The Stench of Ancient Cities

A few weeks ago, I was reading a portion of Genesis Rabba (Parasha 34) with some HUC grad students, and we came across a story that begins: "Two women were coming out of Tiberias, and one said to the other: Blessed is He who brought us out of this bad air!"

The story is told to demonstrate how parochial the two women are, for Tiberias was a noted resort and famous city. But it seems likely that, for someone who lived in the country, ancient cities had a definite bad odor. In one of his letters, Seneca writes:

I expect you're keen to hear what effect it had on my health, this decision of mine to leave (Rome). No sooner had I left behind the oppressive atmosphere of the city and that reek of smoking cookers which pour out, along with a cloud of ashes, all the poisonous fumes they've accumulated in their interiors whenever they're started up, than I noticed the change in my condition at once....

Of course, the ancients had very different ideas about sanitation, cleanliness, and modesty. Readers of Josephus will remember the amount of time he devotes to the "strange" Essene toilet habits:

War 2:148-9: "Nay, on the other days they dig a small pit, a foot deep, with a paddle (which kind of hatchet is given them when they are first admitted among them); and covering themselves round with their garment, that they may not affront the divine rays of light, they ease themselves into that pit, after which they put the earth that was dug out again into the pit; and even this they do only in the more lonely places, which they choose out for this purpose; and although this easement of the body be natural, yet it is a rule with them to wash themselves after it, as if it were a defilement to them."

Josephus obviously thought it excessively modest to defecate in private (uncovered public latrines were common in his day), and excessively fastidious to wash afterwards — which sheds a certain light on the stench of ancient cities.

Interesting observations (including the quote from Seneca) and bibliography can be found here.

Quran or Koran?

OK, which is it — Koran or Quran? The New York Times vacillates, depending on which wire service they're picking up. If it's Reuters, the headline is "Guantanamo Probe Finds 5 Koran Mishandling Cases." If it's AP, the headline is "Inquiry Finds Some Quran 'Mishandling.' "

I'm not going to discuss the substance of these stories; I hope that all my readers will agree that the "mishandling" is deplorable, as well as counter-productive. But the question of popular transliteration interests me.

There seems to be an overall tendency these days to go with a stricter, more Arabically "correct" transliteration in the media. I notice muslim more often than moslem, Muhammad more often than Mohammed. The preference for quran or even qur'an over "Koran" is in line with this tendency.

Strictly speaking, a transliteration "Quran" seems at first glance linguistically correct. The root of the word is cognate to Hebrew קרא, and both roots refer to (among other things) reading or audible recitation. The qur'aan is the "reading," that which is read or recited (compare Hebrew מקרא, miqra, "that which is read," the Bible).

Nevertheless, the Arabic sound conventionally transliterated as "Q" indicates a phonemic contrast (to Arabic "K") that does not exist in English. In fact, in English, the grapheme QU always indicates the phonetic sequence /kw/, and English speakers are going to want to import that /kw/ pronunciation into the spelling "Quran," leading to the monstrosity /kwuran/ or the like.

Therefore, to better approximate the actual pronunciation of the word, I wish they would settle on the older standard spelling "Koran." In English, the Arabic /q/ and /k/ are both adequately signaled by English K. And after all, English is what we're speaking here, right? We don't refer to certain foreign capitals as Moskva, Yerushalayim, Bruxelles, or Roma. Nor should we adopt the spelling Quran for the Islamic scripture.

By the way, as far as I can tell, in German the spelling is still "Koran," and in French they prefer "Coran." In archaic English the preferred term was apparently "Alcoran," based on Arabic al-qur'aan "the Koran," occasionally leading to the solecism "the Alcoran."

Goodacre Becomes Blue Devil; BBC Mourns

Mark Goodacre is crossing the Big Pond to Duke University. Congratulations!

Just one crucial word of advice, Mark: Krzyewski is pronounced "Shashefsky." Practice it at home till you get it right.

Happy Birthday, Bob

Today is Bob Dylan's birthday.

Now that it's dust and ashes
now that it's human skin
Here's to you Bob Dylan
a poem for the laurels you win

Sincerest form of flattery
is imitation they say
I've broke my long line down
to write a song your way

Those "chains of flashing images"
that came to you at night
were highest farm boy's day dreams
that glimpse the Angels light.

And tho the dross of wisdom's come
and left you lone on earth
remember when the Angels call
your soul for a new birth

It wasn't dope that gave you truth
nor money that you stole
— was God himself that entered in
shining your heavenly soul.

