BioLogos announced today that Pete Enns will be joining their team as a senior fellow of biblical studies. Enns has been guest-writing on their Science and the Sacred blog and participated in the recent workshop noted here. The full announcement (and links to team member biographies) is found here.
I always feel a special connection to the Hubble telescope. And not just because I taught astronomy in an Earth science class. It is because I know one of the astronauts, Kathryn Thornton, who was a mission specialist EVA crew member aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on the STS-61 Hubble Space Telescope (HST) servicing and repair mission 1993 (this was the third of her four shuttle missions). Her stories about space travel made me yearn to be an astronaut. Alas, it was not to be (yet!).
James McGrath via Phil Plait first pointed out the Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar for 2009, which began today at The Big Picture. Below is today’s image (check the site every day for more amazing images). James has a nice montage of a few of last year’s photos here.
You can view the 2008 calendar here.
I never get tired of looking at these images.
Clayboy (Doug Chaplin) does a terrific job this month with the Biblical Studies Carnival XLVIII. I’m happy to see such a representation from the Hebrew Bible this month. He also successfully sifted out all of Jim West‘s photo journals of the SBL meeting and listed the best reports of sessions at that meeting in New Orleans.
And, the Top 50 Biblioblog list is out for the month of November. The monthly Top 50 Biblioblog list is now a six-month listing, the current list is here.
Chris Heard has put together two screencasts demonstrating how to setup and use your Mac to type in Hebrew. You might want to be sure you have the unicode SBL Hebrew font installed before you watch the videos. The font is available free for download here. Be sure to also download the keyboard driver and PDF manual. You don’t need to use the SBL Hebrew keyboard drivers, but Chris does demonstrate them in the screencast. Thanks, Chris, for a great resource!
Last month, I posted a list of English sentences that highlighted just how confusing the spelling, semantics, and pronunciation of the English language can be.
I’m looking to expand that list. So, here’s one more (add your own to the comments).
When the doctor was the patient, he was patient with his doctor, but the other patients had no patience for him.
I’d also like to find examples of similar kinds of use of language in the Hebrew text. Any takers?
First semester Hebrew students usually have enough background to understand this Hebrew:
Here we find the preposition עם with a 1cp suffix נוּ so we translate “with us.” This is followed by אֵל , which we translate “God.” So in context (Is. 7:14; 8:8), we are told that the child to be born will be named “Immanuel” meaning “God with us.” In the ESV, NET, and NRSV we find the spelling to begin with “I” but in many carols we read “Emmanuel.” Why is this? Because, when Matthew quotes the OT passage (Matt. 1:23), the Greek reads:
ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν,
καὶ καλέσουσιν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἐμμανουήλ,
ὅ ἐστιν μεθερμηνευόμενον μεθ᾿ ἡμῶν ὁ θεός.
Thus, the English spelling renders the NT Greek as “Emmanuel.”
I still prefer to write the “I” in Immanuel, because my students can then remember that even the prepositions and suffixes that they learn are alive with meaning.
I just returned home from a couple of weeks on the road. While traveling, I put some new apps for my iPhone through their paces. Here are a few that I’ll be keeping.
I had my solid standbys with me too–iFlipr, Things, Library (syncs with my Delicious Library), Olive Tree, and of course Koi Pond. Koi Pond is absolutely mesmorizing for distressed children sitting next to you on an airplane. Don’t hand the phone over to the child, but hold it in your hand and get them to put their finger on the pond and wait for their reaction when the fish start to “nibble” their finger. Everyone in the plane will think you are a hero.
From the online Merriam-Webster dictionary:
Pronunciation: trə-ˈdi-shən
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English tradicioun, from Middle French & Latin; Middle French tradicion, from Latin tradition-, traditio action of handing over, tradition — more at treason
Date: 14th century1 a : an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (as a religious practice or a social custom) b : a belief or story or a body of beliefs or stories relating to the past that are commonly accepted as historical though not verifiable
2 : the handing down of information, beliefs, and customs by word of mouth or by example from one generation to another without written instruction
3 : cultural continuity in social attitudes, customs, and institutions
4 : characteristic manner, method, or style
Advent is a tradition that my family has participated in since I was a child. It connects me to the river of other believers through history who have likewise used four candles (five, if you include the Christ candle of Christmas Eve) to retell the story of the coming of the Christ. It is a continuity. It is not really personal (except for my individual memories), it is more about community. And as Tevye, in “Fidder on the Roof,” came to understand, the traditions that I cling to as the “right” way to remember and live must be seen as something dynamic and living and changing. It is not so much about the details (e.g., colors of the candles, which candle to light first, what words are used to “name” each of the four advent candles) but more about the opportunity to share in community the anticipation and the retelling of the story.
For me, Advent is all about becoming hungry. Hungry for the rest of the story. Each week is an appetizer. By the time we get to the end of the month, I want to be aching for the celebration of Christmas! When I was a child the church was not decorated (save for the colors of the advent candles) until Christmas Eve. But oh, what delight when we entered at midnight on Christmas Eve! The whole sanctuary was full of the heady smell of greenery. Flowers filled the front (in memory of those who taught us our own traditions). And candles were everywhere. I can still feel and smell those memories in my mind’s eye. This is how the story was recounted for me.
As we begin this Advent season, anticipating Christmas (and that holiday’s own set of traditions!), I will look for ways to “hand down” my own “inherited” “beliefs” and “customs” to the younger generation of my family. And I’m sure they will teach me new ways of celebrating and participating in this time of retelling of the story.
I’m wondering about blindspots when it comes to “seeing” our own culture.
First, I wonder about how much Western/Anglo culture affects international translation efforts when the tools for translation are in English and generated (for the most part) by the Western Church. Is a layer of interpretation inserted between the Ancient Hebrew text and the target/receptor language and text? I think that sometimes (not always) we tend to miss just how “foreign” our own English translations are from the original text. I think most people would agree that the best situation is generating a translation from the Hebrew directly into the target language, but this is rarely the case (for lots of different reasons). What best practices will help to appropriately use the current tools, and what is the way forward?
Second, I am surprised by the ability (of some) to accept the need for accommodation to communicate the ancient text (i.e. the Hebrew Bible) into a tribal or remote language so that it is contextually appropriate and understandable, and yet have resistance to allowing modern English translations to likewise reflect their current culture in a meaningful way. Is there a blindspot to our own situated-ness?
Pete Enns is the Friday “guest voice” again at Science and the Sacred (the BioLogos blog).
This week he is discussing the cognate literature (such as Enuma Elish, Atrahasis, and Gilgamesh) of the Hebrew Bible. Why is this helpful?
Placing Israel in its broader cultural and religious context has been referred to as the “comparative approach.” This is a sometimes-maligned term, as it is unfortunately understood by some to imply that Israel was simply copying or “borrowing” what was around them. This is not the case. Rather, the literature of Israel and that of her predecessors and neighbors reflect a common way of looking at the world. The value of these ancient texts is not in telling us from where Israel got her ideas. Instead, they help us understand what kind of a text Genesis is. I like to refer to this as “genre calibration.”
Read the entire post here.