I’ve recently had reason to get aggravated again about the way some modern translations mistreat Ishmael and his kin, specifically in their translations of Genesis 25:18. In the English translation tradition, three renderings of the last clause of Genesis 25:18 compete for translators’ allegiance:

• … and they [the Ishmaelites] lived in hostility toward all their kin.
• … and they [the Ishmaelites] settled near all their kin.
• … and he [Ishmael] died near all his kin.

So which of these translations has the best claim to representing the author’s meaning? For a semi-lengthy discussion, please follow the “read more” link below.

This post offers more content »

At least, that’s what Dani McKinney, an assistant professor of psychology at SUNY-Fredonia, told New Scientist she found in a recent study.

McKinney divided 64 undergraduates into two groups and exposed them to the same lecture in different formats:

Half of the students attended the class in person and received a printout of the slides from the lecture. The other 32 downloaded a podcast that included audio from the same lecture synchronised with video of the slides. These students also received a printed handout of the material.

A week later, students who attended the face-to-face lecture averaged 62% on a follow-up test, while students who watched the podcast averaged 71% on the same test. If I understood the New Scientist article correctly, the difference came mostly from students who watched the podcast at least twice and took notes on the podcast. They averaged 77%. Reading between the lines, I infer that those who listened to the podcast only once performed at about the same level as those who listened to the face-to-face lecture.

We shouldn’t go jumping to any conclusions here, of course, but a couple of things stand out to me:

1. The ability to watch or listen to the podcast multiple times seems to play a key role. Students normally cannot rewind or replay a face-to-face lecture once it has ended, unless the professor allows taping and the students take advantage of this option.
   
2. The study design treats lectures as vehicles for information delivery, or at least I infer this from the description given. But Darren Griffin of the University of Kent points out, in the same New Scientist article, that offloading information-delivery lectures into podcast form allows the professor to repurpose the classroom contact time without giving up information delivery.

I think my classes still contain too much lecture for information delivery and too little active learning, but I continue to adjust that balance. McKinney only studied one lecture, so we have to take her research as suggestive, not definitive. Still, it gives me hope for continued pedagogical innovation, and further validates, in a small way, Pepperdine’s decision to jump into iTunes U.

HT: ReadWriteWeb

I have found and tried to implement a proposed solution for storing Unicode characters—chiefly Hebrew on this blog, of course—in WordPress comments. Please help me test this feature. If you will, please leave a comment on this post and try to include some Unicode characters, preferably Hebrew. Then we’ll all see whether the solution has worked.

Thank you in advance for your kind participation.

Inside Higher Ed reports today on Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments (Jossey-Bass, 2009), a new book by Derek Bruff, Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt. Actually, IHE interviews Bruff about the book’s topic—classroom response systems or “clickers”—instead of presenting a book review.

The interview raised some important questions for teachers and institutions using clickers, such as the matter of standardization. Teaching with Classroom Response Systems just released on February 17, so I haven’t seen the book or had time to read it. Therefore, I won’t pretend to comment on the book itself. Two items within the interview, however, caught my eye and call for a quick response.

When asked about brand standardization, Bruff replied (in part),

Most faculty and staff members with whom I talk about clickers are concerned with the cost to students of the devices. This has led many campuses to adopt particular brands of clickers so that students need not purchase two or three clickers for different courses. Not only does this save students money, but it makes it easier for staff to provide technical and pedagogical support for faculty members using clickers.

I agree with this important concern, but read on. When asked what features he’d like to see added to existing clicker systems, Bruff answered,

Clickers do a great job of collecting and aggregating student responses to multiple-choice questions. Existing technology does not, however, work quite as well with free-response questions. I am hoping to see the development of input devices that allow students to quickly and easily respond with words, phrases, or sentences.

Devices that allow students to quickly and easily respond with words, phrases, or sentences already exist, and most students have already incurred the cost of purchasing these devices before they ever show up for the first day of their first college course:

Having used classroom response systems (clickers) for the past couple of years, I recently abandoned them in favor of a polling and free-response system that students can access online or using SMS. Our institutional research people here at Pepperdine tell me that 95% of our incoming students bring laptops with them to college, and virtually all bring cell phones with text-messaging (SMS) plans. Using these existing tools addresses both of the issues above: students (or more likely their parents) have already purchased these tools, thus addressing the cost issue, and free-response questions are easy to capture, thus addressing the usage issue. Such schemes must always contend with poor cell reception, of course, though an institution that wanted to standardize could always roll an iPhone into the standard entry package, as Abilene Christian University has done (and others have since followed suit). Using laptops assumes that the college or university maintains a reliable wireless network, too, but that assumption should hold good at reputable schools these days. (I mean “should” as a moral claim, not an ontological claim, for those of you keeping score at home.)