— Allen Ginsberg, "On Reading Dylan's Writings," 1973

The Latest "News" From Hershel Shanks

Hershel Shanks is still apparently unwilling to engage in any serious self-criticism or even enter into any serious dialogue on the subject of the recent forgery scandals. In the most recent issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (May/June 2005) he mugs, rants, denounces, criticizes, and mocks — but he does not seriously discuss any of the issues that have been recently raised about the scandal and the role of his magazine.

On p. 46 appears a misleading article entitled "Israeli Prosecutor Repudiates IAA Report on Forgery." This is based on what Shanks sees as a discrepancy between the IAA report on the ossuary and the wording of the forgery indictment — not, as the headline would imply, a new statement by the prosecutor rejecting the work of the IAA. Shanks notes that the forgery indictment claims that only the words "brother of Jesus" on the ossuary were forged, while, he believes, the IAA report claims that the entire inscription was forged. Shanks trumpets this as an "irreconcilable conflict."

There is not a word in the voluminous IAA report even remotely suggesting that the first part of the inscription is authentic, as the indictment now admits.

So, Hershel, have you actually read the IAA report? Then you might remember these words by Esther Eshel:

B.... The inscription itself exhibits variations in handwriting, thickness and depth of the incised letters when comparing the words “James son of Joseph” to the words “brother of Jesus”. ...
C. There is a significant difference between handwritings in the first and second parts of the inscription. The first part is written in the formal style of a scribe and the second part is cursive. The letters bet and kuf in the first part are characteristic writing of a scribe, and the second, cursive part has a characteristic alef.
...
In summary, the different handwritings of the two parts indicate that the inscription is not authentic, although the original ossuary may possibly have contained the first part of the inscription, the second part was added later.

In short, Shanks's article is advocacy journalism gone bad: misleading, sloppy, and inaccurate.

Also in the recent BAR is a wholly unwarranted piece (p. 49) ponderously mocking the recent contribution of Andy Vaughn and Carolyn Dobler in the March SBL Forum. For one thing, Shanks does not give a complete URL for the article, so that readers of BAR will not be able to read it for themselves. (It is here.) For another thing, Shanks does not deal in any way with the gravamen of the Vaughn-Dobler piece, which is the statistical analysis of the seals and the implication that the antiquities market has provided many forged items. In this article, as in all of his recent writings on the scandal, Shanks is not dealing seriously with any of the issues; he is just playing to the gallery and hoping no one will call him to account.

I might blog about a few of Shanks's other remarks in future posts. In closing, though, let me just note that in the SBL Forum in which Vaughn and Dobler's essay appeared, there was another essay dealing solely with Shanks's own contribution to the problem (written, as it happens, by me). Although he must have read it, he does not mention the article at all in BAR. Is he afraid his readers will find it? Would he rather attack others than defend himself? Stay tuned.

Maarav 11/1 Is Out

The new issue of Maarav: A Journal for the Study of the Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures (11.1, 2004) has arrived in my mailbox. The table of contents is as follows:

Shmuel Ahituv and Ada Yardeni
"Seventeen Aramaic Texts on Ostraca from Idumea: The Late Persian to the Early Hellenistic Periods"

Seth L. Sanders
"What Was the Alphabet For? The Rise of Written Vernaculars and the Making of Israelite National Literature"

Christopher A. Rollston
"Non-Provenanced Epigraphs II: The Status of Non-Provenanced Epigraphs within the Broader Corpus of Northwest Semitic"

Marilyn J. Lundberg
"Editor's Notes: The Ahiram Inscription"

Edward M. Cook
Review of A Dictionary of Judean Aramaic by Michael Sokoloff

Peter T. Daniels
Review of Absent Voices: The Story of Writing Systems in the West by Rochelle Altman

Lots of interesting stuff here for (and by) bibliobloggers. Go here to find out how to get a subscription for yourself or your institution.

Biblioblogoholics

Mark Goodacre describes the upcoming CARG session on biblioblogging, in which I have the honor of participating. Judging by some of the comments out there (collected by Stephen Carlson here), we will all need a professional 12-step program by November.

I guess we're all supposed to confess whether we're addicted or not. Well, I don't know about you, but I am not addicted. No sir! I can quit anytime. I mean it! No problem. Got that? Not a problem!

My Link to Elvis

I grew up in an atmosphere of warm personal interest in Elvis Presley. My grandparents were acquainted with his grandparents and lived in the same small town. When I was 4 or 5 years old, I was taken to see him perform at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair & Dairy Show (back in the days when he was still good).

