It's a . . . book!

Name: NIVAC Deuteronomy
Delivered: August 21, 2012
Height: 9.1 inches
Weight: 2.4 pounds
Length: 880 pages
Proud Parent: Daniel Block

It's true, Daniel Block's NIV Application Commentary on Deuteronomy has hit the shelves. Remember the sneak preview I gave you back in February?

The gestation period for this one was more than 10 years.  All of us who have had the privilege of studying Deuteronomy with Dr. Block are delighted to see a safe delivery. Now all of you can share our joy. Congratulations, Dr. Block!

table talk: listening in on ancient conversations

Clement of Alexandria

I've spent most of today with Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther, though I did run into Tertullian unexpectedly in the library stacks. Yesterday it was Augustine, Origen, Ambrose, Gregory of Nazianzus, Hilary of Poitiers, and — my new buddy — Clement of Alexandria. I got lost in the stacks more than once trying to find all of them, and some are still hiding even today. Monday I listened in on medieval Jewish rabbis as they argued about the proper interpretation of what I'm calling the "name command" (Exodus 20:7 and Deuteronomy 5:11). I feel like an aural archaeologist, listening in on ancient sermons, reading ancient correspondence, digging through pages of books long-forgotten to find treasure.

Part of writing a dissertation is learning to listen. Before I start speaking I need to hear what others have to say. And they've been saying things for a long time. Things I, and all of us, need to hear. None of them wrote in English, so I'm navigating other languages (Greek, Latin, French, German) and a variety of translations, thankful for those who have labored before me. None of them shared my cultural context, so I'm also trying to understand what was important to each of them—what made them say it that way, thankful for friends who have more experience than I do in this strange, old world. By listening I've learned new words like apophaticism (don't ask me to explain that one), found new places in the library (the 270s) and online (http://www.tlg.uci.edu/), and discovered that I could spend the rest of my life listening and never get anything written.

After another day of digging it will be time to take stock of what I've learned and make a big decision: who will I invite to be part of my first chapter? Who best articulates the various ways God's people (Jewish and Christian) have understood the name command across the ages? There won't be room at the table for everyone, so I'll need to draw up an elite guest list and decide how to moderate this discussion. I'm sure all the church fathers are on pins and needles waiting to find out if they made the cut. Meanwhile, the library workers will all give a deep sigh of relief that Carmen is done digging, for now.

gearing up for Christmas . . . in July?

Do you remember the series of posts I wrote on Advent in 2011? Perhaps you liked the idea of making an Advent Tree for your family, but lacked the time to make one during a busy holiday season. Don't let Christmas sneak up on you this year! Here's a friendly nudge to start getting ready now. I originally made ours in July . . . maybe you can make yours in August!


Click HERE to see all of my Advent Tree posts (including pictures, Scriptures, and devotions). If you decide to try it I'd love to hear how it goes!

giants in disguise

One of our favorite parts of being missionaries is meeting godly men and women with deep faith and big hearts for what God is doing around the world. Remarkably, some of them have begun praying for us and supporting us without having met us! That’s true of three women from different time zones who (I’m convinced) are giants in the kingdom of God. They may prefer to be anonymous, so I've used pseudonyms here, but God knows who they are and their rewards are waiting in heaven!

Laverne heard about us from her son, our dear friend and mentor. She had a big heart for missions and a thriving business, left to her by her late husband. When she heard about our ministry she began supporting us right away. She was our biggest giver for several years before we finally had a chance to meet her. Her community service and hospitality matches her generosity. What a blessing to know her!

Charlene heard about us from a mutual friend in SIM. She began praying for us regularly when we lived in the Philippines, and has answered every one of our prayer letters with a hand-written letter. Recently her husband passed away and she moved to a retirement home. She took the time to tell us her new address, and it just happened to be right on my way home from Notre Dame. What a blessing to finally meet her and thank her for her faithful prayer support!

Anna Mae took her niece’s word for it that she should support us. When we first met we were struck by her gracious and cheerful spirit. Like Laverne and Charlene, Anna Mae had aged with grace and looked for ways to share joy with those around her. We’ve seen her several times, and always her selfless joy shines through.

