The management of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport likes to call their facility “America’s friendliest airport.” One element of that friendliness: Sky Harbor offers a generous selection of electrical outlets as well as free wireless internet throughout the terminal. Props to Sky Harbor!

My current scholarly project has me investigating the “reception history” or Wirkungsgeschichte of the book of Genesis in Western culture. This investigation necessarily involves forays into the history and criticism of art, literature, music, drama, and other expressions of elite and popular culture. I try to keep an awareness of my utter dilettantishness in these fields always close at hand, and I approach them with trepidation. An article I read a few minutes ago drove this point home once again.

This particular article—which shall, along with its author, remain nameless here—focused on allusions to Genesis 11 within a particular short story. The author claims that “biblical commentary on Genesis 11.i–ix … bears an uncanny resemblance” to the short story in question. Although the article appeared in 2003, the author cites no source, either in biblical studies or literary studies, later than 1974. (I wonder whether a long delay intervened between the authorship and publication—without revision—or whether the article might be a reprint.) The only actual commentary cited is the 1952 Interpreter’s Bible on Genesis (the author of the article in question does not name the author of the old IB commentary), though one might consider Nahum Sarna’s Understanding Genesis to be a commentary. Otherwise, the author cites only a few encyclopedia articles (c. 1955–1975) as sources for understanding “biblical commentary on Genesis 11.i–ix.”

To me, this experience raises once again the question: How can I explore a discipline other than my own, in a scholarly publication, without looking like an ignoramus? How does one exercise quality control in the selection of sources from a field one does not really know as an insider?

I saw this pullquote on NPR.com:

After the unexpected response in January, we didn’t really know what to expect.

Sounds to me like they didn’t know what to expect before the unexpected response in January, either.

Susan J. Behrens published an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently on the topic of civil critiques. It’s well worth your time to read the article, though online access does require a Chronicle subscription.

The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures has recently published an article by Bob Becking and Marjo Korpel entitled “To Create, to Separate, or to Construct: An Alternative for a Recent Proposal as to the Interpretation of ברא in Gen 1:1–2:4a.” In this article, Becking and Korpel analyze and criticize Ellen van Wolde’s proposal that ברא properly means “to separate” or “to differentiate,” not “to create.” In my judgment, Becking and Korpel show the unlikelihood of van Wolde’s suggestion from a lexicographical point of view, and they also provide a coherent lexical and theological account of the “neologism” ברא. If you’re interested in this particular subject, you should definitely put this article on your reading list.

I haven’t blogged much lately—at least, not on Higgaion. This simply reflects the number of hours in a day, and how I’ve chosen to spend my discretionary time. All work and no play makes Chris a dull boy, and a grumpy one. I’m increasingly trying to separate my work life and home/personal life, getting my pedagogical and scholarly work done on campus 7:30–4:30, and then leaving it behind when I go home.

The thing is, if I get my pedagogical and scholarly work done 7:30–4:30 daily, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for blogging. Occasionally I will take time to post something when I feel I have something important or useful to say. However, I hereby officially, explicitly, and ceremoniously declare myself free of any felt obligation to post stuff. I am not “retiring” from blogging or any such nonsense, just taking a different approach to budgeting my time.

I appreciate all of you who post regularly on your own blogs; thanks to the iPhone, you provide some of my favorite bathroom reading (was that too much information?), even if I don’t comment frequently. I appreciate all of you who have contributed regularly to the comments on Higgaion over the last few years, and I hope you’ll keep Higgaion on your RSS feed, even my posting slows to a crawl.

By the way, I just started reading Ellen van Wolde’s Reframing Biblical Studies: When Language and Text Meet Culture, Cognition, and Context (Eisenbrauns, 2010). This book includes a fully-detailed English-language version of van Wolde’s arguments regarding the sense of ברא in Genesis 1, and I’m eager to read that. So far, I have finished only the introduction (chapter 1), but I can already report that Van Wolde’s argument is far more complex than it appeared when all that we Anglophone bloggers had to go on was a brief report from a Netherlands newspaper. I will share more of my reactions to van Wolde’s book as I work through it—I hope to keep up a page pace (thanks, G.M.!) of no less than two chapters per week, but cannot really aim higher than that at the moment.

