Jeremy Thompson Catholic PhD in Biblical Languages, Programmer, Runner

My wife and I found out yesterday evening that one of our family members passed away after a year and half battle with pancreatic cancer. Brent Bencaz will be remembered for a lot of things, but most of all for his cheerfulness and his smile. He will be sorely missed by his family members. I realize that most of my posts are about educational matters, but today I ask for your prayers for the family as we grieve and also remember good times over the coming days. May Brent rest in peace and may perpetual light shine upon him.

“Mr. Brent” (as he was affectionately called)
in the back left.

So, I’ve started an e-mail list on my site. And, it seems to be going really well so far. I’ve gotten quite a number of sign-ups from people all around the world. I’ve put together what I think is a pretty cool free report for those who join entitled “Study the OT for Free.” It basically goes through how a person can get a university level understanding of the Old Testament using only free courses that can be found on the internet. That is about 36 credit hours worth of classes.

Beyond getting a number of sign-ups, it has been a learning experience so far. I had not been prepared for the amount of spam. So, I went ahead and set up the e-mail list through Aweber, which is relatively inexpensive. This allows me to send out broadcasts and also to set up a monthly newsletter type publication with some pretty neat templates. One good thing about the service is that whenever someone joins they can always start with the first volume of the newsletter or whatever I decide to do, instead of somewhere in the middle.

Many people might think doing an e-mail list is “old hat” with sites like Twitter and Facebook available. However, I can already attest that I have gotten more followers for my-email list through this site than Twitter followers. I guess as popular as Twitter is it will never be more popular than e-mail. With that said, I am excited about the possibilities for helping people to understand the Old Testament better.

If you would like to join the list, just go over to the e-mail list page, enter a little info, and wait for your Aweber confirmation.

I know that I have written this in a couple of other places on the site, but I wanted to write a blog post just saying thanks to University of California Television and Villanova University for providing great video content on YouTube. I have put quite a number of their videos on the courses page of this site, and I just keep finding more and more useful information from them. I couldn’t believe that I was able to find video lectures from the likes of Robert Alter, Jon Levenson, Lawrence Schiffman, and even David Noel Freedman. These are some of the top scholars in the area of Biblical Studies. Please be sure to check out University of California Television and Villanova University on YouTube. They have a lot of other interesting content as well outside of the area of Biblical Studies. I do not know that anyone involved with posting the videos will ever read this post, but in case you do, thanks a lot and keep up the good work.

It seems that a lot of you came to the site yesterday to see the video of Jon D. Leveson teaching about Abraham in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. So, I figured you must all like Levenson. In that case, I have posted another video by Levenson today on The Aqedah, or The Binding of Isaac. Unfortunately, this is the only other Levenson video that I could find; however, it is a long one. So, enjoy:

Levenson on The Aqedah

Once again the University of California Television program has provided a helpful video for the study of matters related to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. Below is a link to a video they put together in which Jon D Levenson of Harvard University discusses Abraham in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is often said that Abraham is a figure that unites these three faiths. However, Levenson discusses how he both unites and separates them. Enjoy. And, thanks again to the University of California.

Levenson on Abraham

Recently, I made a blog post on Robert Alter’s translations, which are unique in their attempt to bring some issues in the Biblical Hebrew text into English. Today I found this video where you can learn about translation from Alter himself. The video is entitled Lost in Translation: The Challenge of Translating the Bible. And, it has been made available by Villanova University. Thank you to them for making it available. Check the video out here.

This past week I listened to Karen Armstrong’s The Bible: A Biography in audiobook format. And, I must say, I’m not sure if I have ever read a more poorly titled book. Overall, the information in the book was okay; however, there was a glaring issue that I simply could not get past. It was the lack of specificity in Armstrong’s use of the phrase “the Bible,” which could be extended to a lack of specificity in terminology in general. Certainly, this text was intended for a general audience; however, I do not think this problem stems from trying to make matters accessible.

The phrase “the Bible” appears in the title of the book, and Armstrong uses it very liberally throughout. Yet there seems to me a problem when in the same chapter she is using the term “the Bible” to refer to both Jewish and Christian scriptures.  These corpuses are obviously not the same, much less is there uniformity among Christian groups as to what books would fit into this corpus.  So, one is left with the problem that there can be no single biography on “the Bible.”  Rather there can only be biographies of different scriptural corpuses. Certainly something to the effect of Biographical Sketches of Christian and Jewish Scriptures does not sound as catchy as The Bible: A Biography; however, the latter title is misleading.

I would go into more detail on the book, but with this problem alone I do not recommend it for those interested in learning about the Jewish and Christian scriptures.  In fact, it is more of a history of Biblical interpretation anyway.  If you must, then I have placed the link below.  If you are interested in learning more about the differences between what is considered “the Bible” by different groups, I would recommend listening to the first lecture in the course The Hebrew Bible by Lawrence Schiffman, which you can get for free with a trial of Audible.

I realize that I posted about Charles Grebe’s website AnimatedHebrew.com only the other day; however, I spent a bit more time over there yesterday. And, I must say that the Jonah Comic is absolutely phenomenal. There are not many Biblical Hebrew learning products that I get very excited about since most of them seem to be a perpetuation of the same tired methods. It is simply that every publishing company has to have their own grammar, vocabulary resource, etc.

But, I am very excited about this Jonah comic and the value it could have for learning Biblical Hebrew pronunciation and for extensive reading, which aids in vocabulary learning.  I am just floored that with the fairly vanilla Hebrew readers out by EKS, Zondervan, and others that this Jonah comic is absolutely free on Grebe’s website.  If you are interested at all in Biblical Hebrew, please get over to the site by clicking the link above and check it out.  This is a resource that everyone who teaches or studies Biblical Hebrew really should know about.

I came across a blog post about my supervising professor Christo van der Merwe yesterday through my friend Karyn’s blog (which I mistakenly labeled as “new” in one of my previous posts). She linked into a Hebrew and Greek reader blog post entitled The Bruce Lee of Biblical Hebrew. Apparently, my supervising professor is like Bruce Lee. Read the post for details, but to boil it down it is because of his “use whatever works approach” in terms of linguistics. I have met Christo on several occasions when he has come to deliver papers at academic meetings, and my guess is that he would find it amusing to be compared to Bruce Lee, but be very modest about it.

If you are interested in reading a bit of Christo’s work for yourself, a few of his academic publications are posted online HERE. Also, I would recommend reading the article on the LOGOS Bible software website entitled Rethinking Hebrew Instruction (a short read, but shows some of his work in action). A sense of practicality infuses all of his work. In addition, if a practical approach is what you seek in reference tools and works, I heartily recommend the Lexham Hebrew-English Interlinear (if you are running LOGOS) and his co-authored work A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar.

Up to this point, I have only included on this site courses on the Old Testament, Old Testament history, Old Testament manuscripts, etc. However, this morning I found a free video course on Biblical Hebrew. I have looked around a significant amount for a good free Biblical Hebrew course and this is the first one I thought would be worthy of a post. The course is on the site AnimatedHebrew.com. In addition, to the free Hebrew course, there is also a Jonah comic (very cool) in Hebrew and an audio recording of the exercises in Introducing Biblical Hebrew by Allen Ross. Thanks to Charles Grebe for putting together what looks like a very helpful site for those wanting to learn Biblical Hebrew, especially through self-study.

The course makes use of the following text: