• Get a generous sugar daddy/mommy to pay the full freight for every student
• Hire a really good PR firm and be on the brink of media over-exposure
• Expect the venture to falter after 3 years
• Try to link yourself with an already prestigious brand

…at least that’s what this piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed implies.  That’s odd, I didn’t read anything about having a great faculty…

The mortal sin of the academic world is plagiarism, that is, using someone else’s words or ideas and passing them off as your own.  During the past few days friends have sent me emails concerning sites that sell Old Testament papers to students (topics include: Messiah in the OT, Women in the OT, and OT Prophecy), Alan Jacobs reflected on plagiarists’ lame excuses, the New York Daily News may have plagiarized a story from the Daily Mail, and the New York Times published a piece on the “blurring lines” of plagiarism among students.

What’s all the fuss about?

We live in a very odd culture that extends ownership rights to non-tangible things like ideas and words.  However, these are relatively modern inventions.  Within the ancient world there was no such thing as “intellectual property” or even “authorship” as we understand it.  Literature was composed not by individuals but by communities–whether these communities were sitting around campfires recounting stories real or fiction or in between or whether the communities were scholars writing for other scholars.  Within the ancient world literature developed over time and subsequent generations of composers used previous work in order to fashion their own accounts.  Hardly any scholar put their name on their work (there are a couple exceptions of acrostic poems which spell out a scribe’s name).

All this fuss about plagiarism has me thinking–are students merely reverting to an ancient view of authorship?

May his memory be a blessing.  Here is a selection from an obit from Hebrew Union College:

Dr. Rivkin was the Adolph S. Ochs Professor of Jewish History Emeritus at HUC-JIR/Cincinnati.  He was born on September 7, 1918 in Baltimore, MD.  He received his BA with honors from Johns Hopkins University in 1941 and his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1946.  He also attended the Baltimore Hebrew College and was awarded the BHL degree in 1943. In 1962, Dr. Rivkin was awarded a Simon Guggenheim Fellowship to do archival research on the role of the Jews in the development of early Capitalism in European archives.  He published five books and wrote more than one hundred articles and reviews on Jewish history and early Christianity.  Dr. Rivkin lectured widely in the US and abroad and was especially active in Christian-Jewish dialogue.

You can imagine my relief when a friend forwarded me an email announcing a new teaching grammar for biblical Hebrew.  As I have said before, there are hardly any choices when it comes to Hebrew grammars so this will certainly be a welcome addition to the dreadful paucity of books on this subject.  Also, the author of this grammar has come up with a really great pedagogical device of coining her own brand new term for the Hebrew past-tense verb: the “waw-past.”  So, we can now add “waw-past” to the other names for this form such as “waw-consecutive,” “waw-conversive,” “narrative preterite,” “wayyiqtol,” “reversing waw”…

The New York Times has a nice piece on the Syrian site, Tell Zeidan.  The article focuses on the contributions that Tell Zeidan makes to our understanding of the Ubaid period.  The dig is led by the University of Chicago and you can read a their 2008-2009 annual report here (it contains an overview of the site, pictures, maps, etc.).

The Agade list circulated a story in the Times of London stating that Egypt is preparing to demand that the Rosetta Stone be returned.  I found it very humorous that this story appears in the “Entertainment” section of the paper and rightly so.  I can sum up what answer Egypt will receive in two words:  “No way.”  A little while back the Telegraph ran an editorial entitled “The Elgin Marbles Will Never Return to Athens” that outlines some of the complicated issues involving repatriating famous artifacts; maybe the Egyptian officials should skim over it.

While I am on the subject of the Agade list and Egypt what’s up with all the Egypt stuff lately?  I thought I signed up for the *Agade* list not the *Nefertiti* list.

I found this graph accompanying a Financial Times article rather interesting.

