Time to start blogging again

   As I complete work on the papers I am presenting at SBL in Chicago this month, I will post accordingly.

Here are the abstracts:

Blogger and Online Publication
11/18/2012 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Room: N129 - McCormick Place
Theme: Blogging and Professional Scholarship

Robert Cargill, University of Iowa, Presiding

The Advantages of Reviewing Books Online and the Need for an Industry Standard
John Hobbins, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh

The experience of biblical bloggers and the example of the online Review of Biblical Literature points to the advantages of reviewing books online if one’s target audience is the ever-growing number of people who research a topic via an electronic search engine without wanting to be limited by the confines of ATLA or JSTOR. Online book reviews by bloggers and electronically available book reviews in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, precisely because they are at everyone’s fingertips with no money down and no logins required, are among the most-read and frequently accessed secondary literature in the field of biblical studies. Moreover, thanks to the fast-and-furious nature of blogging, a number of threads document responses to a book as presented in a book review with unparalleled immediacy. Finally, the elastic nature of the electronic medium has meant that very long book reviews face, technically speaking, no obstacles; at the same time, tweet-length book reviews have become commonplace. Where do we go from here? In the paper, in addition to recounting amazing episodes from the annals of the biblical blogosphere, I argue in favor of an industry standard for electronic book reviews and present a proof of concept in that sense. A proposed standard is important not because it should or will become the norm, but because the existence of a proposed standard will raise the bar on several fronts and encourage the more intrepid to put it in practice and help the field of academic biblical studies realize the full potential of electronic media for research and teaching.

Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
11/19/2012 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: S103a - McCormick Place

John Cook, Asbury Theological Seminary, Presiding

The use of kî at the boundary between quotative frame and quotation in ancient Hebrew
John Hobbins, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh 

The purpose of this paper is to examine all instances of kî at the boundary between frame and quotation in Biblical Hebrew and identify those examples in which kî is best understood to be a complementizer relative to a head clause recoverable from context. The standard grammars and lexica interpret examples of kî at the boundary between quotative frame and quotation as if it were equivalent to dî recitativum in Aramaic or hoti recitativum in Greek whenever that possibility is not precluded by the semantics of the passage in question. But it makes more sense, in line with Cynthia L. Miller, The Representation of Speech in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: A Linguistic Analysis (HSM 55; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996) 103-116, to replace that default interpretation with another, namely, that kî is a clause-initial conjunction which subordinates the clause it heads to a matrix clause in all cases in which a semantically appropriate matrix clause, expressed or unexpressed, is recoverable from the context. For example, the matrix clause to which the kî-introduced clause in Exod 3:12 relates is gapped from the preceding context (3:11): “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should lead the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “[You should go to Pharaoh and you should lead the Israelites out of Egypt] because I am with you.” This is an example of a specialized use of a kî-introduced clause in an adjacency pair; that is, a unit of conversation that contains an exchange of one turn each by two speakers (though an adjacency pair may be rounded off by a third element in conversations of unequal power distribution; more than one example of rounding off is attested in Exod 3). In an adjacency pair, the first turn elicits a response of a certain kind in the second turn; both turns have identifiable linguistic profiles. The examples to be discussed include, but are not limited to, Exod 3:11-12; Num 22:28-30; Judg 6:15-16; and Ruth 1:8-10.

Comments

[Mitchell Powell]

Good to have you back! If you put your presentation about book reviews online, I'm looking forward to it. The quality of internet stuff is incredibly variable, but as far as I can see the same thing is true anywhere else. Viva blogdom!

[John Hobbins]

That's right, Mitchell: browse the BS section of any college library - the number of weird and/or outdated and/or hopelessly technical volumes on the shelf vastly outnumber the solid, helpful, and up-to-date resources.

Online, it is rather similar.

[Steve Pable]

You're right, John-- libraries, newspapers, the internet... all of these seem to be full of an inordinate amount of BS. Especially during election season. ;)