Some time back Mark Goodacre did a poll on intro Greek grammars. Mounce was the clear winner, with N. Clayton Croy’s grammar being in second. I thought it was time the same thing was done for intro Hebrew grammars.

As I am now in the midst of teaching Hebrew, it has become apparent to me that I, most unfortunately, made the wrong textbook choice for my students (I’m sure many teachers can relate to this). While it does have some strengths, I have just not been happy with Fuller and Choi’s Invitation to Biblical Hebrew. It is so focused on composition, which is just not how I teach ancient languages.

Anyhow, as I prepare for teaching Hebrew again next year, I thought I would see what others are using and created a poll. Please vote— and if I missed a grammar please add it to the poll.

The ever-insightful John Hobbins (who happens to be my latest Facebook friend as well) brought to my attention the new initiative of the SBL to more widely disseminate information by asking their authors to contribute a summarized version to wikipedia.

I’m in favor of more widely disseminating information through open access, but in my own opinion I find the choice of wikipedia a bit of an odd one myself. While it is true that wikipedia articles can be “locked” articles are otherwise open to editing. Besides this though, there are better alternatives out there.

If the SBL wants to stick with a shorter encyclopedia-style entry, why not go with Citizendium? Citizendium is a great wikipedia alternative (from one of wiki’s founders) that relies on peer review and is not open for any Tom, Dick, or Harry to edit. I will be allowing students in my next year’s courses to quote from Citizendium, as it has been peer-reviewed. Another option is Google Knol. Which is a prettier version of wikipedia, but the original author can specify the level of collaboration by the wider community. There is also the advantage that it is google— wikipedia keeps asking for money so much that I’m beginning to think it may one day disappear. Google is eternal.

There is an alternative, I think, that both makes the info available and has the advantages of wikipedia. I’m willing to bet that a large majority of wikipedia readers first come upon articles via google. Because wikipedia is so huge, it is often in the top five hits of a google search. However, google also has the google scholar search— things prioritized in google scholar also appear in google searches. Why not begin an open access repository that integrates with google scholar (like e-prints) and make sure the abstracts are really good for the articles. And if SBL created its own e-Prints repository, JHS (who is planning the same wikipedia action) could do the same thing and even use the same repository. And other journals who want to provide open access could submit the items to the same repository. The problem with not using proper databases is that the articles often stay confined to the guild— the metadata for the free BBR or Tyndale articles (for instance) aren’t readily available for google scholar. For instance, do a search for the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures in Google Scholar and you get nothing. An e-Prints database (and there are other options too) integrates with google scholar and gives the article metadata to it in proper form, optimal for searching and cross-referencing.

It is a grand idea, one that deinde has actually had for quite some time. It just has never seemed to pan out as Paul and I are pretty busy and copyright is an issue. But if the SBL took the initiative, or JHS, I think we would potentially see a large migration of journals providing access to their articles for free in a way that integrates with a free resource like google scholar. How about SBL? Create a free repository for biblical studies journals to make use of. We at deinde could probably help out a whole lot, as we have some experience with ePrints already.

Again, I’m all for open access. Let’s just be sure that we are choosing the right medium for dissemination— one that does not potentially compromise the integrity of the research AND cause more work for the authors.

As we remember and celebrate Christmas today and tomorrow, and take time to read the Christmas story, I encourage you to read a great chapter in Dale Allison’s Studies in Matthew, “The Magi’s Angel.” Far from trying to argue for a supernova or meteor, Allison argues, with support from early church commentators and Jewish background literature, that the star was a guiding angel— as ancient cosmology viewed the stars as angels or celestial beings.

Merry Christmas!

Thanks to all of you who have watched my first two videos. As promised, here is a third video. I have a number more, but as I am trying to ultimately get them published, I’m not sure how many more to share freely online

Anyway, here is the very first Greek song I wrote. Simple, but effective!

**edit: sorry to the 53 of you who watched this already, there was a slight glitch in the video that is fixed now**

As promised, I’ll be showing off a few more of my Greek videos for learning paradigms by song. This is the first declension song. Enjoy!

http://blip.tv/file/1561823

In a previous article written for the SBL forum I noted an ever-expanding list of full-view books in biblical studies and related fields that are accessible via Google Books. Bob Buller and I work on this list when we can (any who want to join in collaboration can!). Anyway, all of that to say, I’ve never actually given it a good permanent link from Deinde—who knows why.

So, on www.deinde.org you will now see in our menu an item called Google Books list, which will show you the document. Enjoy!

The latest Tyndale Tech email has come out and as usual is full of great information for biblical scholars. In the email, he discusses some great free software options that people may find useful.

Since I’m known around these parts as a bit of a tech ninja myself, I thought I’d make a few corrections and additions.