Now, this past weekend, I discovered that Dr. William Hunt, the doctor who delivered Elvis, was married to my great-aunt Lula.

No, don't write to me asking for memorabilia, I don't have any. But law! ain't it a small world! (Sorry, after being in Mississippi, my Southern accent has reasserted itself.)

Thankyouverymuch.

"Sexual Cleansing" and Levirate Marriage

Last week, the New York Times featured an article about the practice of "sexual cleansing" in Africa:

Here and in a number of nearby nations including Zambia and Kenya, a husband's funeral has long concluded with a final ritual: sex between the widow and one of her husband's relatives, to break the bond with his spirit and, it is said, save her and the rest of the village from insanity or disease. Widows have long tolerated it, and traditional leaders have endorsed it, as an unchallenged tradition of rural African life.

Now AIDS is changing that. Political and tribal leaders are starting to speak out publicly against so-called sexual cleansing, condemning it as one reason H.I.V. has spread to 25 million sub-Saharan Africans, killing 2.3 million last year alone. They are being prodded by leaders of the region's fledging women's rights movement, who contend that lack of control over their sex lives is a major reason 6 in 10 of those infected in sub-Saharan Africa are women.

It sounds like a real problem; but I'm probably not the only Biblical scholar who was reminded of the practice of levirate marriage. A woman widowed without children was, in ancient Israel, married to her husband's brother in order, by means of a legal fiction, to bear children to her late husband (Deut. 25:5-10). From the Anchor Bible Dictionary:

This type of marriage is known as levirate marriage, from the Latin levir, “brother-in-law.” Its continuation into the NT era is demonstrated by the Sadducees’ question to Jesus about the childless woman who was married in sequence to six of her late husband’s brothers (Matt 22:23–33 = Mark 12:18–27 = Luke 20:27–40). We have seen that levirate marriage existed in Ugarit, in the Middle Assyrian (no. 33) and Hittite law codes (no. 193), and possibly in the Nuzi texts. In these texts the primary concern is with producing a (male) child to carry on the name of the deceased husband.

Here's my question: Is there any historical connection between the levirate law and the practice of "sexual cleansing"? Is the latter a debased and superstitious form of the former; or is the levirate law a later development of a primitive ritual that originally had nothing to do with "preserving the husband's name"? It seems to me that both alternatives are equally likely. It is also possible, of course, that there is no historical relationship at all. Maybe a historical anthropologist (if there is such a thing) can answer this.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Richard Kalmin, "Levirate Law," Anchor Bible Dictionary

UPDATE: The article referred to by Andrew in the comment below is excellent. It doesn't address the historical question I raised, but many cross-cultural comparisons suggest themselves.

Goin' South

"Ralph" will be on a short hiatus the next few days as we visit kinfolk in Mississippi.

In the meantime, you can enjoy this article by a BBC reporter (HT: Bible & Interpretation), who reports on Mississippi with the air of Livingstone returning from the jungle. He discovers that there are — gasp! — Christians in the Deep South.

Google's Peep Show

I've been playing around with Google Print, and enjoying it — up to a point. It promises to be a valuable tool — one of these days. Their mission statement is as follows:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information, but much of that information isn't yet online. Google Print aims to get it there by putting book content where you can find it most easily – right in your Google search results.

Good enough. The problem is, I haven't yet come across a book whose entire content is online. The maximum amount I have been able to access for any one book is about 15 pages.

So what's the point? Is this in fact only an elaborate way of getting users to buy the book, as the numerous "buy this book from" links would suggest? There is in fact supposed to be a "find it in a library" link, but it doesn't appear on any pages that I have seen.

At this point, Google Print (and I know it's in the beta stage) is the print equivalent of a peep show: "Try these free samples! Get hooked and buy the rest!" They're going to have to lift some limitations on presenting full content, or else the tool will be more frustrating than helpful.

Coleridge's Pants

It is interesting to reflect that John Betjeman was one of C. S. Lewis's first students. They didn't get along.

Even humour separated the two men, and Betjeman complained peevishly that his tutor had forever ruined Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' by wondering whether the 'pants' in the line, 'As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,' were made of wool or fur.

Betjeman would really have hated this blog.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and Undoing, of 'The English Athens', by John Dougill. (Univ. Michigan Press, 1998.)