Bruff knows about these solutions, of course:

I have spoken with several instructors who have started to use systems that allow students to submit responses via various mobile devices — cell phones, smart phones, and laptops — that make it easier for students to do so. These developments are exciting, but there is a need for tools that will help instructors quickly make sense of responses to open-ended questions. Development of such tools would open up a lot of possibilities for these systems.

No “tool” can substitute for actually reading free-text responses, of course, but some strategies already exist for quick processing, and others are surely coming. Consider, for example, the popular “word cloud.” For this example, I asked my students to supply one word that could complete the sentence, “The Bible is …” They texted their responses to a short code issued by my polling service provider, PollEverywhere. Using PollEverywhere’s tools, I immediately generated a .csv file with a list of student responses. I copied the responses out of the .csv file and pasted them into Wordle, and got the following result (the size of the word indicates the frequency of response):

Naturally, I would prefer a tool where I didn’t have to export, copy, and paste the data, but I imagine that such tools will become widely available before long. And I imagine that Bruff’s book, at 240 pages, includes discussion of “best practices” for clicker use that would apply to any sort of live polling, whether using clickers or text messaging. Maybe I’m jumping the gun here, but it seems to me that narrow-band, highly specialized gadgets like clickers are the trailing end of the instructional technology wave, and the future of IT lies in finding new ways to turn students’ existing gadgets from liabilities (distractions) into assets.

The long-awaited Transforming Word one-volume commentary on the Bible (ACU Press, 2009) has finally arrived! I contributed the section on Genesis; many other scholars affiliated with the Churches of Christ and Christian Churches contributed the rest. I counted 53 names on the list of editors and authors. Listen to an interview with general editor Mark Hamilton (a fine Hebrew Bible/Old Testament scholar at Abilene Christian University, if you don’t know him) about the commentary. (But somebody out there tell Larry Fitzgerald what “begs the question” means, please. How about you, sis?) The commentary chiefly addresses preachers, teachers, and “laypersons” (so to speak).

Claude Mariottini posted recently on an entry in When Critics Ask: A Popular Handbook on Bible Difficulties (Victor, 1992). Claude pointed out how the authors’ attempt to defend the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy (as a literary whole) falters on the text’s actual words. The authors, Geisler and Howe, quote Deut 1:1, “These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel” in order to make their case, but as Claude points out, the narrator immediately adds the words “beyond the Jordan”—stamping Deuteronomy with a west-of-the-Jordan perspective that sets its author apart from Moses, who (according to Deuteronomy itself) never attained such a perspective. (My language here doesn’t adequately distinguish between Moses as a literary character and Moses as a potentially historical individual, but that shortcoming doesn’t affect my main point here.)

I was teaching Deuteronomy recently in my “Religion 101: The History and Religion of [Ancient] Israel” class and I wanted to make just this point to my students, so I asked for a volunteer to read Deut 1:1–5 aloud. The phrase “beyond the Jordan” (Hebrew בעבר הירדן) appears twice in this paragraph to describe Moses’s geographical position in relation to the narrator’s. (I also call my students’ attention to Deut 2:12, which explicitly places the author in a time period after the Israelites have displaced the Canaanites—from the Israelites’ or Judeans’ own point of view, of course, and with all the attendant caveats about the historicity of the “conquest.”) Imagine my surprise, then, when one student read:

These are the words which Moses spoke to all Israel on this side of the Jordan … On this side of the Jordan in the land of Moab, Moses began to explain this law, saying …

I did a double-take. “What did you say? Read that again, please. What translation do you have? What in the world …?” It turns out that the King James Version of the Bible reads “These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan in the wilderness …,” and the New King James Version—which my student had in class—simply updates the KJV’s English (as does the pretentiously-titled Third Millennium Bible/New Authorized Version).