First, two corrections. Zotero is a great app no doubt, and being free is awesome. There are some limitations to using a bib.manager that is a Firefox plugin, but I digress. The correction I need to make, though, is David’s mention of Endnote suing Zotero (and why I don’t really push Zotero). It is not because “because they are suing Zotero for enabling Endnote users to migrate to Zotero.” Every bib.manager that I know of is able to export its data for other programs. Zotero is being sued because they seem to have reverse engineered Endnote’s years of work.

Next correction— David points out SimpleOCR. I do hope that people take advantage of this free application. However, it is too much to say “Don’t pay for expensive software - ‘better’ software only improves the layout (ie pictures and correct formatting) without being much better at text accuracy.” SimpleOCR wouldn’t even make this claim. IRIS and other OCR has been perfecting the science for years. I use IRIS OCR (build in to DEVONthink Pro Office) and it far surpasses any other OCR I have used.

I have promoted Google Docs in the past and continue to plug it as a great free alternative, especially for collaboration. However, if you are looking for a solid FREE office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, and presenter and a whole lot more) that works both OFFLINE AND ONLINE, then you owe it to yourself to check out ZOHO. There are some major benefits to ZOHO, so many that I’ll have to use a list.

• It has a desktop browser plugin for working offline on documents. This means you can work whether you are online or offline. This is huge, and automatically places it a cut above Google Docs.
• Though it has a desktop plugin, you can still view and edit the files online if you are not at your own computer.
• Cross-platform compatible. It runs in the browser!
• It (along with ThinkFree office, another awesome online app suite, cheap but not free) is the first real “Cloud” office suite. The files are stored online (or synced to online if you saved items offline initially) and the cloud can be accessed online from your computer, another computer, plus your iPhone or Windows mobile device. 1GB of space for users.
• It has collaboration features too
• Zoho Share is another free application that gives you online storage space for documents, pdf’s etc. The documents saved in the ZOHO storage can be opened in ZOHO writer, etc.
• MS Office 2004 compatible (.doc, .xls, .ppt), with docx compatibility on the way

Hopefully this has enticed you enough for ZOHO. As I said, Google Docs is great, especially for compatibility and occasional use. But if you are looking for a FULL and FREE cloud office suite for your personal use (tell your students!) then ZOHO may be write for you.

A few days ago Mike Bird said about me on his blog: “he showed me some Greek teaching stuff that he’s working on which will rock the world of biblical Greek education!” I figured now is as good a time as any to begin sharing a small sampling of what I’m working on. I aim ultimately to publish this work, either with a publisher or just on my own (with lulu perhaps).
In due course I will relay some of my student reactions up- suffice it to say that they love them and have in fact been my primary motivators for getting these published. I’ve also shared these with people like Mike Bird, Craig Evans, Stan Porter, Jamie Grant, and Bruce Chilton. They all thought they were great.

This first video I’m going to share is the one that actually required the least amount of effort and creativity on my part, as it is a standard tune for singing the Greek Alphabet. I hope you enjoy it, and there will be more to follow. Enjoy!

My last word on this— I need to give public thanks to a student named Mike Fredericks who was and continues to be instrumental to this whole project.

Well SBL isn’t going exactly as planned. I almost didn’t come, as yesterday morning I somehow hurt my lower back. I did a funny twist when picking up my son. But I decided to pop some advil and brave the trip. My back is still a little sore, so I haven’t left my hotel since yesterday. But I’m going to pop another advil and go check out the book tables in about an hour or so, then come back and rest some more. My paper is tomorrow and I think I’ll be fine by then. After my paper is dinner with Mike Bird and then some more rest.

cheers!

I just had a minor breakthrough in the process of scripture indexing and thought I’d share it with the world. First, let me highlight the previous method for scripture indexing:

• go through the proof with a highlighter and highlight all ancient text refs
• enter all of those highlights into an excel file (reference in one column, page number in the other)
• sort the entire sheet alphabetically
• book by book, cut and paste from the excel sheet into a text file
• the most tedious part— amalgamate all identical references together on one line

My new method that came to me yesterday was during my reading of a PDF in the wonderful Mac program called Skim. It is a fantastic PDF reader that allows you make notations and notes in a superior method to any other PDF reader. The icing on the cake is that you can also export the notes. Any Skim highlights automatically copy the text you have highlighted, and indicates the PDF page. So, my new method:

• scan the PDF proof, highlighting all ancient text references. If the text is missing the book abbrev., add it in Skim’s notation. Also, if the ref was in a footnote, add that to the Skim annotation
• Once this is done, export the skim notes as an RTF file (a 5-second operation)
• do several find and replaces in the RTF file so that the reference is tab separated from the page number, and the footnote reference is tab separated as well (2 or 3 minutes of time)
• copy and paste the results into excel
• In excel, a new column needs to be made for the correct proof page plus footnote number (The pages registered in Skim are the PDF pages, not the proofs page numbers). Do this with a simple equation (column 2-15&cell 3)
• Sort alphabetically.
• the most tedious part— amalgamate all identical references together on one line

I’m getting it down to a science If you think there can be any improvements in this method, let me know!