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

As always, I scheduled one day of class into this semester to give students some contact with the “mainstream” biblical wisdom tradition as represented (for example) in Proverbs, Psalm 1, and so on. However, I don’t feel like I teach the book of Proverbs very well, perhaps because I don’t really enjoy the book of Proverbs very much. Any suggestions?

My Religion 101 class will study selected psalms on Tuesday. To help lay a foundation for our in-class activities, I created the following videos, two of which I uploaded just a couple of hours ago:

• Parallelism in Biblical Hebrew Poetry
• Poetic Structures in the Psalms
• Sorting Through the Psalms

Enjoy!

Since returning from the 2009 Society of Biblical Literature meeting, I’ve uploaded three new YouTube videos. One relates to my Religion 101 class:

• Parallelism in Biblical Hebrew Poetry

I will soon (today, if all goes well) supplement that one with additional videos on poetic structures in the psalms and form criticism of the Psalter. Two other videos, which I created in response to an e-mail from another teacher of Biblical Hebrew (whom I met through the Cohelet project), introduce students to typing in Hebrew on a Macintosh:

• Typing Hebrew on Mac OS X, Part 1 — This video shows viewers how to activate and access Hebrew keyboards on the Mac, and how to use the Keyboard Viewer and Character Viewer.
• Typing Hebrew on Mac OS X, Part 2 — This video discusses font selections as well as some of the challenges with selecting and editing right-to-left text on the Mac.

I’ve also expanded the Cohelet and Semantic Biblical Hebrew offerings on iFlipr:

• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.1
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.2
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.3
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5 (Cumulative)
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Movement
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Prepositions
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Senses

Please let me know of any typos you find in the decks, and please send suggestions for additions (especially ways to expand the movement and senses decks without getting into obscure or difficult-to-illustrate terms).

Whew! Saturday at SBL 2009 proved rather busy and hectic for me, and the first half of Sunday looks about the same.

Remember those iTunes U and YouTube videos that I’ve been posting recently? Pepperdine University funded the equipment and software to produce those videos with a Faculty Innovation in Technology and Learning grant. As part of that grant project, I brought my equipment with me to SBL ’09 and partnered with the SBL folk who are working on the new World of the Bible web site. I spent a good bit of Saturday working with that project, and will do the same the first half of Sunday. If all goes well—I have some concerns about lighting and sound quality, but hope I can fix those issues in post-production—Pepperdine’s iTunes U and/or the SBL web site will soon feature the likes of Mark Goodacre, Aren Maeir, and others delivering 5-minute (or so) mini-lectures on the Philistines, Mary of Magdala, and so on. I’ll give more details later as I learn how well the video did or didn’t turn out.

I also gave my presentation “Drowning in Paint: The Deluge in Western Art” on Saturday afternoon. Aside from misusing one German word (audience members graciously corrected my error, and I learned that what I had said was true of Danish, but not of German), I thought it went reasonably well. The questions and comments offered afterward were helpful and on-point, and I didn’t get any of the “Why didn’t you write the paper I would have written?” or “What do you think about a completely different topic?” questions. (I hate those.)

The only other presentation I attended was David J.A. Clines’s presidential address. David gave a good talk, but I was weighed down by dinner and found myself nodding—not in agreement, but with sleepiness. Essentially, David put forward a lengthy-ish case for active learning. I completely agreed with his proposals, but didn’t find them as “new” as he seemed to cast them.

It’s now Sunday morning, 6:50, and time for me to head out to the “Church of Christ Professors Meeting” (a.k.a. on-site worship). See you around!

I’ve posted two new videos at YouTube since my last update here. The links here will take you to YouTube. “Israel and Assyria” is also available in Pepperdine University’s iTunes U catalog; the Isaiah video should be up in iTunes U sometime Monday.

• Israel and Assyria, 900–600 BCE
• One, Two, or Three Isaiahs?

Enjoy!

If you read the title of this post just right, you can make it rhyme … but that has nothing to do with my main point.

For this academic year, I set myself the goal of using classroom time for more active learning experiences—which requires me to lecture less in class. To that end, I’ve starting offloading some lecture material into short videos; I also intend to transform some homework materials from reading into viewing/listening experiences. Some of these videos can only be viewed by Pepperdine students right now (due to copyright issues) in iTunesU, but my goal is to make all of these micro-lectures public through iTunesU and, for those who don’t use iTunes, YouTube. Due to the sequencing of material this semester, my first two publicly-available micro-lectures are:

• Introduction to the Deuteronomistic History
• The Composition of the Deuteronomistic History

I will gladly receive any and all constructive criticism and suggestions—I’m keeping the videos short precisely to keep them modular and easy to update. However, please note my goal of keeping the videos close to five minutes each, so a good bit of oversimplification is inevitable.

(Oh, and if you like the videos, please take time for a quick star rating.)

Episode 5 of the Higgaion Podcast continues Michael Heiser’s introduction to the divine council. In this segment, Michael takes up the problem of relating the divine council concept to our tradition of describing ancient Israelite and Judean religion as “monotheistic.”

Should you prefer to listen without going through iTunes U, you may download the file directly and copy it to your favorite MP3 player, or listen right now using the embedded player below.

Please note that for the time being, in spite of Mark Goodacre’s vote to the contrary, I’ve decided to stick with the relatively low-quality monophonic output in deference to listeners who have limited bandwidth or who have to “pay by the K” for downloads. I plan to review this decision frequently, however, and I’m always open to your feedback on this question. (That’s a pun. Get it? Audio quality … feedback … never mind.)

Just under twenty times in the Tanakh—I could have written “in the Former Prophets” if not for two verses in Chronicles—a writer uses the phrase “from Dan to Beer-sheba” (מִדָּן וְעַד־בְּאֵר שֶׁבַע) to Israel’s geographical territory. In Judges 20:1—and only in Judges 20:1—the author adds a ל before the מן, and adds “and the land of Gilead” (וְאֶרֶץ הַגִּלְעָד) to the entire phrase. I suppose I could go look this up in a commentary, but it’s late at night and I’m at home. Anybody have any idea why this should be so—why this verse, and this verse alone, adds an explicit inclusion of Transjordanian Israelite territory to the standard formula?

Genesis 1 portrays God as the cosmic king. But what’s a king without a court? In episode 4 of the Higgaion Podcast, Michael Heiser drops by to introduce listeners to the divine council.

Should you prefer to listen without going through iTunes U, you may download the file directly and copy it to your favorite MP3 player, or listen right now using the embedded player below.