This iPad e-book version of Alice looks brilliant, not shovelware but a genuine remediating of an old classic, if the real thing is half as good as the demo looks like, that might really mean that the iPad is as much of a stimulation to innovation in publishing as people have claimed. I just love the way it blends new media with old, instead of making one mimic the other.
HT: Chris Meade @ bookfutures
Makes me wish I had an iPad, and/or I was in London ;)
It is a long time since I have mentioned TanakhML, but it is one of the few online resources I use almost daily for reading the (Hebrew) Bible. The Interface is neat and attractive, it is fairly easy to browse the text, you can turn various elements like vowels and accents on or off, but best of all you can click the little button that says “accents” at the top right of the browse window and get a view of the verse you are at that shows instantly how the Masoretes read it, purase by phrase. For someone like me who has never really tried to master the accent system this is brilliant!
Open Scriptures makes a really interesting announcement Morphological Hebrew Bible Version 1.0 if we had such a tool all sorts of interesting free and open source Bible projects become much more possible.
Sadly this looks more like version 0.1 than 1.0, as far as I can see there is as yet no actual morph tagging available :( But, and here the short announcement is frustratingly unclear. And not being a code junkie (despite my recent foray into mySQL database management) I can not make out if they even have yet a system to allow volunteers to make and discuss the coding. If they do what is needed are:
I wonder if this might be a project people teaching Hebrew could give to their students as an assignment, to code a few verses, which the teacher then checks, marks, and then corrects. This is basically a task that Hebrew teachers regularly perform, moving it into the framework of such a project would make it more productive!
Performance of Emilio de' Cavalieri's La Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo in Basilica San Paolo Fuori Le Mura
I am listening to La rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo by Emilio de’ Cavalieri (1550-1602) this is arguably the oldest surviving opera, or perhaps it’s an oratorio. When I say listening, I’m actually playing one of the super-bargain DVDs we bought, so I can also watch the performers (it is a concert rather than a staged production) and the setting a fine old highly decorated church (the Basilica San Paolo Fuori Le Mura, in Rome).
The singing is preceded by a spoken prologue, which as far as I could gather (there are subtitles in English, but somewhat obscured by the bottom of my TV, and my Italian is not strong – though I can read the legalese on the backs of bus tickets ;) is a Jobian account of the misery of human life. The rhetoric seemed so exaggerated that I wondered what was going on…Such suspicion of non-literal meaning may be a biblical scholar’s déformation professionelle…
I decided it would both help my enjoyment of the oratorio and my detection of possible irony if I could get the words, ideally with English translation. I also (being a scholar) thought a quick peek at an encyclopedia article might help. Naturally I googled the work, dozens of sites selling CDs, scores selling MP3s, a few selling DVDs, a few googled-books offering comment, and a rather sparse Wikipedia article resulted. Surely the world of classical music should be better served by the web than this? The best I could get by way of background information was the above slighted Wikipedia article and a few paragraphs from a Guardian review of one of the CD issues of the music.
Incidentally there are (probably copyright-breaching) You Tube clips from the performance here:
Have I gone wrong, missed something? Where would you look for information about such works, their composers and ideally (they being long out of copyright) texts of the libretto?
Yesterday I was reading bits of theses I am supervising (catching up after an Easter holiday), both were complex material, one because she is writing about Bakhtin (stimulating and likeable but not easy), the other because he’s dealing with two of the more difficult passages, basically dealing with the question of God’s commands to Israel in to commit the Canaanites etc. to the ban.
A basic question in dealing with this is: What do the passages actually say? For Dt 7:2 the English versions are pretty unanimous and clear (this is therefore just a small sample):
New Revised Standard
and when the LORD your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.
New International Version
and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.
English Standard Version
and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.
It is not just the translations that follow the AV slavishly either, the CEV and New Living are as bad or worse.
So, to adopt (though hopefully with other motives) the snake’s question (Gen 3:1): Is this really what God says?
וּנְתָנָם יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ לְפָנֶיךָ וְהִכִּיתָם
הַחֲרֵם תַּחֲרִים אֹתָם
לֹא־תִכְרֹת לָהֶם בְּרִית וְלֹא תְחָנֵּם׃
The key phrases are in the second and third lines (above, this phrasing is based on the Masoretic accentuation).
הַחֲרֵם תַּחֲרִים אֹתָם is something like “you will certainly ban them” using a superlative construction that repeats the verb. The only major question about its meaning is what exactly the verb חרם means. Whatever it is they are most definitely to do it to the seven nations mentioned in the previous verse.
The last line is easier, they are not to make a covenant with them, nor show them “mercy”. Mercy here represents חנן “grace, mercy favour”.
The first clue that the English translations are wrong, if they mean – as I understand them to – that the Israelites are to wipe these seven nations out, is that they are commanded to make no covenant with them. One cannot make covenants with the dead. Secondly they are to show them no favour, this is not the same as showing no mercy!
Thus the traditional reading depends entirely on understanding of the ban חרם if this means “kill” then the rest of the interpretation is possible, but if it means something else then the rest is misleading (to put it mildly).
The Greek already had this understanding rendering הַחֲרֵם תַּחֲרִים אֹתָם as ἀφανισμῷ ἀφανιεῖς αὐτούς.
So, does this ban mean “kill” or even “kill as a sacrifice to a god”. Not exactly, it seems rather to mean “exclude from human use, devote to a god exclusively (sometimes by sacrificing or killing).
So, does Dt 7:2 mean: “Exterminate them!” ? Sadly I think the answer is “yes and no”. As a command from God it clearly does not, one cannot make a covenant with someone one has killed! The command is rather to have nothing whatever to do with them. However, as an instruction in time of war to the Israelite forces in Joshua’s day, it does mean “Take no prisoners.”
