Higgaion - Latest Comments

Re: Typing Hebrew vowels on iPad: the options expand

Ann Pangbourne — Sun, 15 Feb 2015 03:20:05 -0000

Davka nikkud keyboard £3.99 seems to do the business for me

Re: Posturing for praise and prayer: standing, kneeling, and bowing

Alexander Basnar — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 06:09:33 -0000

Maybe a little late for joining in. Maybe you changed your mind already. I see two major problems in your approach:

"Showing respect" is not a category of worship. Worshipping God means, submitting totally to the King of Kings! With all due revernce. That's not how we treat guests at the dinner table, and that's nothing a Christian would ever grant even an earthly King or President. Not even Angels accept such a form of devotion. This is exclusively for the Lord.

Therefore human categories of courtesy fail. You tend to make contemporary American culture the guideine for how to worship. But our worsship has to be patterned after den Heavenly worship where we are to fit in.

I suppose, if you put Rev 4 and 5 beside esp. your last paragraph, you will see what I mean.

Re: “Noah” and environmentalism

James Tabor — Sun, 30 Mar 2014 20:43:07 -0000

Great post Chris. I made some of the same points yesterday on my blog.

Re: How to watch Aronofsky’s “Noah”

Chris Heard — Sun, 30 Mar 2014 14:33:31 -0000

That’s a good question, Brooke, especially when we’re talking about biblical adaptations. But filmmakers face this sort of thing all the time when adapting literature that’s not considered historically accurate as well. There’s a whole literature about this in film studies.

Re: How to watch Aronofsky’s “Noah”

Brooke — Sun, 30 Mar 2014 09:33:53 -0000

"…nobody considers The Lord of the Rings to be 'God’s Word' the way that conservative Christians think about the Bible."

Well… :)

Excellent post. I wonder how much this presupposition (that an artistic work inspired by a biblical story is supposed to mimic the text) is grounded in the pre-presupposition that the text is historically accurate; that is, that it's a combination of inerrancy and a kind of uninformed commitment that the goal of art is mimesis. ("Picasso is dumb cuz people don't look like that.")

Re: Typing Hebrew vowels on iPad: the options expand

p1lgr1m_one — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 09:44:11 -0000

Same here, error 404. Is there a Dropbox link?

Re: Typing Hebrew vowels on iPad: the options expand

Dewayne Dulaney — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 22:25:08 -0000

!שלומ

Chris, I get a 404 page not found error when I try to get your Hebrew keyboard for Unicode Pad. Could you email to me at dewayne dot dulaney at gmail dot com, or put a link to get it from Dropbox?

Re: Teaching עִבְרִית מִקְרָאִית

Chris Heard — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 01:31:07 -0000

Aaron et al., I implemented this suggestion some time ago, but forgot to leave a reply here indicating that.

Re: Gamifying higher education: is it BS?

Ian — Sun, 27 Oct 2013 06:13:21 -0000

(from James's blog)

I don't think gamification is BS. In fact I think it is really powerful. But Ian is right, the well has been poisoned by folks who wanted the cachet of games without the actual game.

Gamification done well is about play. How do you make an activity that isn't about play, into play? Playing games is about experimentation and mastery of rule-based systems with only token consequence for failure.

How do you make failure have minimal or token consequences in a formal education context? How do you allow students to experiment? Games simulate high-skill, high-stakes activities with low-skill, low-stakes play. How do you do that when the grade at the end is real?

So I think using games in education is a good idea, but I think it is more fundamental that co-opting the language and artefacts of games. Those artefacts are only in games at the service of the game mechanics. So adding them to something else makes it no more a game, than sticking wheels on something makes it a car.

Finding ways to make it work is hard, I think. Even Scott Nicholson, who I strongly rate on these issues, as both an academic and a professional game designer, struggles to give lots of good examples of when it works.

Re: iWork apps learn to speak (pointed) Hebrew

Chris Heard — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:14:18 -0000

Before anybody else feels compelled to mention it in the comments, let me say that I know Mellel does a beautiful job with Hebrew and with exporting to MS Word for Office. I use it frequently. But Mellel doesn’t do presentations, so the ability to use Hebrew more effectively in Keynote, and with SBL Hebrew to boot, is kind of a big deal in my line of work. Also, Pages is much slicker than Mellel when working with tables, images, and other types of complex layouts. For example, in Pages you can specify how wide you want a column or where you want a picture by typing numbers into fields. In Mellel, you still have to drag those things into position. Sometimes I want more granular control. So without dissing Mellel at all, I am glad that Pages has grown up a bit.