George Psalmanazar

Mark Goodacre calls our attention to Alice Liddell, of Alice in Wonderland fame, as one of the DNB "Lives of the Week." Another featured life is that of George Psalmanazar (1679-1763), a fascinating character, a mad linguistic genius. A few excerpts:

... Psalmanazar decided to make his identity more exotic, and posed as a Japanese convert to Christianity. To facilitate the project, he revised the certificate that he had had drawn up to prove that he was Irish, and devised an alphabet and many words of a language that he thought might be taken for Japanese. Aware that Hebrew was written from right to left, he imagined that other ‘oriental’ languages would follow that pattern. He invented twenty letters with shapes, names, and pronunciations that resemble some Greek and Hebrew letters. By his own account, he also added ‘many other particulars equally difficult, such as a considerable piece of a new language and grammar, a new division of the year into twenty months, a new religion, &c. and all out of my own head’ (Memoirs, 137).

... this time [he] used the name of Salmanazar (ibid., 169), which he took from the name of a biblical king of Assyria and captor of the Israelites, Shalmaneser (2 Kings 17). Later he began spelling the name with an initial P to make it more exotic.

... [H]is fanciful account of Formosa, which occupies little more than half of the book's 327 pages ... raised doubts about his veracity in several quarters at the same time as it excited many readers. Among his entertaining but suspicious claims were that Formosa was Japanese rather than Chinese; that the state religion, founded by an avatar named Psalmanaazaar, required the annual sacrifice of 18,000 boys under the age of nine; and that the production of children was facilitated by the encouragement of polygamy, although adultery was absolutely forbidden.

... [Regarding other cases of false identity and forgery in the 18th century]: In these and many other cases of forgery and assumed identity in the period, the impostor imagined he had access to hidden information and that he himself was in touch with a deeper or older, often more ‘natural’, tradition of knowledge than that accepted by the current establishment. The flourishing of such forgers at this time may have been a response to the increased professionalization of knowledge during the period. Psalmanazar's quarrel with the Royal Society, his defence of revelation in religion, and his immersion in ancient Hebrew may be all regarded as a rebellion against modern forms of knowledge.

OK, so a "defence of revelation in religion, and an immersion in ancient Hebrew" are rebellions against modernity, are they? Well, count me in. Vive la revolution!

Happily, Psalmanazar eventually recanted his lies, became a believing Christian and a friend of the young Samuel Johnson. He died shortly before Johnson first encountered James Boswell in a London bookshop.

Onkelos in Les Miserables

I'm always interested when the targums wind up in unexpected places. I ran into a mention of Onkelos in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, ch. 5:

[The monsignor] was a man of letters and rather learned. He left behind him five or six very curious manuscripts; among others, a dissertation on this verse in Genesis, In the beginning, the spirit of God floated upon the waters. With this verse he compares three texts: the Arabic verse which says, The winds of God blew; Flavius Josephus who says, A wind from above was precipitated upon the earth; and finally, the Chaldaic paraphrase of Onkelos, which renders it, A wind coming from God blew upon the face of the waters.

The good bishop was apparently interested in renderings of Genesis 1:2 that translated ruach as "wind." No more is said in the novel of this interesting dissertation.

Many modern translations translate "wind," including the JPS and NRSV.

"The Curse of Akkad" and Global Warming

For the first time since cities were built and founded,
The great agricultural tracts produced no grain,
The inundated tracts produced no fish,
The irrigated orchards produced neither syrup nor wine,
The gathered clouds did not rain, the masgurum did not grow.
At that time, one shekel’s worth of oil was only one-half quart,
One shekel’s worth of grain was only one-half quart. . . .
These sold at such prices in the markets of all the cities!
He who slept on the roof, died on the roof,
He who slept in the house, had no burial,
People were flailing at themselves from hunger.

That's from the "Curse of Akkad," a lament over the fall of the empire of Sargon the Great. It appears in Part II of a remarkable series of articles on global warming by Elizabeth Kolbert appearing now in the New Yorker. Kolbert has convinced me that global warming is real, caused by human factors, and of grave consequence.

I don't share the academy's visceral loathing of George Bush, but his administration has, in my opinion, fumbled badly on environmental policy. Here's hoping someone does something about it before 2100. Kolbert quotes one scientist:

“We may say that we’re more technologically able than earlier societies. But one thing about climate change is it’s potentially geopolitically destabilizing. And we’re not only more technologically able; we’re more technologically able destructively as well. I think it’s impossible to predict what will happen. I guess—though I won’t be around to see it—I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were destroyed.” He paused. “That’s sort of an extreme view.”

