also continue with viewing lectures as pre-recorded downloads outside of class. New this term is the Wikipedia assignment, in which students will make a series of course-related edits to relevant Wikipedia articles. Also new is a plan to prepare for in-class discussion with threaded, asynchronous, online discussion between sessions.


• “Elementary Hebrew 1”: as in recent years, we’ll be starting with about ten hours of oral/aural exercises, using no texts of any kind. I’ve got a small surprise planned for today, if I can manage to walk to a store between classes.


• “The Old Testament in the New Testament”: a new seminar, beginning in tee minus 150 minutes. The meat and potatoes of the course will be student presentations, with each student presenting a “method” article on some aspect of literary allusion as well as a “content” article on NT allusions to the OT. Something new: all presentations will be offered from a standing position and must have some A/V (multimedia) component. The idea is to raise the energy level up from “somnambulant rap session” to…I don’t know, something where blood continues to flow to brains.

And, yes, each of these meets today! The seminar meets once each week, the Intro course twice, and Hebrew thrice, so Tuesday is the big day of the week this term.

How about you (both profs and students): what’s on the menu for Fall 2010? What’s new, and what’s old?

["Good Morning, Eager Young Minds." was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/09/07. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Retreat

[audio http://anumma.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/12retrt1.mp3]

Faculty retreat today and tomorrow, and I don’t yet know whether there will be wireless to be had. If there is, I’ll post a bit.

In the corners of the retreat time and space, I need to continue work on syllabi, mainly the daily/weekly schedules. Just think: right now, the details of the rest of 2010 in the lives of scores of women and men remains a cloud of probabilities, like Schrödinger’s Cat. In a few days, that cloud of probabilities will have been resolved into a determined state, like…Schrödinger’s Cat with the lid up.

[Retreat was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/08/30. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Mid-Atlantic SBL Call for Papers

Are you SBL? Are you Mid-Atlantic? Then this is for you.

The Mid-Atlantic Region of the Society of Biblical Literature has issued their call for papers for the 2011 conference (PDF link). The conference is March 17–18. The due date for proposals is December 6 2010. The theme this year is “Religion and Embodiment,” and fitting the theme is optional.

Good luck, and have fun.

[Mid-Atlantic SBL Call for Papers was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/08/27. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Ask a Biblical Scholar Anything

This is an idea about which I could not be more enthused (hat tip to Pharyngula).^[1] Ten biologists collaborate together to answer any questions that a layperson might pose them. The front page provides some relevant caveats; for example, if the question is quite basic, they might gently point a reader to the standard textbooks, rather than be roped into doing someone’s homework for them.

I especially like that the site builds a searchable growing repository of questions already answered. This should be a helpful resource, not only for inquirers, but for the team members to consult when dealing with new questions.

The idea of a similar, “Ask a Biblical Scholar Anything," site has seized my imagination. In my experience, answering questions about the Bible and biblical studies for genuinely curious laypeople is a delight. Part of that delight comes from my sense that only a few people have a resource in their lives to field such questions; when I make new acquaintances, they often have a short list of questions about the Bible that they've waited to unload, or that they've bounced off of others without receiving satisfying responses.

Some desiderata that come to mind are:

• As with AaBA, there would need to be a fairly large team: at least eight, I think. The good news is, I suspect recruiting new team members wouldn’t be all that hard, such that the team could grow (or shrink) according to traffic. The idea is that nobody should have to spend more time on it than they want to, with a very low minimum expected commitment.


• Team members should have terminal degrees in biblical studies, or else be candidates in a terminal degree program.


• The team members would have to have a shared understanding that “biblical studies” is a non-confessional literary and historical enterprise, relying for its claims on the shared public evidence of the biblical texts and such extra-biblical evidence as variant manuscripts, ancient Near Eastern texts, material remains, and so on (rather than on private revelation and confessional dogma). Theologically, it’s about the theology in the texts rather than one’s theology of the Bible. This understanding would need to be communicated on the front page of the site.