Dear Committee,

Since you are beginning the process of revising the NIV translation for a 2011 release I wanted to take this opportunity early in the process to express a few modest suggestions that might improve a very popular Bible translation.  Translation is difficult–particularly when there are so many emotional, theological, political, and economic dimensions that go along with translating the Bible–so I certainly realize that you have much work ahead and many difficult decisions to make.  I  am not trying to Monday morning quarterback your work–the committee is filled with many fine scholars who I know will do a great job and will produce a translation that will be useful and helpful to many people.  However, I do have a few proposals that I have gathered from many hours of my own reading and reflection upon the Hebrew/Aramaic Bible alongside the NIV that I believe would improve an already very good translation:

• Eliminate erroneously tendentious translations.  Every biblical translation is done with some kind of ideological bias, however, there are several particularly striking instances in which the NIV breaks established grammatical understanding and translates certain words or phrases in order to seemingly (and undoubtedly with good intentions) support particular theological concerns.  For instance, in Genesis 2:19 the NIV translates a very obvious narrative preterite (wayyiqtol) as a pluperfect to seemingly obscure the fact that the orders of creation between Gen 1 and 2 are different.  I do not know of another instance in which the NIV translates a narrative preterite in this way and there is no ancient translation that I know of that the NIV translators drew from to lend support to this interpretation (the LXX translates this as kai + aorist clearly reading a narrative preterite).
• Don’t avoid figurative interpretations and loose translation of idioms.  There is no reason to interpret verses like Jonah 3:3 literally and invent an entire “city-visit” scheme to explain the “three-day walk” idiom.  (I’ve provided more details about this verse here.)
• Fix inconsistent translations.  It is very odd that the NIV translates the phrase, eshet hayil, as “a woman of noble character” in Ruth 3:11 and “wife of noble character” in Prov 12:4 & 31:10.  While the exact phrase, eshet hayil, occurs only in these three verses the male version of this phrase, ish/anshe hayil, occurs 18 times and nowhere does the NIV translate this as “man of noble character.”  Furthermore, hayil appears in total 231 times and in every instance of a male the NIV translates the word with a connotation of strength, wealth, or as “capable men.”  So, why does the NIV break with a totally consistent translation record of hayil and ish/anshe hayil when the gender changes to female?  Eshet hayil would be better translated something along the lines of “industrious or entrepreneurial woman” as this construction clearly means from the context of Ruth and Proverbs 31.
• Don’t sanitize biblical language.  There is a good bit of “earthy” language in the Old Testament and an accurate translation should represent this instead of suppressing it.  For instance, the NIV translates the words of an Assyrian military commander in Isaiah 36:12b as “to eat their own filth and drink their own urine.”  It seems to me that the words har’ehem and shenehem translated as “their excrement” and “their urine” are stronger than this since the Masoretes presumably deemed them not polite enough to pronounce in synagogue and they left a note in the margin of this verse to instead say “their elimination” and “the water from their feet.”

There are other things I could mention but if only these issues were fixed the NIV would be all the better.  Hopefully these reflections will be of value to you as you continue your work.  I wish you the very best,

Charles

James Bowley has been named Humanities Teacher of the Year for 2009 by the Mississippi Humanities Council.  Professor Bowley is a distinguished graduate of HUC-JIR.  Congratulations!

It seems that the normally sleepy discipline of philology is starting to take on some of the sensationalistic sizzle normally reserved for archaeology.  John Hobbins sagaciously notes: “Scholars are known to succumb to the temptation of suggesting that their findings are of revolutionary significance even if they are not.”  It seems to me that this statement describes Ellen Van Wolde’s recent comments regarding Genesis 1.  From her translation of Gen 1:1 as “in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth” she concludes: “It meant to say that God did create humans and animals, but not the Earth itself.”  In other words she says that Gen 1 is concerned with God forming the world through pre-existent matter by separating the land from water, etc.

I find it hard to discern what is new or even noteworthy here.  Scholars have been saying this for years.  In fact, the translation commissioned by the National Council of Churches, the New Revised Standard Version, contains this interpretation by translating Gen 1:1 as “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth…”  Furthermore, even evangelical scholars have embraced this view–most recently John Walton who has a new book out by IVP and a forthcoming volume also by Eisenbrauns (the publisher of Van Wolde’s new book on this subject).

Like John Hobbins I respect Van Wolde’s scholarship I just wish that it wasn’t dressed in sensationalism.