By the way, she quotes "The Curse of Akkad" because archaeologists working at Tell Leilan in Syria have theorized that climate change — a drought, to be specific — brought Sargon's 2nd millennium empire to an end.

George Lucas and Doctor Doom

No doubt many are starting to get all geeked up over the new Star Wars movie. I know I am. But let us not follow those who like to make George Lucas into some kind of deep intellectual disciple of Joseph Campbell. Take the time to re-read this Salon article from 2002, which points out what Lucas's true influences were. George Lucas is not a thoughtful purveyor of modern mythopoeia; no. George Lucas is a fanboy. His world is indebted to the comics, especially the creations of Jack Kirby.

I remember the first time I saw Star Wars, in 1977, with friends at Mann's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. When Darth Vader first came on the screen, I blurted out, "Hey! It's Doctor Doom!" And so it was:



And this is to say nothing of the debt he owes to Darkseid:




For those who are not comics cognoscenti, Doctor Doom is the long-time nemesis of the Fantastic Four, while Darkseid is the villain of the later series "New Gods."

UPDATE (5/2): Thanks to all of you for your comments. And don't miss this post at Thought-Dreams. By the way, I note that in the Star-Wars Hebrew poster that Eliyahu displays, the movie is described as a maaravon — a "Western"!

The Number of the Beast: 616?

Aside from the reference to the Book of "RevelationS," this paragraph in a National Geographic article on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri is quite interesting:

So far 65 volumes of transcripts and translations have been published by the London-based Egypt Exploration Society, which owns the collection.

The latest volume includes details of fragments showing third- and fourth-century versions of the Book of Revelations. Intriguingly, the number assigned to "the Beast" of Revelations isn't the usual 666, but 616.

My copy of Nestle-Aland (27th ed.) at Revelation 13:18 lists for the variant reading "616" only "C; Ir mss" (the 5th century uncial manuscript C and some manuscripts cited by Irenaeus). A 3rd or 4th century papyrus containing this reading would be extremely significant, although probably not enough to outweigh the many witnesses for "666."

As Bruce Metzger points out in his Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (1971), the numerical value of "666" is derived from the Hebrew/Aramaic values for the letters comprising the name נרון קסר, "Nero Caesar" (in Greek Νέρων Καῖσαρ) The variant "616" results from the alternate spelling נרו קסר.

For those of you unfamiliar with the numerical values of the Hebrew alphabet, the values in the above name are nun = 50, resh = 200, waw = 6, nun = 50, quph = 100, samekh = 60, resh = 200. Add 'em up!

The name "Nero Caesar" (נרון קסר) actually appears in a scroll from the Judean Desert, Murabbaat 18, dated to the "second year of Nero Caesar" (55/56 CE).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Delbert Hillers, "Revelation 13:18 and a Scroll from Murabbaat," BASOR 170 (1963), p. 65.

UPDATE: The fragment (P.Oxy. LVI 4499) can be viewed here. Although it is pointed out that the numerology does not work with the Greek letters, the Hebrew values are not discussed.

UPDATE (5/4): I note that this post is getting, for me, a lot of hits. For laypeople, I want to emphasize these points: (1) the most likely reading of the number in Revelation 13:18 is still "666"; (2) the reading "616" has in fact been known for many years, and even the new papyrus has been known since the 1990's; (3) the variation between "666" and "616" does not materially affect the interpretation of the book of Revelation. In short, the reading "616" is mainly interesting to textual critics of the New Testament and is unlikely to make a change in anyone's Bible or beliefs.

UPDATE (5/5): See also these posts from Jim Davila, Mark Goodacre, and Stephen Carlson, each with valuable comments and links.

Misreading the Forgery Scandal

I don't think I write a particularly difficult brand of prose. And yet one of my writings seems to be very hard for people to understand. First Andre Lemaire, now this. Richard Anderson writes:

Edward M. Cook, blogging at Ralph the Sacred River, http://ralphriver.blogspot.com/ has published an article at SBL Forum: The Forgery Indictments and BAR: Learning From Hindsight, http://www.sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleId=371.
Cook would like to think that the James ossuary scandal is somehow the fault of the magazine, Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR) and its editor, Hershel Shanks. Ed Cook is not alone in his criticism. Under the view of these critics, responsible journalists would engage in a kind of self-imposed censorship. This to me is unrealistic. Furthermore it does not address the real problem.