Just after my visit with Charlene several weeks ago, I was in a minor car accident. Though I wasn’t hurt at all, our van was totaled. Our neighbors generously offered us the use of one of their cars until we found a replacement. Saturday we finally found it: the exact same van in excellent condition, one year newer and with 32,000 fewer miles. The price was much lower than we expected. Already confident that God had provided this van for us, we had no idea that he had another surprise up his sleeve. While we were out looking, he was silently arranging to help us pay for the van behind our backs. Imagine our shock when we found a check in our mailbox on Monday morning from Anna Mae. We can now pay for our van, taxes, fees, new tires and trailer hitch, with money left over!  Anna Mae simply saw a need and decided to meet it.

The giants in God’s kingdom are not who we might expect. They don’t necessarily live in major cities, hold positions of power, have a large following, or command attention. Some of them live quiet lives of faithfulness in small town America, praying fervently, giving generously, and letting the joy of the Lord splash on everyone they meet. Their noiseless acts of service are changing the world, one radiant smile at a time.

Review of BibleWorks 9 (part 3): not your grandma’s textual criticism

For all you scholars out there, here is the third installment of my BibleWorks 9 review.

I’m listening to an old Michael Card CD (The Word) at the moment (yes, I know that dates me). He’s singing, “so many books, so little time,” and I couldn’t think of a better excuse for this very belated third installment of my BibleWorks review. The folks over at BibleWorks were so generous to provide me with an upgrade to version 9 free of charge in exchange for a series of reviews. In addition to being generous, they have proved very patient with a busy doctoral student. You can find my first two installments here and here.

Are you sitting down? On the floor? Ok, good.

If you’re wondering whether the upgrade is worth it, prepare to be blown away by what BibleWorks 9 can do. But first, think back to your first Greek exegesis course, the one where your professor showed you how to do textual criticism. If your experience was like mine, you felt like you had entered a foreign land. Greek seemed easy compared to the steep learning curve as you tried to make sense of the apparatus. Every little symbol referred to something else that also seemed obscure, with its own date, provenance, and stylistic tendencies. And your task was to take all these numbers, letters, symbols, and dates and produce a chart showing which reading had the strongest support. Think of how long it took to flip through your Greek New Testament trying to find the key to all those symbols.

Now imagine that your professor offered to follow you around for the rest of your career, reading the apparatus for you and loaning you all the charts he or she had painstakingly made of textual variants. Imagine that you could spend your time thinking about which reading was the best reading and what theological difference it made rather than trying to decipher codes.

You can stop imagining, because it’s true. BibleWorks 9 includes two complete textual apparatuses for the entire Greek New Testament (CNNTS and Tischendorf). Each and every symbol is hyperlinked to its description, and each and every variant in the CNNTS  includes a chart of all the manuscript evidence for that variant. It’s a Bible scholar’s dream.
But that’s not all. Say that you’re working on a particular problem and you notice that one prominent manuscript has a surprising reading. You want to investigate more closely, because the reading seems suspicious to you. Now, from the comfort of your own study, you can look at high resolution images of some of the major NT manuscripts right in BibleWorks (including Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Vaticanus and others). You can zoom in and out, change the lighting or the contrast, despeckle the image or adjust the sharpness. You can even view a photographic negative of the image to look for erasures, a change in handwriting, or help in deciphering ambiguous letters. The manuscripts are overlaid with hyperlinked verse references to the passages in any translation you choose, making navigation much easier. Learning how to use these new features is simple; detailed video tutorials are included.

I admit that part of me is tempted to tuck away what I now know in a dark corner somewhere, so that my students have to struggle as much as I did. But I’ve decided to be a hero and show them how to use these power tools. I’ll be sure to pepper my demonstration with stories of how rough the rest of us had it (“back in my day . . . “). Students will, of course, still need to learn how to decide between the strength of various witnesses. They will need to be aware of how geographical distribution of manuscripts affects textual decisions. And they will need to understand the principles of textual criticism and get practice applying them to particular cases. But all the ingredients for the text-critical cake have been assembled for them (and you!) in one easy-to-use location so they can focus on baking, not shopping for ingredients.

I have only one disappointment, but it is significant. Neither the text critical apparatuses nor the digital manuscript images are available for the OldTestament, and I’m told that it will be a good, long time (20 years?) before the gap is filled. (Perhaps I should have chosen a degree in New Testament!) But really these features are just the icing on the cake. BibleWorks is indispensable for rigorous study of the entire Bible, with or without these new power tools.

