Ralph the Sacred River

"The artifex verborum of the dream ... was no less adept than the waking Coleridge in the metamorphosis of words." — John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu.
Observations on language (mostly ancient), religion, and culture.
By Edward M. Cook, Ph.D.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Fun with Popes and Presidents

One of the most obscure areas of human knowledge is the comparison in ages and terms of office between Popes and Presidents. It is arguably ...

Saturday, March 05, 2011

"Loving This Book": Stative and Progressive

This semester our Hebrew seminar is considering the semantics of the Hebrew verb, and, as a foil to other treatments of verbal semantics, we...

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Seventh Annual Ralphies

Here we go ... Best TV Show : First, I have to say a few words about Lost , which has won this award for several years. By the time the last...

Sunday, December 05, 2010

Now We Are Six

On November 30, 2004, the first post of this blog appeared. The first year or so was quite active, and coincided approximately with the bir...

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Scenes and Observations from SBL Atlanta 2010

In no particular order ... Two huge ballrooms were assigned to a session attended by about 15 people. My room, thankfully, was in a tower (H...

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Old Dog, New Trees

Summers, for academics, are empty vessels waiting to be filled; not like the academic year, whose content is largely determined by others. D...

Thursday, June 03, 2010

Bob Dylan, Carl Sandburg, and the "Borrowing" Problem

One of the oddest things (among many odd things) in Bob Dylan's memoir Chronicles is his narration of a conversation with poet and play...

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Shoddy-Wall-Builders

When translating the Damascus Document for the Dead Sea Scrolls book I co-authored with MIke Wise and Martin Abegg, I took some pains not ...

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Olive Pits and Alef-Bets: Notes on the Qeiyafa Ostracon

There seems to be a general feeling that there is something about the Qeiyafa Ostracon that counts against a strong minimalist understandin...

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Is Sin in Aramaic a Commercial Term?

I have not yet read Gary Anderson's Sin: A History, but Bruce Marshall, in discussing the book, attributes the following view to Anders...

Monday, December 14, 2009

Sixth Annual Ralphies

The Ralphies. "Are they still around?" Yes, they are, VIrginia. And you get to read them. Most of the year my mind was on my wor...

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Poetic Tenses (cont.): Hidden Preterites and False Preterites

1. As I noted previously, the SC2 can appear in poetry without the waw which usually accompanies it in prose. The same is true (and this is...

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Toward a Theory of Hebrew Poetic Tenses

A simplistic take of the Hebrew verbal system is that there are two conjugations, the prefix-conjugation (or imperfect), or PC, and the suff...

Monday, September 28, 2009

A Note on the Translation of Gen 3:15

A Roman Catholic deacon, in a talk I heard yesterday, asserted that the usual English translations of Gen 3:15b, "He/it shall bruise yo...

Friday, September 25, 2009

Apposition in Biblical Hebrew

I've been going through Waltke and O'Connor's Intro to Biblical Hebrew Syntax with some students, giving it a detailed read and...

Monday, September 07, 2009

Teaching Aramaic: Diachronic or Synchronic?

This note is more jottings for my own benefit --a form of thinking out loud -- than a fully considered proposal. Comments from scholars are ...

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

More Dylan Thefts, II: Rollins, Pynchon, Hemingway, etc.

A while back I reported on some passages of other authors that Bob Dylan had re-used in Chronicles . I've continued to find more, as ha...

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Little Walter, Bob Dylan, and the Two Sonny Boys

Bob Dylan, in his autobiographical Chronicles , tells this story of Sonny Boy Williamson: The only comment that I ever got [on my harmonica ...

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Williamson on the Oxford Hebrew Bible Project

I've been sort of planning to write a critique of the plans for the Oxford Hebrew Bible , and why I think the whole plan is misconceive...

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Saludos Lakers, Campeones Mundiales

This is a rare post about sports. Those who know me know I'm a Lakers fan. I come by it honestly, living for 13 years in LA during the h...

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About Me

Ed: Washington, DC; College professor at Catholic University of America, Department of Semitics.

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