• There would have to be a standard rubric for recognizing and dealing with poor-faith inquiries coming out of the culture wars. This would, at the same time, have to allow for good-faith inquiries coming from those whose frame of reference has been distorted by the culture wars. (In English: What about spamming inquiries from folks like Answers in Genesis? What about well-meaning inquiries from folks whose minds have already been addled by AiG?)

I’m not in any hurry on this—believe me!—and it is the very beginning of the school year, with all its busy-ness. Still, if anyone who meets the second criterion above would be interested, let me know, and we can begin to look into it. If enough scholars were interested that the work load were low, it could be a real service.

BACK TO POST By the way, P.Z. has been having a hell of a time. He won’t be grateful for your prayers, but if you’re in a position to give to Red Cross, donate blood, or otherwise render service to heart patients, he’d be pleased.

[Ask a Biblical Scholar Anything was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/08/26. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

This is What Grad School Means

Going over some old links, I came upon this gem of a quote from Dr. Crazy:

My grad students don't seem to get that "grad school" means "Dr. Crazy doesn't make class happen." I gave them some tips, as well as some threats, that may improve this situation next week, but dude, it was a long 2 hours and 45 minutes tonight.

“Grad school” means that the professor doesn’t make class happen. Like any prof, I have a bag of tricks designed to communicate this through action: assorted discussion formats, student presentations, debates or disputations. But Crazy boils it down nicely into spare, clean prose.

How do you communicate to your students—especially in “that” group, the class that stares silently at you and waits for your to serve up the magic—that “grad school” means that the professor doesn’t make class happen?

[Rapid addendum: if you are a student: how do profs succeed in communicating this to you? What obstacles to you “making class happen” might not be obvious to the prof?]

[This is What Grad School Means was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/08/25. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Pronouncing Sumerograms as Sumerograms?

Lots of times, we who read and copy Akkadian texts pronounce the sumerograms instead of normalizing them into Akkadian. It’s convenient, when in teaching or learning, or when dictating. Is it logical to suppose that the ancient scribes also did so?

Explanation about sumerograms in Akkadian, for the non-specialists out there:

Akkadian is the language of Assyrian and Babylonian texts, during more or less the 2nd and 1st millennia B.C.E. The writing system for Akkadian was borrowed from a completely different language, Sumerian. Consequently, while most of the signs used to spell Akkadian represent syllables (not single sounds, as with an alphabet), the scribes would often represent an entire Akkadian word by using the Sumerian sign that had represented that word in Sumerian. So, a phrase spelled entirely with syllabic Akkadian characters like this (from Code of Hammurapi §102):

šum-ma tam-ka-ru-um a-na ša-ma-al-le-em ka-as-pa-am a-na ta-ad-mi-iq-tim it-ta-di-in-ma…

This represents the spoken phrase, šumma tamkarum ana šamallêm kaspam ana tadmiqtim ittaddin-ma… (“If a trader has given silver to a trading agent as an advance…”). But, in practice, such a phrase would employ many sumerograms along with the syllabic signs: here, DAM.GAR3 for tamkarum, ŠAMAN2.LA2 for šamallêm, and KUG.BABBAR for kaspam. As a result, the actual spelling turns out to be:

šum-ma DAM.GAR3 a-na ŠAMAN2.LA2 KUG.BABBAR a-na ta-ad-mi-iq-tim it-ta-di-in-ma…

The point of all this is that, in reading the text, you pronounce the Akkadian words, not the sumerograms that represent them. So, šumma tamkarum ana šamallêm kaspam ana… etc. But, when we scholars are talking about the text, asking how it is written, we might pronounce the sumerograms as sumerograms, so our hearer understands what’s happening on the tablet: "shumma dam gar-three ana shaman-two-la-two kug babbar ana…etc."

Does that make sense? There is reading what the text says, when you pronounce the sumerograms as the Akkadian words they represent; then there is talking about how the text says it, where you pronounce the sumerograms as sumerograms.