Review of BibleWorks 9 (part 2): spotlight on searching

Last semester I learned how to do a search that is proving incredibly powerful (I wish I had taken the time to figure out how to do this a long time ago). I can now search in Hebrew or Greek for a key word in a certain tense or person (or whatever morphological tag I choose), occurring in a specified proximity to another word of my choosing. For example, in class Dr. Block was curious if the Hebrew Bible ever used the expression “walk after Yahweh” the way it talks about walking after other gods in Deut 8:19. He suspected it did, but didn’t remember where.

Since “walk” occurs 1349 times, “after” occurs 812 times, and “Yahweh” occurs 5195 times in the Hebrew Bible, it would be enormously time-consuming to scan through each reference to find where they occur together. Thanks to BibleWorks, within a minute I had the answer. I simply typed the Hebrew root letters for “walk” + “after” + “Yahweh”, with the symbol *3 to indicate that I only wanted to see those passages where these words occurred within the space of  3 words. Immediately BibleWorks gave us the answer we were looking for. The Bible does indeed use this expression to refer to Yahweh. It is found in only 2 places: 2 Kings 23:3 and 2 Chr 34:31 (parallel passages!). There, Josiah is renewing Israel’s covenant with Yahweh (after reading Deuteronomy!) and affirming that he will not follow other gods, but Yahweh alone — a very interesting correlation.

For the sake of being thorough, I should add that this search did not bring up passages where Yahweh is talked about in the first person or as “he” (without using his personal name). Thanks to Moshe Weinfeld’s ‘Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School’ (332) I have discovered there are several more passages where this idiom is used referring to Yahweh: 1 Kgs 14:8; 18:21; Hos 11:10; and Jer 2:2. It would have taken a bit more time for me to come up with these using a BibleWorks search. I could have first narrowed by search to “walk” + “after” and then manually checked the results, or I could have tried a number of more specific searches such as “walk” + “after” + “me” and then checked the context of each. In most cases my initial search would suffice to help me find examples. 

I’ve said it before, but I simply can’t imagine attempting an MA or PhD in Biblical Studies without BibleWorks!

For Part One of my review, go here.

Review of Bibleworks 9 (part 1): a few of my favorite things

BibleWorks 9
is Now Available!

At Gordon-Conwell my professors recommended that I purchase BibleWorks software to help me study the Bible in Hebrew and Greek. I've been using BibleWorks now since 2007, and honestly, I can't imagine trying to study the Bible without it. I've used versions 7, 8, and now 9, and it just keeps getting better. I was glad to discover that my doctoral supervisor, Daniel Block, uses it as well for his own research. Here are the principal ways I use it:

• I have BibleWorks open on my laptop in all of my Bible classes. In a matter of seconds I can look up any passage the professor mentions and see it for myself in dozens of translations. I can do a quick search to find related passages and know that I’m looking at every passage that matches my search criteria.
• I have not opened the NIV Exhaustive Concordance in the past 5 years. It’s much faster to check BibleWorks. I can search in English, Greek, Hebrew, or any of the major modern languages such as Spanish, French, or German (not Tagalog, unfortunately). I can search by exact word or phrase in any language, or by root word in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic.
• I rarely use a Hebrew or Greek lexicon (is it ok to admit that?), unless I’m performing an exhaustive word study for which I need to consult both Bible Dictionaries and Lexicons. Just by rolling my mouse over any word in the Bible, I have immediate access to lexical entries from Holladay (for Hebrew) or Gingrich (for Greek). BibleWorks speeds my translation process without using an English translation as a crutch. I can work directly from Hebrew to see the definitions of any word I don’t already know. If I come across a strange grammatical construction, I can instantly compare all my favorite translations to see how they handle the passage.
• I have used BibleWorks to learn both Hebrew and Greek vocabulary, and I plan to use it for Aramaic. The BibleWorks flashcards are the best I’ve seen anywhere. I can sort words alphabetically or by occurrence, work on words that occur in a particular passage, time myself, hear them pronounced, and print review lists to have in front of me in class. Best of all, BibleWorks keeps track of the words I know and don’t know, so that my review time focuses only on the words I have yet to learn.

The folks over at BibleWorks were kind enough to provide me with a free upgrade to their latest version in exchange for a detailed 3-part review in both of my blogging venues (both here and at the Wheaton blog: www.wheatonblog.wordpress.com). Like any new program, it takes some time to learn how to use, but BibleWorks 9 provides plenty of training videos and helpful instructions, as well as occasional seminars on site at schools around the country. I do not consider myself technologically gifted (blogging is about as savvy as I get), yet I couldn’t get along without BibleWorks.