I think a better translation would render the verse something like:
“and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them,
then you must completely cut yourselves off from them,
you shall make no covenant with them and nor offer them grace.”
Hmm…
PS (21 April 2010) If all you need to do is make your Hebrew and Greek Unicode look nice please see Phil’s excellent guide at How to Use Greek and Hebrew in Blog Posts (nb. as the post goes on it gets more and more geeky, but the beginning should not be beyond most bloggers).
I am writing this post to help others who have problems with using “International” (Unicode) characters on a WordPress blog installed using their host’s cPanel. Maybe I can save you the hours of searching on the Internetz for the answer :)
The problem I had was that though Unicode (Hebrew etc.) would display and edit fine when I slicked “Publish” it all turned to ??? ?????? ???? which was no use at all.
Some Googling and a few hints from kind friends finally suggested that the problem was the charactersets that the MySQL database (that runs WordPress behind the scenes) was set to use.
You can check if this is the issue by going to phpMyAdmin (in cPanel) click on the appropriate database. On the next screen is a table which includes to the right a collumn “Collation”. The likely problem will be some “tables” have “latin1_swedish_ci” which is (apparently) brilliant for English and other European languages, but no good for other parts of the world, instead of the nice genuinely International “utf8_general_ci”.
The real bummer is that you cannot simply change this here, that would offend the database fairies, so you need to export your blog (in WordPress admin go to Tools and choose “export”).
Then:
1. Enter your cPanel and click on the phpMyAdmin icon in the Databases box.
2. Select the database you wish to manage from the drop-down menu on the left
3. Click on the Operations tab in the top menu of your phpMyAdmin
4. At the bottom of the page you will see the collation option. You can now select a collation from the drop down menu and click on the Go button.
Now using FTP backup your blog directory (you may want things like the pictures you uploaded, or your theme with any tweaks you made…) and then change its name on your server. Now you can install a new blog with the old name and in the old directory, it will work fine with Unicode characters :)
Just in WP-Admin “Import” the blog you exported, and then copy by FTP the wp-content/uploads directory into the new blog (that gives your pictures etc.) and also the theme you were using into the themes directory (to restore the look and feel. All that’s left is to delete the default “Hello World” post. If you are like me you already have one of those from the original install ;)
Then change the directory name.
For some reason despite having UTF8 set as the character set in WP-CONFIG.PHP thius installation is mangling Hebrew and presenting it as a series of ????
If there is anyone who can suggest a cause, or better still a fix, I’d be delighted, as I have a post that will be much better with Hebrew showing as Hebrew ;)
The Djinn in charge of all deserts and the original camel (Rudyard Kipling)
I am recording the Just So Stories for Librivox, and I want to make this the most full and complete audio version of the book ever. So, I have included the 13th story, that was in the first US edition, but left out of most later ones (superstition?), and Kipling’s entertaining descriptions of the pictures he provided for the book, as well as the poems that follow each story. Including the picture descriptions means that listeners need access to the pictures, but many may not have the book, or want to look at a book while listening, so I have prepared a booklet with all the pictures. Can you look at it, and give me feedback and criticism that might make it more usable by people listening to an audio book? (The file is here, as PDF.)
Thanks!
There are lots of interesting things to watch at the Areo Club Cafe
When we went out to Ardmore on Thursday for me to enjoy my 30 minutes at the controls of a small trainer, we had a light lunch at the Cafe there.
The view from the Aero Club is great, not great scenery, but the people getting into their aricraft, doing the checks, then taxiing away to take off, or the reverse. Across the airfield fromk time to time there will be someone practicing flying a small helicopter in a straight line following a taxiway… In short there’s always something different to watch.
The coffee was not bad, not the very best, but average to good compared to cafes in our part of Auckland. Service was friendly and quick, even though the cafe was a busy place, nearly as busy as the aero club office next door ;)
The food menu was unadventurous, but also workmanlike. Barbara’s corn fritters were tasty but almost too corny and unusually came with the bacon cut up and mixed into the mixture.
Executive summary: come for the view, not the food, but worth a visit if you are in the neighbourhood and want a cup of coffee or a light meal.
For years now I’ve been getting more and more fed up with the way weird sects, and Christians who have become nearly as weird, get away with making the Bible mean whatever they like. It is no wonder that less and less Christians (in the West) bother to read the Bible, if it means half the things that people have told me with a straight face that it says, then it is not worth reading.
So, many readers make the Bible out to teach oppression of one sort or another, women subservient to men, children to adults, anyone who enjoys life to the killjoys and their dumb rules… And it is not just the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the raving loony fundamentalists, or the nutty Neo-Athiests, sadly there are loads of people in ordinary churches who love the Bible, yet abuse it terribly.
Then I taught a course at Carey “Understanding and Interpreting the Bible”, which I mentioned in a post on the old blog. Nothing fancy, a beginner’s class, using a slim paperback as its textbook : Duvall, J Scott, and J Daniel Hays Journey into God’s word : your guide to understanding and applying the Bible. Grand Rapids Mich.: Zondervan, 2008. Yet several times during the semester students said things like “Why don’t they teach us this in church?”.
So I’m trying. A series of sermons at Blockhouse Bay that finbished a few weeks ago, and now a seminar at Easter camp. A screencast using the audio from that seminar is below, and below that a link to the audio of some of the question and answer session (sadly my recorder ran out before the end :(
Question Time from the Bible Abuse Session at Easter camp (MP3 file)
