Online courses, she said, also give students a chance to learn at their own pace and to have contact with their teachers through e-mail, text messages and even phone calls.
–New York Times article; wow, I can’t believe how much I’ll learn through text messages!
This morning I stumbled upon an interview of Eva von Dassow in which she talks about the ancient city of Ur. It is worth a listen.
Pete Bekins at Balshanut has two nice posts on Hebrew Poetry. One on parallelism and the other on the controversial topic of meter. Check them out; it will be worth your time.
The Digital Orient blog has posted a few recent articles from André Lemaire including:
Publishing is extremely important for those who are seeking a tenure-track position at a research institution, however, it is still very important for professors at teaching institutions. Among other things, publishing will effect hiring and promotion, book deals, and speaking gigs.
So, if you have a good paper that you would like to submit for publication, where should you send it?
Well, to some extent it might depend on where you are or want to teach. If you are aiming for a confessional school then a seminary journal like Westminster Theological Journal or Biblioteca Sacra might be a good option, but if you are wanting to teach at a research institution then you should probably avoid this.
However, even if we limit ourselves to broad-audience, peer-reviewed journals, which ones are the most prestigious? Well, this depends as well.
The European Science Foundation attempted to rank various journals (using the acronym ERIH) according to a three-tiered system of: A, B, or C. This entire enterprise has been highly criticized, most vociferously by North American scholars since their journals are underrepresented and lower-ranked than European journals. In general I agree with this criticism and one of the most astounding results of the ranking was the assignment of a “B” rating to the Journal of Biblical Literature–on par with Expository Times, Irish Biblical Studies, and Calvin Theological Journal. Almost every North American scholar that I have talked with thinks that JBL is the preeminent North American biblical studies journal as well as one of the very top international journals (full disclosure: I have a forthcoming article in JBL and therefore I’m pretty receptive to this line of thinking) and I certainly think it is head and shoulders above many of the “B” journals.
Furthermore, the European “Religious Studies and Theology” list doesn’t even rank very helpful journals including: Maarav, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages, and the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures. Furthermore, some confessional but still critical journals were also left out such as Bulletin for Biblical Research, Tyndale Bulletin, and HIPHIL. (The Australians are also compiling their own list due anytime now.)
So what journal should a young scholar send his or her article to? The ERIH list is a good place to start, but I would take their rankings with a grain of salt and I would expand the scope of journals you consider a bit wider. However, I would not cast your net too wide. If it is a fantastic paper go for top-tier journals and personally I would never consider a journal that was not indexed by ATLA since other scholars will never find your work as they search during their own researching which means that you won’t be cited, etc.
What are your thoughts on the ERIH list? What advice do you have to young scholars?
When confronted with an unevenness in a text, one can choose one of two ways: either to go ahead and eliminate it, which is the way of textual ‘surgery,’ or to try to illuminate it and see it as being due to conscious literary art.
–Tryggve Mettinger, The Eden Narrative, 36-7.
The gift of spending one’s years on the narrow peninsula of time in close contact with texts of unmatched existential dimensions.
–Tryggve Mettinger, The Eden Narrative, xiv.
The Eden Narrative
A Literary and Religio-Historical Study of Genesis 2-3
EIS – Eisenbrauns
by Tryggve N. D. Mettinger
Eisenbrauns, 2007
xvii + 165 pages, English
Cloth, 6 x 9 inches
ISBN: 9781575061412
List Price: $29.50
Your Price: $26.55
www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~EIS~~I~METEDENNA
From the Agade listserve:
Professor Kupper is very well known for his major works on the Mari
tablets as well as on diverse aspects of the Old Babylonian world. in
1990 Professor Tunca edited his Festschrift, “De la Babylonie à la
Syrie, en passant par Mari : mélanges offerts à Monsieur J.-R. Kupper à l’occasion de son 70e anniversaire (Liège: Université de Liège).
–>Here are a couple links to some of his books: Lettres royales du temps de Zimri-Lim: Archives royales de MARI XXVIII and Inscriptions royales sumériennes et akkadiennes.
Chip Hardy over at the Daily Hebrew blog has a huge list of downloadable resources for Hebrew and Aramaic studies. Most are quite old but often still helpful.
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on how to save languages from dying by expanding predictive text functions on mobile phones. Currently, only about 80 of the world’s ca. 6,912 languages can be used on a handset. Since there are over three billion mobile phones, developing language compatibility is for them is far more significant than even keyboard compatibility for internet, etc. Furthermore, it seems that text messaging usage surges when predictive text fuctions are available.