Getting on with things:

My question concerns whether some texts suggest that ancient scribes—at least sometimes, presumably among themselves—pronounced sumerograms as sumerograms, rather than as the Akkadian words they represent.

Take a text I came across in Lesson Eighteen in Huehnergard’s grammar.^[1] Line four of the tablet contains the sumerogram AD.TA.NI, when expected is AD.A.NI (AD represents “father,” and A.NI represents “his/her”). So why is the sign TA used instead of A? Physically, the signs are not remotely alike and could not be confused one for the other. Well, in Akkadian, the dental consonants are not always carefully distinguished: so, the sumerogram AD also can represent, not only the sound /ad/, but also /at/ or /aṭ/. I would—hesitantly—wonder if the spelling AD.TA.NI reflect a rapid pronunciation of the sumerograms: /at-ta-ni/ for /at-a-ni/.

This had been in the back of my mind since I came across it recently, when lo! and behold, I find this note to the 75th Amarna letter: ^[2] “Very hesitantly, it is proposed that KU.TI.TI is a syllabic writing for GU2.(UN).DI6.DI6, ābilāt bilti, lit. ‘bearers of tribute.’”

If Moran is “hesitant,” then I’m hesitant enough to stand behind him even more hesitantly. But, again, why shouldn’t the ancient scribes have found it convenient, as we do, to pronounce the sumerograms from time to time, especially in the context of teaching, learning, dictating, and taking dictation?

Does anybody know of more data on this? Are the Assyriologists all taking this kind of thing for granted, such that it’s no big deal? Anyone?

BACK TO POST The text is the adoption of a slave, from Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmäler der Königlichen Museen zu Berlin; vol. 7,8.
BACK TO POST William L. Moran, The Amarna Letters; Baltimore: University of John Hopkins Press, 1992), page 146, EA 75 n. 7.


[Pronouncing Sumerograms as Sumerograms? was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/08/24. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Studying Religion or Theology: What's The Use?

Akma and Mark (links are to their home pages) shared a Facebook link to the Geek Muse: 100 Reasons to Study Theology and Religion: A Call for Comments. With religion and theology departments coming under the knife, Geek Muse calls for your arguments: how do these programs benefit our society? What good are they? Give it some thought, and go comment.

[Studying Religion or Theology: What's The Use? was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/08/23. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Students, You're on Notice!

Yesterday afternoon, my son had a play date with a Taekwon-Do classmate who also happens to be the child of one of our Masters students. The student, my wife, and I chatted aimlessly while the kids played on a water slide in the back yard. Among the topics that came and went were:

• The first of the Amarna Letters (EA 1), with comments on the epistolary genre of the letters (specifically, how a flattering salutation and an exhaustive list of well wishes and assurances of well-being precede a body mostly involving bitter squabbling);


• How 1000 words is really not that many to write, and how students with writing experience know that editing down to 1000 words is ‘way harder than getting up to 1000 words in the first place.

Not three hours later, I got an email from said student, in which she:

• composed the email in a parody of the epistolary genre of EA 1; and


• pointed me to where she had demonstrated our point about writing by banging out 1000 words on the first topic to come ready to hand, specifically Ecclesiastes 1–2.

Students who would complain that form criticism is intractable or that 1000 words is a lot to write: you’re on notice!

[Students, You're on Notice! was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/07/30. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Little Help: The Old Testament in the New Testament

Do you have any favorite resources concerning allusion to the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament? It could be books, essays, or articles.

I’m thinking of things like Richard Hays’ Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (Yale, 1989) or J. Ross Wagner’s Heralds of the Good News: Isaiah and Paul ‘in Concert’ in the Letter to the Romans (Brill, 2002), or Thomas R. Hatina’s In Search of a Context: The Function of Scripture in Mark’s Narrative (Sheffield, 2002).

Do you have any favorites about the OT in the NT? And if so, what makes them good?