Why did the KJV’s translators render בעבר הירדן as “this side [of the] Jordan”? At first, I thought perhaps they found the clear implication of post-Mosaic authorship for the book of Deuteronomy so troubling that they just couldn’t stand it, and rewrote the verse to make it compatible with Mosaic authorship. Digging deeper, though, I found a more charitable reading of the case. The KJV translators may have found Deuteronomy’s use of בעבר הירדן genuinely puzzing. Lexically, the phrase undoubtedly means “across the Jordan.” Yet not only the narrator, but also Moses himself uses the term to refer to regions east of the Jordan, as in Deut 3:8. The eponymous hero of the book of Joshua does the same, in Joshua 1:14, for example. Yet later in the book, Joshua still refers to Transjordan as בעבר הירדן, such that the phrase refers to the east side of the Jordan river no matter where the speaker stands.

I don’t think it’s difficult to see what’s happening. The phrase בעבר הירדן lexically means “across/on the other side of the Jordan.” Deuteronomy’s author(s) or final redactor(s), who on evidence of Deut 2:12 lived after the Israelites (including Judeans) were well established in Canaan, has the book’s characters use the same vocabulary that “he” and “his” contemporaries used. From their west-of-the-Jordan viewpoint, the region east of the Jordan was בעבר הירדן. When Moses, Joshua, and other characters in Deuteronomy–Joshua used this term to refer to land east of the Jordan even while they were standing east of the Jordan, these are anatopisms, the lesser-known geographical cousins of anachronisms. The characters speak like the narrator, situated in a different place and time, speaks.

Incidentally, a number of modern translations “absolutize” בעבר הירדן, translating it as “east of the Jordan”; so NIV, NLT, NCV, etc. This translation points readers to the correct geographical region, but does not reveal the author’s west-of-the-Jordan geographical frame of reference. Those translations that closely follow the Hebrew, and use “across the Jordan” or “beyond the Jordan” (NRSV, ESV, HCSB, NJPSV, etc.) make the reader work a little harder geographically, but show the reader a part of the author’s outlook that the aforementioned translations obscure.

Every time I read Genesis 19:10 in Hebrew, I find myself lingering over the literary artistry in this verse. I’m a sucker for Hebrew narrative anyway, but this verse is just beautiful.

No doubt you remember the story. Two divine messengers have come to Sodom to destroy it (along with Gomorrah). Lot has invited them into his home, but the men of Sodom wish to gang-rape the visitors to show them who’s boss. Lot has come outside, shutting the door behind him, to try to reason with Sodom’s citizenry. The long-timers, though, reject the newcomer’s attempt to “legislate morality,” and they draw near to attack Lot and to break down his door so they can get at the visitors inside. At this point, the narrator says:

וישלחו האנשים את ידם ויביאו את לוט אליהם

Is the suspense not killing you? Eight words into the verse, we still don’t know which men have grabbed Lot! Whose hands are on him—the Sodomites’, or the angels’? The ambiguity is resolved by one small word that sits at the very end of the phrase—הביתה. Whew! Haven’t you seen this trope repeated in countless horror movies: the hand reaches out, but you don’t know whose hand it is …

Of course, I’ve read this passage many times. I know how the clause ends. But I still love watching it play out in front of my eyes.

Unfortunately, many English-speaking readers miss out on this sentence’s beautiful construction, because some popular English mass-market translations telegraph the punch. Some translations destroy the suspense entirely:

But the men inside reached out and pulled Lot back into the house … (NIV/NIrV/TNIV)

But the men inside reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them … (NRSV)

But the two men reached out … (Message)

But the men [the angels] reached out … (Amplified)

But the two angels reached out … (NLT)

But the two angels in the house reached out … (CEV)

But the two men staying with Lot opened the door … (NCV)

But the angels reached out … (HCSB)

Some English translations do better, but still without the zip of the Hebrew:

But the men reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them … (NASB)

But the men put forth their hand, and pulled Lot into the house to them … (KJV)

But the men reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them … (ESV)

But the men put forth their hand, and brought Lot into the house to them … (ASV)

Any of the English translations quoted here (and even The Message) will accurately transmit to you the propositional content of the Hebrew verse, but none of them can give you the same aesthetic experience as reading Genesis 19:10 in Hebrew. In my book, that alone justifies learning Hebrew, if you have the opportunity (David Ker, I’m looking at you).

Over the weekend, while I was taking a quick jaunt to San Diego to visit the Canyon View Church of Christ for “Christian Education Sunday,” Tyler Williams encouraged us all to study the Septuagint on February 8. Okay, so I don’t think he meant for us to limit our study to February 8. If you’re at all tempted to downplay the Septuagint’s importance, check out Tyler’s post.