Re: Gamifying higher education: a useful distinction

Isaac — Thu, 17 Oct 2013 01:06:27 -0000

This is great Chris. I actually presented a paper on this just a couple of weeks ago here in Sydney and have started to use gamification on a classroom and curricular level for beginner Koine Greek course.

Re: Music for teaching Biblical Hebrew: ה׳ מלך

Chris Heard — Sat, 29 Jun 2013 10:45:26 -0000

No, Terry, there is no typo. In nonliturgical contexts, Orthodox Jews (including the singers, Gad and Benny Elbaz) commonly substitute a ק for the ה in אֱלֹהִים. This is similar to the qere’ perpetuum, the substitution of אֲדֹנָי for the Tetragrammaton when reading scripture, or the practice of writing G-d instead of God.

Re: Music for teaching Biblical Hebrew: ה׳ מלך

Terry L Eves — Sat, 29 Jun 2013 08:28:23 -0000

I think you have a typo in the second line. I think you meant to write "Elohim" rather than "eloQim"? Thanks for sharing this!

Re: The scope of reception-historical studies

Chris Heard — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 19:22:35 -0000

As a matter of fact, your book is right here on my desk next to Reuling’s!

Re: The scope of reception-historical studies

John Byron — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 12:58:59 -0000

I know what it took me to to work on the history of Gen 4, I can't imagine the task you have with 21 chapters!

Re: The inspiration of scripture: 2 Timothy 3:16

Tim Bulkeley — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 17:24:55 -0000

It is surely dangerous to base any doctrine on one sentence or short passage, if we start on that road I'd better book my next few weeks for baptisms on behalf of all my dead ancestors whose eternal state is less than clear to me! (1 Cor 15:29)

Re: Scholars citing Wikipedia: good, bad, or ugly?

Matthew Dowling — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 11:15:27 -0000

Ugly (with caveats). "Ugly" in the sense that I can't count how many times I've hear professors rip on students for this. In terms of "caveat"--some of the entries are quite good and are a great entry point into a subject. However, if as a researcher I cite Wikipedia instead of finding a suitable review article....this smacks of laziness.

Re: Posturing for praise and prayer: standing, kneeling, and bowing

Mad Latinist — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 12:43:48 -0000

ואנחנו כורעים ומשתחוים ומודים לפני מלך...

I wonder if the aversion to kneeling might not also have something to do with the Catholic association.

Re: Leadership changes in the SBL-PCR

Joseph Kelly — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:08:54 -0000

I've become increasingly interested in how to improve my academic writing. How can I engage a broader audience while making a significant contribution to my field? I think this can also play into how I disseminate my ideas in an engaging way in a variety of different venues--both in writing and in public lecture or presentation.

Re: Pepperdine Bible Lectures 2013 via iTunes U

Chris Heard — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:28:57 -0000

If there's any "blame" to be assigned here, I'd assign it to Church Relations rather than IT. But I'm not really interested in "blame." I'll know better next time! In the meantime, there's always YouTube or Slideshare if I can find the time and self-discipline to record a voiceover for the slides I used.

Re: Pepperdine Bible Lectures 2013 via iTunes U

Chris — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:10:20 -0000

Sorry about not letting you know about the change in class recordings this year. I only heard about the change the week before and was under the impression that the only change was bringing it in-house instead of contracting it out.

If I knew we definitely could have setup some capture equipment for the AC classrooms.

Re: Whatever happened to iTanakh?

Tim Bulkeley — Tue, 21 May 2013 20:28:45 -0000

Thanks for letting us know :)

What a shame! Still if it encouraged improvements...

Re: Oh! Oh, selah!

Chris Heard — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:57:04 -0000

“Must be” is surely an overstatement, in light of the facts that (a) deriving סלה from סלל is speculative, (b) deriving סלה from סלל requires emending every occurrence of סלה in the MT, and (c) there is no evidence other than this speculative derivation to suggest that סלה refers to a motion or posture. If סלה is a verb derived from סלל, it is definitely not an imperative form, but then סלה doesn’t appear to be a verb form at all (certainly not using the Masoretic vocalization). סלה “must have been” meaningful to those who compiled the psalter, but its meaning is opaque to us given our current level of knowledge—which will only improve with new data, not with speculations.

Re: Oh! Oh, selah!

Susan Burns — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:49:30 -0000

Selah must be an instruction to the Cantor informing him to ascend the stairs.

Re: Posturing for praise and prayer: standing, kneeling, and bowing

Susan Mitchell — Wed, 15 May 2013 15:52:21 -0000

At the Palo Alto Church of Christ, we've tried kneeling between our pews at various times for the reasons you've mentioned, but it's awkward and even painful for some. I'd like to explore all postures of worship, which is just one reason why I'd love to swap out our pews for chairs.