Open Access Intro to OT

This post concerns my ideas for a particular kind of open-access Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament).

I recently floated a Tweet (and Facebook status update) that asked around about any open-access Introduction to the Old Testament. I have an idea for such a project, and wanted to see if anything was already out there (knowing pretty well that there is not).

Akma proved (as I knew he would) to be an eager conversation partner, and his responsive post has generated some discussion. I follow up there with some remarks about what I have in mind.

What I plan to try for is an Introduction to the OT that:

• is freely available online;


• is historical- and literary-critical in focus (as is a Coogan or a Collins, say; in other words, not a "theological introduction" narrowly reflecting the concerns of faith communities or other readerly social contexts);


• is authored by a socially diverse body of contributors.

With the "open source" aspect, I mean to respond to a clear need. I would like my own students to have a freely-available, critical Introduction. (I'd actually like them to have several, as well as several open-access Hebrew and Greek grammars, and so on.)

With the authorship and content that I have in mind, I mean to address a situation in the field. During the time that historical criticism was held to be in decline, traditional historical-literary introductions continued to be ceded to the white male authors, while women and people of color wrote works intended to supplement such introductions. Now, though, the recognition of the biblical authors as among the "Others" to whom we try to listen earnestly has prompted some rehabilitation of the historical-critical approaches. It is well past time to have "traditional" historical-literary-critical Introductions to OT that reflect genuine diversity of authorship. (What holds together such an Intro would be a shared commitment to grounding one's historical-literary claims in publicly-shared evidence and lines of reasoning; what makes it diverse would be the unpredictable range of possible perceptions and assessments regarding that evidence.)

Akma had the excellent idea that such an Intro could be "modular": after the initial publication, if somebody wanted to offer a supplemental chapter, zie could do so as long as the controlling body agreed that the supplemental work fit the scope and formatting of the project.

I will be writing up an outline delimiting the methods, outline, and scope of the project, and will also be having discussions with possible contributors. I am at a very early stage on this, so you will have to stay tuned a while to hear more about what takes shape.

The Endless Summer of Endless Teaching…

…ends very soon. In mere days, in fact. Thanks for your patience, and don't delete that RSS feed just yet.

In the meantime, enjoy ^[FOOTNOTE] the biblical exegesis of Wanda Jackson (“Hard Headed Woman”).



BACK TO POST“enjoy" here ≈ being acutely reminded of how frequently the only “empowerment” available has amounted to “internalizing as self-loathing the sweeping prejudices of the patriarchy, but being really saucy and spunky about it.” h/t to Judy in comments.

[The Endless Summer of Endless Teaching… was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/07/19. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

"Genius!" "Dancing!"

P.Z. Myers has the opportunity to dance his Ph.D. thesis, in the third annual "Dance Your Ph.D." interpretative dance video contest. Sadly, the contest is only open to the physical sciences and social sciences. But, that doesn’t have to stop me from choreographing in my head.

An interpretive dance for my dissertation would involve:

• six dancers in muted blue, dancing in a Martha-Graham-inspired, low-to-the-ground style of resigned but heart-felt obedience. These represent the chapters Daniel 1–6.


• four dancers in shades of concrete gray, who dance sweeping steps around the Dan 1–6 dancers, lording it over them, occasionally lifting them up to moderate heights, while a nameless crew of faceless figures in black threatens the whole but always bounce harmlessly back into the wings. The four dancers in gray represent the gentile nations.


• six dancers in blazing orange, who represent Daniel 7–12. They take the stage, pick up the dancers in blue, and use them to bludgeon the four dancers in gray. They then incorporate the now-unconscious dancers in blue into their own active, aggressive display.


• the stage becomes a giant cloud on which the 12 blue and orange dancers join, pyramid-like, into a single human figure.


• the cloud bursts into a giant chrysanthemum.

How does your dissertation translate into modern dance?

["Genius!" "Dancing!" was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/07/01. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]