שלום עליכם

For some time, I’ve contented myself largely with consonantal Hebrew only here on Higgaion. I kept seeing goofy spacing when I would try to use nikud; the vowel points would show up between the letters instead of beneath, above, or within the letters as appropriate. However, I think I just may have learned a solution. Unfortunately, I cannot remember were I read this or from whom I learned it, though it wasn’t that long ago. I think it was on some discussion board or other. If you’re viewing Higgaion using a Macintosh, do you see the following text in appropriately-pointed עִבְרִית?

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃

It’s all done with the magic of style sheets, and the solution assumes that you have access thereto. If you’re hosting a WordPress blog on your own server, the style sheet is probably in the folder with your theme, and is probably named style.css or styles.css. Specific locations and names can vary. The solution remains the same. Once you have found your style sheet and opened it in an appropriate editor (use whatever editor you would use to edit raw HTML), add something like this to your style sheet:

.hebrew {
     font-family:"New Peninim MT",serif;
     font-size:1.5em;
     text-align:right;
}

You will probably want to fiddle around with the font-size. If your Hebrew looks too small compared to your English, try making the Hebrew font size about 150–175% of your English font size. For reference, I have my English font size set to .85em.

Now you can style any HTML object to display Hebrew more nicely. My quotation from Genesis 1:1 above just applies the “hebrew” style to a blockquote object, as follows:

<blockquote class="hebrew">בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃</blockquote>

You can apply the class to almost any HTML container: p, blockquote, td, and so forth. For inline Hebrew, apply the class to a span, as in the following example:

… do you see the following text in appropriately-pointed <span class="hebrew">עִבְרִית</span>?

If you don’t want to manipulate the size of your Hebrew text relative to the size of your English (or German, or French, or whatever else your main text is), you can simply add “New Peninim MT” and/or “Lucida Grande” to the font-family attribute of your body class. However, if you do this, ensure that something else sits in the first position. In my case, that would be Charis SIL (although I just looked at the site in Windows XP—something I never do—and Charis SIL seems ugly in Firefox for WinXP):

body {
     put your other body stuff here, plus …
     font-family: "Charis SIL","Georgia","New Peninim MT",serif;
}

My font definitions follow my own preference for a serif-style Hebrew font, using a specific font name for the Mac side and relying on browser interpretation on the Windows side. If you prefer a sans-serif font, just replace “New Peninim MT” with “Lucida Sans Unicode” (preserve the quotation marks) and add “sans-” (no quotation marks) in front of “serif” in the definition of the .hebrew class.

If Hebrew is working fine for you as it is, never mind! But these tweaks seem to display Hebrew well in Higgaion both on Mac (which I really care about) and Windows (whose users I don’t wish to alienate). Perhaps you’ll get some mileage from these style definitions as well.

I’m a little late in saying (well, blogging) so, but I’m absolutely appalled by Pat Robertson’s stupid comments about Haiti. On the level of basic human sensitivity, blaming the victims for a natural disaster is just flat awful. As a Christian, I find Pat’s comments baldly uncompassionate and even opportunistic, jumping on other people’s pain to advance his own theological cause in a spirit of competition.

Britt Hume’s altar call to Tiger Woods was opportunistic too, but with a completely different tone than Pat’s blame-the-victim mentality. Britt showed compassion. Pat didn’t.

And Pat’s theology is deplorable, too. The idea of the devil conferring boons on people in exchange for a sort of dark covenant works in horror fiction, but not in Christian theology. Pat’s theology gives the devil far more power than any biblical writer ever did.

I gots me too many of ’em. That’s all there is to it. I had hoped to pick up the blogging and resume the podcasting, and I have—but on the recreational side of my life, not the professional side. The professional side has been focused on immediate professional duties.

So if you care about such things, I apologize for my lack of presence from interesting biblioblogosphere discussions of late, particularly those surrounding the Qeiyafa ostracon. Many thanks to all of you who have blogged regularly on interesting things.

It turns out that St. John’s College’s “If you can read this, you’re overeducated” T-shirt—written in Attic Greek—was under-proofread. Better a T-shirt than a tattoo, eh, Tyler?

HT: Inside Higher Ed