Let's see: I am supposed to have written that the James ossuary scandal is "somehow the fault" of BAR. I have certainly criticized BAR in the past for contributing to the problem of the spread of unprovenanced artifacts, but I have never tried to say that the scandal is "somehow the fault" of BAR. The words I used, taken directly from the article, are these:

contributed to the problem
part of the responsibility
unwittingly contributed
might have contributed to
a kind of "accessory"

Anderson thinks the "real problem" lies elsewhere. It certainly is a complicated issue, with many variables. I was only writing about one of them. And I deplore seeing my views set up as a kind of straw man or foil, when a nuanced engagement with them would have been both possible and preferable.

Anderson says, "It is interesting to me that there is no urgent call for the IAA to examine all of the artifacts it has purchased over the last thirty years to determine which ones are fakes and of course, publish the results of their findings." Huh? On the contrary, there have been repeated calls both within and without the IAA to retest the whole range of unprovenanced items in museums both in Israel and in other countries.

Does IAA need to clean its own house? Maybe. There's a lot of cleaning up to do in the world of biblical archaeology. It's a big mess, with many causes. But to oversimplify matters as Anderson does is to darken counsel.

Will Books Disappear?

I've enjoyed reading this week Plato and the Internet, by Kieron O'Hara (co-writer of the computer game "Tomb Raider 4," according to the cover). It's given me a much better perspective than I had before on what exactly the Internet is, how it came to be, and how it affects the acquisition, production, and dissemination of "knowledge."

The world O'Hara describes, I now realize, really is my world. Although I don't play computer games (reflexes poor), download much music (still stuck at the "put a record in the record player" stage, although "record" = CD), own an iPod or a cellphone, and my iBook is fast becoming an antique — I am a "knowledge worker" in this world of information overload. Most of my income is derived from data entry for two knowledge management systems (Inscriptifact and Accordance), although I try to maintain a presence in the old knowledge economy (books and articles).

That's made me think about the role of the new cybernetic acquisition of knowledge in the "ecology" of other systems of text acquisition. I think that those who prophesy the end of the old regimes of printed books and actual libraries in real, not virtual, buildings, are on the wrong track. They are thinking of information only in terms of retrieval. You can't beat computers for retrieval, and if you are treating a text as a source of information, the computer will greatly magnify the power of any text to serve as information or evidence. That's not going to go away.

But a text is not just a database. A novel, for instance, is not going to be accessed as a novel except by reading it straight through, and the best way to do that (don't start with me about E-books) is in a bound book. This applies mutatis mutandis to any book linearly organized — i.e. to books of imaginative content, of sustained argument, of cumulative pictorial or narrative power. They are still going to be best accessed in the old-fashioned way, unless they are going to be used only as information (e.g. checking Fielding for the syntactical patterns of British English in the 18th century).

On the other hand I think that books of non-linear information (like dictionaries, encyclopedias, and indexes) are eventually going to disappear in print format. (Or do you want to flip through a dictionary to look up words?) Just the other day I was ribbing a grad student because he actually had the massive dead-tree version of the Anchor Bible Dictionary on his bookshelves taking up space, instead of at his fingertips in the laptop. Not in my lifetime, but eventually, these printed sets will disappear.

But the Bible will still be printed, and so will books about it. And biblioblogs will still discuss them both — I hope.

My Review of Seow's Grammar

A few weeks ago there was a discussion of Hebrew grammars here; helpful, I hope, to some. Although my own experience with some of the grammars that were mentioned is limited, I have read and reviewed C. L. Seow's Grammar for Biblical Hebrew. The review appeared in Journal of the American Oriental Society 110 (1990): 337-338.

Now, as an experiment in making some of my printed material available, I've uploaded a PDF of this review, downloadable here (download starts immediately). [UPDATE: Link removed. See update below.] Let me know if this works out OK. The file is 2+ MB, which seems large to me, but I'm not sure what I ought to have done to reduce the file size. I scanned the pages, saved them as JPEG's, and then inserted them into a Word document, which I printed as a PDF. Is there a better way to do this for multi-page documents? Your input would be appreciated.

Note: the review is of the original edition of Seow's grammar. I believe there is a second, revised edition, which I have not seen.

UPDATE (4/25): Many thanks to Ken Ristau and Tyler Williams, who both sent me versions of the above PDF, optimized for the web. Download this one instead (483 kb), provided by Tyler. Also note Tyler's links in his comment below to his own resources for Hebrew grammar study. Thanks, fellas.